The scientist helping the fight against child trafficking

Guatemala, February 2015. After a search of a house suspected of housing members of a human trafficking network, police find a baby just seven months old. The adults arrested refuse to talk and no one knows who this child belongs to...

This could be one of the thousands of cases of stolen babies who, despite being rescued from an uncertain future, end up being institutionalized and separated from their families. However, this child was a lucky one: his DNA led him straight to his biological mother. A few months earlier, a woman reported her baby, barely a day old, stolen from a public hospital in Guatemala City. The found the baby through the Institute of Forensic Sciences (INACIF) which is part of the DNA Prokids program, whose main objective is precisely that, to fight against human trafficking through the genetic identification of victims and their families. So, the DNA of the reporting mother was included in the INACIF database. 

"When the prosecutor handling this child's case remembered our program, she contacted us to see if his mother was in the genetic database," says Estuardo Solares Reyes, head of genetics at INACIF. "It was very exciting. The break-in was at 6 a.m. At 9 a.m. they brought the child to us, we took the sample and the whole lab stopped to work on this case... all together! We are talking about a laboratory that works for the whole country in which only seven people work, but it had to be done quickly to avoid institutionalizing the child and having to go through the whole bureaucratic apparatus of the State. At three o'clock in the afternoon, we already had the results: there was a match! That same day we were able to return the baby to his mother and now they will live happily... I hope", he recalls with emotion.

The DNA Prokids project is an initiative that emerged from the Department of Forensic Medicine of the University of Granada in 2004. Since then, around 13,600 samples have been taken worldwide, nearly 1,200 identifications have been made and some 270 illegal adoptions have been prevented. "There are countries in Asia and Central America where adoptions are a business", explains José Antonio Lorente, Professor of Legal and Forensic Medicine at the University of Granada and the main promoter of the programme. "Adopting a child has a high cost in terms of time, money and psychology, and many people take advantage of illegal 'shortcuts' to make a profit. It's a very sweet tooth, mainly for lawyers but also for doctors, psychologists, etc. These people are interested in having children for adoption. And if there aren't, they 'look' for them.”

The procedure followed in the program is quite simple. Samples are taken from relatives who report a child missing or stolen and from minors whose identity is unknown. "Saliva or a drop of blood can be taken, always with the authorization of the person who has custody of the child, which in Spain, for example, would be the prosecutor for minors," Lorente explains. "The genetic material is automatically analysed by a standard procedure. Generally, autosomal DNA is used, but we also often include mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome DNA because the reference samples are not always from the parents but from a grandparent, and in these cases, mitochondrial DNA works better," explains the researcher.

The DNA Prokids program provides its partners with kits containing everything needed for sample collection. Each pack contains gloves, a lancet to prick if blood is drawn, a band-aid and an alcohol wipe to wipe off after the collection, a paper stick to collect epithelial cells from the mouth or to deposit the blood sample and a sealed envelope to send the material in complete confidentiality.

In addition, these envelopes include a sheet representing a family tree, which should be filled out in the case of samples from relatives who file a complaint, as it explains the family relationship with the missing child.

Finally, the material is accompanied by a card with all the data of the minor or the relative, including an identification number and a bar code. "We often get the samples with just the bar code," Lorente explains. "This guarantees the confidentiality of the data since we in Spain can do the genetic analysis without knowing who the sample belongs to, we send it to the country of origin, and there the relevant authorities already have all the data on the child or person in question".

With the results of the genetic analysis, each country generates a database that can be crossed to look for matches. "Some identifications are obtained so-called 'hot', for example, a child who disappears, the family reports it, and two weeks later it appears in another part of the country," says the researcher, "but most are 'cold' identifications. They are children who were lost a long time ago and when their data is entered, the match is found".

The DNA Prokids project started with a pilot experience in Guatemala and Mexico, and later extended to other countries. "We worked with several states in Mexico and also in Honduras, El Salvador, part of Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and a state in Brazil. In Asia, we collaborate with China, which has its own program, with Nepal, some states of India, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia", Lorente lists. "We are now very interested in other countries where child trafficking is known to be very high: Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. We always work with public bodies in those countries: the police, forensic science institutes, etc. If you want something to work, you have to go to the public administrations, and also do it according to the laws of each country. We also work in parallel with some NGOs, but the important thing is the governments.

The next step, and one that will surely help to exponentially increase the number of children identified, is to achieve an international database to cross-check results between countries. "Sometimes they do the analysis themselves, and other times they send it to us anonymously and we send them back the result. But the database is for each country; we don't have any personal information on any child," Lorente recalls. "We are putting a lot of emphasis on international collaboration, helping all countries to have similar software that allows data to be exchanged anonymously. Right now it's done on a very ad hoc basis, but we want to make sure it's done systematically.

