Behind the desire to provide a home for a vulnerable child sometimes lies a far more complex reality. In Haiti, international adoption has developed within a context marked by political instability, extreme poverty, and institutional failures. Between the stated good intentions and documented abuses, this system raises essential questions: how do we distinguish between authentic humanitarian aid and practices that turn vulnerability into economic opportunity? This article explores the mechanisms by which adoption can shift into child trafficking, examines the role of different actors involved, and questions the consequences of this phenomenon on Haitian families and the children concerned.
A savoir avant de lire
La situation en Haïti est grave.
Comment le peuple haïtien peut-il être privé de sa souveraineté, de son identité et de sa dignité en toute impunité ? Comment peut-on regarder le pays sombrer les bras croisés avec des vagues excuses ? Comment les médias peuvent-ils taire ou falsifier la vérité ?
La réalité du peuple haïtien questionne la notion même d’humanité.
Malgré les conditions difficiles, des femmes et des hommes courageux agissent chaque jour pour que le pays résiste et se développe malgré tout. Vous pouvez voir des exemples dans les parties interviews et projets de ce site. Les articles exposent de façon factuelle la réalité en Haïti. Les interviews et les projets apportent des pistes de solution ainsi qu’une vision nuancée d’Haïti.
Sommaire
Is international adoption child trafficking in disguise?
- How many adopted people searching for their origins have discovered they were never orphaned or abandoned and that their families had been searching for them for years?
- How many parents were deceived when religious figures, humanitarian organizations, or other actors stole their child(ren) while promising them a better future and upcoming reunions, even though full international adoption didn’t allow them to keep that promise?
- How many adoptive parents were deceived when they adopted a child they believed had no family and no resources?
- How many people have profited from this betrayal committed globally over several decades?
- How many institutions have benefited from this child trafficking? What was the nature of these advantages? Were they only financial gains?
- Thousands of children have been trafficked around the world. Beyond the number of lives broken and betrayed, what is the true extent of the consequences of this trafficking? At the personal level first of all, but also at the societal and cultural levels.
The phenomenon is well known and has been the subject of investigations, research, and reports without consequences for the millions of people concerned. In her article on the consequences of illegal transnational adoptions, Elvira C. Loibl (2021) explains that crime within the international adoption system is well documented. Numerous studies and reports describe the illegal means and methods by which children are obtained for adoption purposes (Loibl, 2019; Maskew, 2004; Smolin, 2006; Stuy, 2014). For example, children are purchased from their impoverished families or abducted from their homes, from the street, or from childcare institutions; or vulnerable biological parents are coerced or given misleading information in order to obtain their consent for an adoption (Dickens, 2002; King, 2012; Meier, 2008; Smolin 2006). Illegally obtained children are then ‘laundered’ through the adoption system: their birth certificates and other documents necessary for an adoption are falsified or fabricated in order to hide their illegal origin and identify them as legally abandoned orphans (Loibl, 2020; Smolin, 2006).
(…) Previous research has identified and explained the many factors within the international adoption systems of recipient countries that foster illegal adoption practices (Loibl, 2019; Smolin, 2006). The financial and ideological motivation of adoption agencies to place as many children as possible, the unlimited flow of Western money into poor countries of origin where it incentivizes actors to illegally obtain children for adoption, weak monitoring and control of foreign representatives and cooperation partners, and blind trust in the integrity of countries of origin that have ratified the Hague Convention are structural weaknesses that will continue to encourage human rights violations in the international adoption system (Loibl, 2019).
What is the reality of adoption in Haiti?
According to the 2023 Global Slavery Index report, in terms of modern slavery prevalence, Haiti ranks 2nd in the Americas.
Although child trafficking via international adoption is global and historical, this article focuses on current Haitian reality. The issue has returned to the news especially since the 2010 earthquake.
A 2017 LUMOS report on funding Haitian orphanages at the expense of children’s rights estimates that 30,000 children live in approximately 750 primarily private and funded orphanages in Haiti. The Haitian Government estimates that 80% of children in orphanages have at least one living parent, and almost all have other family members. Poverty, lack of access to basic services, and the desire to provide education push parents and caregivers to place their children in orphanages. With adequate support, many children could return to family and community structures, and at-risk families could be strengthened to prevent separation from the outset. More than 80 years of research demonstrate the physical, social, and psychological damage caused by raising children in orphanages and that family-based solutions reduce the risk of abuse and lead to better outcomes for children.
