Trafficked children reach a place of safety
It’s a trick that is played upon the most desperate in some of the poorest regions of the world. Families struggling to make ends meet are approached by an intermediary to give up a child. There is a vague promise of a better life for the child than the parents could themselves provide, and some cash is offered. In West Africa the sums can be as little as $35.
The child is then relocated far away from their home region and enters a life of slavery, forced into long days of exploitative unpaid work and abuse.
But governments, local and international NGOs and UNICEF are all involved in the push to try and bust this racket – both by developing strategies to stop trafficking and by coming to the rescue of these vulnerable children. The latter involves finding them a place of safety, providing counselling and medical assistance, addressing their lack of education, and then thinking of ways either to reintegrate the children in their communities or build the skills required for future independence.
All names are pseudonyms chosen by the children themselves.


L’Amour and Pagne claim to be 13 years old, because that’s what their papers say. Their birth certificates, processed at the Foyer Jean Paul II run by Salesian missionaries, assign them a younger age than their likely real one, as that would have made them too old to be able to access primary education. L’Amour, a sex worker’s daughter, was neglected, and Pagne was accused of witchcraft and banished from her village. She had never been to school.

Rouge was born in Nigeria, the result of his mother’s on-off relationship with a Chinese man. His father never acknowledged him and his mother died when he was one. After a spell with his grandmother, who was destitute and could not feed him, he ran away to live on the streets. Half-starved and naked, he was rescued by a primary school head teacher who took him to the Foyer Inmmaculee in Kara, Togo, run by Missiones Salesianas. He is now being educated, but nobody has come forward to claim him, so it is unlikely he will go back to his family.

It is 1 o’ clock, time for a nap, but these boys would rather play at super heroes than sleep. They are among 30 child residents of the Centro de la Alegría Infantil in Cotonú, Benin, run by the NGO Mensajeros de la Paz. All have escaped situations of vulnerability – whether orphaned, abandoned or exploited by human traffickers. Many suffer from night terrors, or scream and cry during the day for no apparent reason, because of the dreadful experiences they have had.
Grenat’s return






The individuals in our story were supported by the following NGOs who have so far successfully reintegrated over 1,500 children:
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Mensajeros de la Paz in Cotonou, Benin – www.mensajerosdelapaz.com
Misiones Salesianas in Kara and Lome, Togo – www.misionessalesianas.org
Carmelitas Vedruna in Lome, Togo – www.vedruna.org
Ana Palacios is a photojournalist who focuses on African issues. Her work has been published in Stern, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, El País and Tiempo among others.
This article is from
the July-August 2017 issue
of New Internationalist.
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