In 2018, UNODC chose as its theme for World Anti-Trafficking Day: "Responding to trafficking in children and youth". This was intended to draw attention to the problems faced by trafficked children and to possible action initiatives related to protecting and ensuring justice for child victims.

This is not a minor problem: according to the latest Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, produced by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in 2016, approximately 30 per cent of the victims of trafficking are children. In addition, in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, Central America and the Caribbean, this figure rises to over 60 per cent.

UNODC is also responsible for implementing the "United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children", which entered into force in December 2003 and has already been ratified by more than 170 countries. This action seeks to promote cooperation between countries and urges them to prevent and combat human trafficking. In this context, programmes such as DNA Prokids are a very useful tool to tackle the problem.

"In Guatemala, the most frequent crimes related to child trafficking are theft and buying and selling children for illegal adoptions," explains Estuardo Solares. "The mothers received about $150 a month, medical care and vitamin supplements, $1,000 for the entire pregnancy and between $1,500 and $2,000 for the baby. But for the lawyers and the people involved in this scheme, it was more than a lucrative business: a child in Guatemala could cost $60,000 to $110,000. The country's government established the National Adoption Council to combat this problem, and the DNA Prokids programme was consolidated as a key tool. "We could say that there is already a DNA Prokids 'culture'," says the expert. "We are doing about 2,000 expert opinions a year among children and relatives. Judges in Guatemala no longer give children up for adoption if there is no genetic test. They don't believe in anything: only in DNA.

What about Spain? According to the Global Slavery Index, produced by the Walk Free Foundation, the situation is not worrying and in our country, there are hardly any cases of minors in a situation of modern slavery. In fact, in the last report on "Human Trafficking in Spain", published by the Ministry of the Interior, only 16 cases of child victims of this type of crime were identified in 2017.

However, Spain is a transit country whose borders are crossed by many minors at risk of becoming victims of trafficking. "We have worked with Melilla," Lorente explains. We have worked with Melilla," Lorente explains. "Many children in an irregular situation were arriving at the border, so now every time a child arrives with 'suspicious' documentation, they send us a DNA sample for identification. When we started working with the Melilla government we had peaks where almost a third of the cases were children who were not related to the adult they were entering through the border. There were real child trafficking networks.  We began to systematically analyse the cases and as a result, the number of cases was reduced considerably, to the point that it is now rare for a minor to enter through this route".

Italy is another border country that in recent years, and as a consequence of the refugee crisis, is experiencing a massive influx of people fleeing from war conflicts and human rights violations. "Children who migrate alone, because of their childhood condition, are exposed to all the dangers of such a journey, but with an added situation of extreme vulnerability derived from their young age," explains Rosa Flores, from the Human Trafficking Unit of Red Cross Spain. "We are talking about trips that involve crossing borders in conditions of total insecurity: no money, no documentation, no one knowing where you are or waiting for you at your destination... They are cannon fodder for the mafias".  

A survey by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) of 1,600 children who arrived in Italy via the Mediterranean Sea revealed that more than 75 per cent of them had been held against their will or forced to work without pay at some point along the way. "We need to create a large database coordinated by all the countries where there is a large influx of refugees," says Lorente. "In Lebanon, for example, there is a tremendous situation because of the large number of people it receives. Inside the camps there are thefts of children and a lot of terrible events. Something has to be done there, to create databases that can be compared inside and outside the country.

In addition to helping locate missing children, implementing the DNA Prokids program on a systematic basis could be a very powerful prevention tool. "We have plenty of technology to solve this problem, the DNA identification techniques are already super-purified," says Lorente. "We don't have to look for a new method to analyze the DNA of the hair, or whatever it is... there are very serious problems that have a solution and above all, they can be prevented".

As the expert points out, in many countries it is relatively simple to traffic in young children, almost as simple as forging a birth certificate. This would be avoided if, systematically, each child to be given up for adoption had a DNA sample taken to verify its origin. "A child cannot leave a country for adoption unless, first, it is verified that his or her parents are not looking for him or her within that country and, second, a record is kept in case of relatives later appear to claim him or her.

For Lorente, "the best part of this program is not the resolution part but the preventive part. The final objective is to implement a series of actions that will make it much more difficult to steal a child, to send out a warning message. We must prevent". Thanks to initiatives like this, we may be moving towards a future where cases of stolen children are now only part of fiction films.