Familial Trafficking

October 2025 GLC Monthly Learning Call Brief

How “normal” can hide harm — and what we can do about it.

Summary of the calls

Our October calls on familial trafficking were an excellent example of the knowledge sharing and insight expanding capacity of our GLC community. The aim of exploring this as a topic was not to single it out as a standalone form of trafficking, but rather to interrogate perceptions and understanding. What emerged was indeed a rich and valuable reflection of family as shaping both vulnerability to and protection from trafficking.

Both calls highlighted the complex interplay between economic pressures and cultural practices which contribute to families becoming enablers and perpetrators of trafficking. They also revealed how family-based exploitation manifests differently across global contexts resulting in diverse forms of trafficking, but consistently driven by poverty and absence of social safety nets, economic and social instability, gender inequality, cultural and social norms and cultural taboos. 

Eastern Call overview:

Judith Kiriau from Homes of Peace and Empowerment (HOPE) Trust, Solomon Islands outlined key familial trafficking types in the Solomon Islands including forced marriage, forced labor, and commercial sexual exploitation of children, driven largely by the intersection of financial hardship resulting from economic realities on the island and social customs like bride price and the normalisation of responses to desperation. She highlighted the need for responses to be community based.
Gillian Kane from Ulster University, sharing insights from research into forced criminality of youth in Northern Ireland illuminated how child criminal exploitation linked to paramilitaries and organised crime in Northern Ireland, remains under-identified as trafficking due to normalisation and familial involvement. Central to this context is the post conflict nature of society and inter-generational trauma, she also emphasises the need for highly localised response strategies.
Kimberly Quinley from Step Ahead Thailand presented familial trafficking as often rooted in poverty, desperation, and lack of awareness and lack of alternatives, rather than malice, but stressed that families, if equipped can be the first line of protection. She also highlighted the other side of the coin, of the harm that can result when in the name of prevention children are removed from their families and placed under the care of institutions. Their evidence based Keeping Families Together programme was developed to support those working to strengthen families.

Western Call overview:

Sophie Otiende, as a survivor advocate Sophie shared her personal experience of familial trafficking in Kenya, emphasising how early disbelief and harmful cultural practices—such as unpaid child labor and the normalisation of children being sent to live with relatives—create risks as well as barriers to disclosure and justice. She also noted poverty and lack of free secondary education as key vulnerabilities and stressed the importance of precisely understanding survivor’s experiences in relation to the structures and systems that create the context for their trafficking occurred, so as to better target prevention. 
Diana Shaw, founder of the Child Development Foundation and Chair of the CSO Anti-Trafficking Coalition in Belize outlined Belize’s position as a Central American migration corridor with complex historical roots and cultural and linguistic diversity, and how regional poverty and lingering cultural practices like migration and early marriage (legally recognised until 2004) exacerbate risks to trafficking by families. Community reluctance to report familial trafficking stems from cultural taboos about exposing family issues and protecting indigenous heritage. Responses need community involvement and contextualisation as well as broader targeting of economic drivers.
Katherine Long from Spring of Hope in Bulgaria presented distinctive familial trafficking patterns shaped by economic collapse, ethnic community structures, and cultural practices. Entrenched trafficking patterns in Bulgaria’s communities, where exploitation is often normalized within family and community structures frequently occurs through relational recruitment villages operate trafficking as a community “guild,” where trafficking is normalised as a survival profession, as well as through selling daughters into marriage under the dowry system.

What we learned

The discussions revealed that trafficking within families can look ordinary — woven into daily life, justified by tradition, or driven by love and survival. These reflections draw together what we learned across both the Eastern and Western calls, and what it means for us as a community of practitioners working to prevent exploitation and strengthen families.

The three main thematic explorations on the calls were:

• Normalisation of harm — how social and cultural norms conceal exploitation.

• Structural vulnerability — how poverty and inequality drive familial trafficking.

• Need for localised and contextualised ‘upstream’ interventions — drawing from survivors' experiences for community-based and family empowerment prevention to disrupt patterns and systems.

