That’s Someone’s Child: Understanding & Preventing Familial Trafficking

A Story of Surviving Familial Trafficking: Love146 U.S. Survivor Care

Child trafficking breaks my heart! That’s someone’s daughter. That’s someone’s son. This is an instinctive reaction for many (especially parents) when the topic of child trafficking comes up. A healthy family relationship is a place of care, safety, and love. A parent would do anything to keep their child from being victimized, right?

Sadly, this is not true of every parent. Sometimes, parents or other family members are the very ones trafficking their own child and surviving or benefiting off the child’s exploitation. It’s a devastating reality, but it needs to be understood if we hope to detect and prevent it.

What is Familial Trafficking?

To understand familial trafficking, we have to start with two other definitions.

Child sex trafficking is the exchange of anything of value for any sex act with a minor. This includes the creation and exchange of child sexual abuse materials (formerly known as child pornography).
Child labor trafficking involves using force, fraud, or coercion to compel a minor to provide involuntary labor or services.

The term “familial trafficking” is about who the trafficker is. In familial trafficking, a parent, caregiver (including foster parents), or another family member exploits their child either for sex or labor. Familial trafficking can take many forms. It could look like a family member allowing their child to be sexually abused or live streaming their own abuse of their child in exchange for money, drugs, rent, or something else of value. Or it could look like a child being forced to work or beg for the family’s economic benefit. It could also look like family members allowing other traffickers to exploit their children or providing inadequate supervision when people who provide economic benefit to the family (e.g., landlords who provide reduced/free rent) are around.

Familial trafficking causes a unique kind of compounded harm because the victimization occurs at the hands of people who are supposed to love, nurture, and keep you safe. Survivors of this type of abuse deserve trauma-informed, specialized, expert care, like that which Love146 provides, tailored to this type of trauma recovery.

Young Victims

As the U.S. Department of State, and Department of Justice note, familial trafficking often begins at a very young age. We’ve noticed this with the survivors we’ve worked with as well. This early exploitation makes children vulnerable to continued victimization by others as they grow older.

When a child’s early experiences are shaped by being exploited at the hands of the people they should be able to trust, it can distort their understanding of what’s normal or acceptable. If that exploitation met a need like providing food, shelter, or money for their family, they may grow up believing that being exploited is the only way to survive. As they get older, these children may feel pressure to make very tough choices no child should ever have to face, just to survive.

Familial Trafficking and Child Marriage

In 2017, the International Labour Organization (ILO) expanded the definition of exploitation (which they refer to as modern slavery) to encompass certain cases of child marriage. When a child is married off and the child’s family receives money or something else of value in return, this may be considered a case of familial trafficking, particularly when the child is subjected to involuntary servitude or sexual contact they can’t consent to.

Familial Trafficking is Difficult to Detect

These situations are often hidden behind everyday routines. For example, the trafficking may occur in the child’s own home. U.S. Department of State shared, “When the family member is the trafficker, the exploitation is often normalized and accepted within the family culture, sometimes spanning generations.”

In addition, unlike other types of traffickers, family members are not replaceable. You can find another employer, friend, boyfriend or girlfriend, but you only have one mom, one dad, one family. Reporting that your family is harming you isn’t just scary; it means risking the loss of someone whose role in your life is irreplaceable.

Another reason familial trafficking is difficult to detect is that young children don’t always realize that there is an exchange taking place. They may know they’re being abused, but not understand the full context of what’s happening. So even if they disclose their abuse, their victimization might be misidentified as sexual or physical abuse, rather than trafficking.

Hope for Preventing Familial Trafficking

“My children won’t experience being sold because, unlike my mother, I’ll be capable of raising them.”
– A Child in the Care of Love146

At Love146, we work to end this cycle of intergenerational trauma. Healing is possible, and so is prevention. Our U.S. and Philippines Survivor Care Programs work with youth who’ve experienced all forms of human trafficking, including familial trafficking. Despite the barriers to seeking help, children are identified, youth do speak up, and many are finding the support they need to be safe and flourish, through long-term support, tailored services, and connections with caring and trustworthy professionals.

Our prevention education curriculum, Not a Number, helps youth understand their rights, recognize unsafe situations, and build the skills they need to seek help. This curriculum is being implemented across the U.S. by trained professionals who are ready to receive disclosures of trafficking and take necessary steps to report these crimes and support the child.

“Whenever I fall down, Love146 helps me stand up again and face tomorrow. Love146 is my family that fights for me.”
– A Child in the Care of Love146

Familial trafficking is hard to look at. It breaks the narrative we want to believe: that a family would never do this. But when we choose not to engage, we risk leaving children unseen and unprotected. Understanding this issue is the first step toward ending it. And when we do listen, learn, and act, we help build a world where children who experience this form of exploitation are seen, helped, and fiercely supported. As one young survivor told us:

“The Love146 supporters don’t get tired of helping us to have a beautiful life that is different from what we used to have before. They treat us as their children.”
– A Child in the Care of Love146

So yes, that is someone’s child. And when their family is the source of harm instead of protection, we as a society have a choice: We can look the other way, or we can assume the responsibility to help protect them. We can choose to be the listening ear, the philanthropist, the advocate, the teacher, the health care worker, the neighbor, the community member who doesn’t turn away. Together, we can choose to care.