According to the same report, relationships between adoption agencies and crèches (children’s centers aimed at adoption) also fuel the orphanage system in Haiti. Crèches can be operated independently or by foreign adoption service providers (ASPs), and Lumos has already documented prospective adoptive parents providing orphanages with money as humanitarian aid in addition to adoption and visitation fees. In recent years, IBESR (Institute for Social Welfare and Research) has made progress regarding international adoption and, in 2012, Haiti ratified the Hague Convention on adoption. But adoption agencies have been suspected of funding orphanages and children’s homes to encourage the recruitment of children from their parents for international adoption.
According to this report, humanitarian aid and the adoption system participate in child trafficking in Haiti.
(See Nadia d’Or’s article Child trafficking in Haiti )
“Within the economic model of orphanages, recruiting children into orphanages for exploitation is a form of human trafficking that is currently uncontrolled. The fabrication of orphans with fraudulent documentation and the subsequent exploitation of children in orphanages match the current interpretation of the definition of human trafficking as described in the United Nations Protocol on Trafficking in Persons (TIP). Online funding through child sponsorship fuels this model, as orphanages attempt to show a perceived ongoing need for children by increasing their numbers. Despite their mostly good intentions, orphanage volunteers and mission participants provide demand for opportunities to visit orphans, which increases the need for supply: children. This demand incentivizes trafficking.”
The road to hell is paved with good intentions…
“Illegal adoptions, namely adoptions that are the result of crimes such as the abduction, sale and trafficking of children or that involve the commission of other illegal acts or illicit practices such as the absence of biological parents’ consent, fraud and undue financial gains, violate many principles and standards relating to children’s rights, including the principle of the best interests of the child.”
Conclusion of the 2016 report by the Special Rapporteur on the sale of children of the United Nations Human Rights Council
In Haiti, most of the time, hell is paved with bad intentions that disguise themselves as good intentions. This is why development cooperation and humanitarian aid and corruption are linked and interdependent.
(See Yvon Janvier’s article Corruption in humanitarian aid in Haiti)
The Cobra effect and child trafficking in Haiti: when humanitarian aid fuels crime
The Cobra Effect is an economic and social phenomenon where an intervention, often well-intentioned, produces consequences opposite to those expected. The term comes from a colonial anecdote in Delhi where, to eradicate the cobra population, British authorities offered a bounty for each cobra killed. This incentivized some people to breed cobras to collect the bounty. When this scheme was discovered, the breeders released the snakes, thus worsening the initial problem. This mechanism illustrates the popular saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
This concept applies to the international adoption situation in Haiti, where humanitarian aid and efforts to protect children have contributed to fueling a failing system. According to the LUMOS (2017) report, at least 70 million US dollars are granted annually to Haitian orphanages. Funding linked to the number of children housed incentivizes certain organizations or individuals to separate children from their families, thus creating artificial orphans. This economic logic has transformed humanitarian aid into an engine for an industry where orphanages, often unregulated, prosper on families’ vulnerability.
The intensification of this phenomenon was particularly visible after the 2010 earthquake. Faced with the humanitarian emergency, controls on international adoptions were relaxed, doubling the number of adoptions and also orphanages within a few months. Only 35 of the 756 children’s homes recorded across the country have operating authorization, but all capture funding (LUMOS, 2017). This period was marked by child trafficking accusations that suggest the scale of the dysfunction.
“Although the humanitarian emergency and mass displacement following the 2010 earthquake had an enormous impact on children, the initial response from private philanthropy was not to focus on sustainable solutions to strengthen families and communities. Instead, due to a perceived orphan crisis resulting from the emergency, Haiti experienced at least a 150% increase in the number of orphanages. These have since become the preferred international response to children’s vulnerability, undermining efforts at the national level to create a broader child protection and social welfare system.”
