Children trafficking - DRC

Human trafficking is the third market generating profits for organized crime, behind only drugs and guns running. In African countries, poverty, nonattendance of social protection, high profits earned by traffickers, and the conviction rates for offences against the traffic, have caused child trafficking to persist. Domestic and Transnational Criminal Networks take advantage of intercountry adoption (ICA) procedures to traffic children, ‘harvesting’ children illegally from birth parents, and then using official adoption processes to ‘launder’ them as ‘legally’ adopted children. This network represents interactions essentially among public and private agents: foreign and African citizens, baby factory clients, middlemen, business people, young women selling their babies, kidnapping victims, and public servants. The qualitative data about nodes/agents and interactions was gathered with media sources to include facts between 2011 and 2015.