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Child Trafficking Statistics

The One-Child Policy has led to a burgeoning black market in stolen children, at least 70,000 a year.[i]

New evidence has arisen that Chinese officials have begun stealing babies and children to sell for foreign adoption.[ii]

Kidnapping and buying and selling children for adoption increased over the past several years, particularly in poor rural areas. There are no reliable estimates of the number of children kidnapped; however, according to media reports, as many as 20,000 children are kidnapped every year for illegal foreign adoption.[iii]

China’s gender imbalance is a powerful, driving force behind trafficking in women and sexual slavery, not only in China, but all over Asia.  According to a statement by the United States Department of State, “Women and children are trafficked into [China] from North Korea, Vietnam, Burma, Mongolia and Thailand.”  These women are trafficked into China and forced into marriages, employment, and sexual exploitation.[iv]

Many unattached men migrate from rural areas to urban destinations, patronizing prostitutes there. In doing so, these men could turn China's HIV epidemic - now confined to certain high-risk populations - into a more generalized one by creating "bridging" populations from high- to low-risk individuals. Such male bridging populations have fueled HIV epidemics in Cambodia and sub-Saharan Africa.[v]

Women currently make up approximately 80% of an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 North Korean refugees in China, and of these women, an estimated 90% become victims of trafficking.[vi]

Chinese families’ preference for sons, and the growing gender imbalance, increasing numbers of male children are trafficked for adoption, and women and girls are trafficked for forced marriages and commercial sexual exploitation.

In order to assure their sons will find wives, some families are buying trafficked girls and raising them as “foster daughter-in-laws”.[vii]

Parents who cannot keep their ‘‘out-of-plan’’ children—those children born in violation of the One-Child Policy—are vulnerable to persuasion or coercion to relinquish or sell them.[viii]

Article 240 of China’s Criminal Law defines the trafficking of persons as ‘‘abducting, kidnapping,

buying, trafficking in, fetching, sending, or transferring a woman or child, for the purpose of selling the victim.’’ This definition does not automatically prohibit forms of trafficking such as forced adult and child labor, commercial sex trade of minors over 14 years old, or trafficking of men, which are covered under Article 3 of the UN TIP Protocol.[ix]

To date, there are around 20 million migrant children and more than 20 million rural children left behind at home by full-time working parents in cities.[x]

According to a research report by the All-China Women’s Federation, of children affected by migration and possibly trafficking, stay-at-home children make up the second largest number.[xi]

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