The conclusions of the LUMOS report are concerning. Humanitarian aid and the international adoption system foster child trafficking in Haiti by creating demand and financing a solution.
When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure (Goodhart’s law)
Here, the stated intention to save abandoned children is measured by the number of adoptions and the number of children in orphanages. A goal with the direct consequences of fabricating orphans and separating families. Managers promise housing or money under the pretext of sponsorship, thus deceptively encouraging poor families to place their children temporarily, who are then adopted and sent abroad permanently.
Despite legislative reforms initiated from 2012 to better control adoptions, the majority of Haitian orphanages remain unregistered, and the illegal system continues to operate. This context perfectly illustrates the paradox of good intentions facing complex realities: without a fine understanding of the stakes, incentives, and effects of an intervention, the measures taken can perpetuate or worsen the problems they seek to solve.
The real question is not whether the intentions were good. It’s understanding that in a system where the problem generates profit, nobody has an interest in truly solving it.
Why are Haitian children in high demand?
Ongoing destabilization of the country is a facilitating factor
According to the 2023 report of the Interministerial Mission on Illicit Practices in International Adoption in France, “kidnappings or child abductions, i.e. the buying and selling of children, are often identified in contexts of political crisis, dictatorial regimes, civil war, or natural disasters such as the Armero mudslide in Colombia after a volcanic eruption in 1985 and the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010. Beyond conflict situations, poverty is also very frequently the source of consent extorted from parents.”
State failure is a facilitating factor
State failure in Haiti constitutes a major factor facilitating the phenomenon of demand for Haitian children for international adoption. According to the LUMOS (2017) report, approximately 85% of Haitian orphanages are not officially registered by the State, creating a significant regulatory void, making it difficult to monitor and protect children, and to investigate abuses. This lack of oversight is aggravated by the country’s structural institutional weakness, marked by an ineffective judicial system and lack of administrative control. This constitutes fertile ground for abuses and exploitation. The government inherits a limited budget for child protection agencies, paradoxically overwhelmed by a growing number of institutionalized children, which further weakens its capacity to exercise real control (LUMOS, 2017).
Thus, state failure in regulation forms a fertile breeding ground that facilitates illicit practices surrounding the international adoption of Haitian children, thus exacerbating the vulnerability of affected children and families.
Corruption is a facilitating factor
Corruption is another key factor facilitating this dynamic. Haiti is regularly ranked among the world’s most corrupt countries, with a score of only 16 to 18 out of 100 in the Corruption Perception Index (Transparency International, 2023-2024). This endemic corruption also affects the public sector, where dilution of responsibilities, widespread impunity, and misappropriation of funds undermine the State’s capacities to apply and enforce laws, including those related to child protection. Scandals of massive embezzlement, particularly within humanitarian programs and cooperatives, have paralyzed government action (Banj Media, 2023). This climate favors the development of illegal networks exploiting administrative gaps and social suffering, where child kidnappings and sales develop due to institutional or administrative negligence and complicity.
According to Chantal Collard (2005), “children in Haiti are particularly vulnerable, representing half of the country’s total population, and Haitian families face numerous challenges. In addition to natural disasters, the Haitian population has been affected by decades of political and economic instability, recurring foreign interventions, and high rates of extreme poverty. On average, Haitian women have five children, and, as primary caregivers, mothers often struggle to adequately meet their families’ needs. A quarter of Haitian children do not live with their biological parents: some live with extended family members, while others are placed outside the family, either in situations of child domestic labor or in orphanages.”
In her article Haiti Sad Playground – On International Adoption, this researcher explains that statistical analysis by country demonstrates that international adoption is not a bilateral phenomenon between States that would exchange children, but that it is unilateral and that, predominantly, the transfer of children occurs from poor countries to rich countries. Thus, Suzanne Hoelgaard (1998: 203) and Barbara Yngvesson (2000: 272) note that these transfers create a hierarchy between nations, some having nothing to give but their children, while others are demanders and recipients of these children.
(…) Haiti combines three of the most common factors contributing to making a country a giver in international adoption. Poverty is the main one, but just behind slips overpopulation. As Alfred Métraux had already noted in the late 1950s, Haiti is the most densely populated region in the Americas. (…) To these general factors must be added the blockage of children’s circulation between different social classes.
