An alarming connection exists between residential care facilities, such as orphanages and children’s homes, and human trafficking. Orphanage trafficking occurs when children from vulnerable families are actively recruited into residential care for profit or other forms of exploitation within the orphanage. Often a child finder is hired by an orphanage to go out and recruit children through deception or coercion of family members.
What is commonly misunderstood by well-meaning volunteers and donors is that of the millions of children living in orphanages around the world, research shows that in many countries, the vast majority have a mother or father who is alive. Poverty, not orphanhood, is the most common driving factor leading parents to place their children in orphanages.