The practice of obscuring or falsifying a child's true origin and family history within an intercountry adoption process, including fabricating a claim that a child was abandoned or orphaned when the child was in fact stolen, purchased from or coerced away from their birth family, or obtained through fraud, in order to make the child appear legally eligible for adoption and to conceal the true circumstances from adoptive parents and adoption authorities. It has been documented by researchers, investigative journalists, and in some cases prosecuted by national authorities in a number of countries with a history of high intercountry adoption volume, including Guatemala, Cambodia and Ethiopia, prompting stricter international safeguards under the 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption.
Facts
Elements of OffenseUnder the UN definition applied to child trafficking generally, the offense consists of the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring and or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation, a definition substantially broader than general trafficking definitions 1 Classification
Offense GradeSerious or Indictable Offense 1 Connections
Has Offense Grade
Entity-backed identity for the offense-grade enum value this offense already carries, resolved to a crime concept by an explicit value-to-entity map (phase 3 bucket conversion, docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md). The offense-grade fact itself stays on the offense unchanged.
Sources
1. Child trafficking, Wikipedia
Definition sectionQuote, Definition section
The 'recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring and/or receipt' of a child for the purpose of exploit[ation].
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