The practice of foster family placement, particularly that of children from peasant families who are sent to city families to be educated, apprenticed, and often exploited there, has long been noted by observers. In the 1930s, Melville Herskovits (1937: 103-104) refers to it as quasi-adoption and emphasizes how common this phenomenon is.
Juvenile domesticity in Haiti is an institution with a dominating tendency whose roots go back to the time of slavery and which exposes minor individuals of both sexes to a form of servitude for the benefit of the adults to whom they have been entrusted (UNICEF 1998: 7).
Legal adoption in Haiti is not full adoption. Biological parents, when they are known and alive, do not abandon their children but only give their consent to their placement. Legally therefore, ties with the birth family are not severed, which would moreover be unthinkable in Haitian culture. However, almost all foreign countries require that any adoption be transformed into full adoption, and biological parents are regularly required to sign papers to this effect before a judge or notary. Several of them, however, even when explained to that this will result in an irrevocable break in the filiation bond with their child, continue to hope that perhaps they will one day come looking for them, making, in an imaginary way, full adoption a distant and long-term family placement.
Even if international adoption places the Republic of Haiti in a humiliating position – as was the case, not so long ago, for several industrialized countries, now exclusively recipients of children, it is tacitly encouraged by the State as a solution to the problem of children in trouble and poverty. On the other hand, it is openly denounced by some as constituting the last bastion of colonialism and slavery.
Unlike what happens in several other source countries, there is no public institution that takes care of the many abandoned babies, children, or minors. Haitian social services work in partnership with lawyers, crèches, or private sector orphanages. (…) Their number tends to increase. As an employee of this institute told me: We discover the existence of new crèches because someone comes to report their existence. The State does not have the means to conduct monitoring visits (Collard, 2005).
International adoption is a false solution to a false problem (François Nau)
This sentence summarizes the central thesis of Nan Non Sivilizasyon (In the Name of Civilization), published in 2013 by JEBCA Editions by François Nau, a peasant and writer from La Vallée de Jacmel in Haiti. In his book, he draws a striking parallel between child trafficking via international adoption and historical slave trafficking. He documents the system he observed in the 1970s-80s in his region: an adoption program used the local religious network — a Catholic priest and sisters from a local school — to recruit children. The mechanism was simple and formidable. Recruiters targeted the most vulnerable families, promising them education and a better future. Parents signed papers they often couldn’t read.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of children were torn from their families in this way. Their identities were systematically falsified: birth dates modified, places changed, parents’ names invented. An intermediary orphanage served as a transit point. The children disappeared, became adoptable, and ended up in Western families who often didn’t know the real conditions of the adoption. After their departure, no more contact. Parents spent years trying to get news of their missing children, in vain.
This is not ancient history. This system never really stopped operating. It simply adapted, professionalized, globalized.
François Nau sent his work to the Haitian presidency, the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies, UNICEF, UNESCO, and numerous international agencies. Result: total silence. No investigation. No response…
Je wouj, Red Eyes, is in Haiti an evil spirit that possesses its victims’ bodies during the night and transforms them against their will into werewolves. It also tricks mothers by waking them at night to ask them to voluntarily give their child to it.
To all Haitians,
To all those who have Haiti in their hearts,
The werewolves come and go
and traffic our brothers and sisters in broad daylight.
Corruption and misery are a pass to hell.
The only way to end child trafficking in Haiti
Is to become sovereign and free ourselves from our chains.
Say no to corruption by being, for this cause, all united.
In the Americas, Haiti is the 2nd country where child trafficking is most developed.
May God help us face this macabre and sordid record.
Haitians, let’s not stand idly by for our children.
With the diaspora and our foreign friends, unite against this scourge and stand together.
We are many who know a child who has disappeared
either in trafficking, kidnapping, or through adoption.
Are we going to act as if nothing happened or that we saw nothing?
Or are we going to become aware that it’s time to take a stand?
To all Haitians,
To all those who have Haiti in their hearts,
The werewolves, at night, come and go
and traffic in dark places our brothers and sisters.
To learn more and understand the context
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