Trafficking hidden behind normalised and accepted behaviour (Cultural and Social Norms).

Across both calls, participants examined how social and cultural norms shape what is perceived as “acceptable.” Practices such as bride price, child labor, early marriage, and sending children to work for relatives or to engage in criminal activities are often viewed as normal acts of care or survival rather than exploitation or framed as help and seen as culturally or economically acceptable and/or necessary. A contributing feature of normalisation is the acceptance in some contexts of the cultural or social belief that ‘family matters are private’ and that families are safe, which contributes to keeping harm hidden, invisible to authorities and challenges legal enforcement. This normalisation allows familial trafficking to occur largely unseen, as harm becomes embedded in everyday life. The broader theme here was how embedded beliefs about family privacy, obedience, and respect protect exploitative practices from scrutiny. In communities from Northern Ireland to Kenya, privacy, loyalty, and fear of shame often silence victims and prevent intervention. Familial trafficking is frequently misidentified as neglect or domestic conflict, rather than exploitation, meaning that the systems designed to protect children rarely recognise what’s happening. 

Structural and economic drivers of familial trafficking

A recurring theme was the role of poverty, economic desperation, and social inequality in pushing families toward trafficking-related decisions. When livelihoods are unstable and education is unaffordable, families may rationalise harmful arrangements as necessary for survival. Gender inequality and patriarchal systems exacerbate these pressures, particularly where women and children have limited decision-making power. This theme emphasised that familial trafficking cannot be separated from broader socio-economic conditions — it is both a symptom and a survival response to structural vulnerability.

Need for intersectional upstream interventions

Both calls explored the difficulties of responding effectively to familial trafficking and the need to rethink conventional intervention models. Familial trafficking can often go unseen or misclassified as something else — a child protection issue, a domestic dispute, or neglect — rather than recognised as trafficking. Responses are also fragmented. Too often, prevention work fails to go beyond awareness raising, and anti-trafficking work focuses on rescuing victims after the fact or pursuing prosecutions, rather than investing in families and communities before exploitation begins. Both calls emphasised the need to go “upstream” to develop interventions that are: survivor-centred while also respecting privacy and trauma recovery, localised and culturally grounded, and economically realistic. The discussions converged on the idea that families can be either sources of risk or powerful agents of protection, but that anti-trafficking work needs to address trafficking’s intersectionality and integrate within broader child protection, social justice, labor rights and efforts that contribute to greater economic stability, rather than isolated programs.

Implications for the GLC

For our community, these insights challenge us to look differently at families — not automatically as safe spaces, but as places that can hold both care and harm. Our task is to work with families, helping them gain the support and knowledge they need to protect their children, as well as to harness our collaborative and collective capacities to focus efforts strategically on system transformative prevention.

Approaches must be both widened to address systemic factors, as well as be locally grounded, responsive to cultural realities, and linked across sectors — from child protection to education, social welfare, and justice.

In 2026 the GLC aims to bring more learning to the community that explores our collective knowledge on relevant intersections as well as ways we can bring our capacities together and develop interventions that might target upstream structures and systems.

In the meantime, we encourage members to reach out and connect in their shared work at this intersection. There is a great deal of knowledge and experience that this community holds. For those who would like to start working with families, there is no need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ as we say.

As a start, one such existing tool that can support your organisation’s work with families and communities, so that they can be sources of protection rather than harm, is Step Ahead Thailand’s Keeping Families Together program as shared by Kimberly on the call. It is a practical and evidence-based 18 month program for building family resilience and reducing vulnerability to trafficking, which has been successfully used in diverse global locations. The Step Ahead team are ready to support anyone who would like to embed this program in your community work, please reach out to them via email at kfttrainingthailand@gmail.com. Their Family Strengthening Handbook is also a helpful resource for further learning.

If you have relevant resources for the community pass them on to us, and if you need resources let us know and we can help get them to you. Lets connect and share! 

Sign in to the Members Area watch the October call recordings here.

If you are not a member of the GLC and are interested in the calls we’d love to hear from you, email the Secretariat Team at team@globallearning.community, or read more about membership here.