拐卖婴儿黑市：无处可逃的螺旋

Somewhere, Rebecca's son is 10. He could, she knows in her heart, be dead. The last time she saw him, Lawrence Josiah, her firstborn son, he was one. She was 16. It was about 2am one night in March 2011 and Rebecca was drowsy from sniffing a handkerchief doused in jet fuel — a cheap high on the city's streets.

She sniffed jet fuel because it gave her the confidence to go up to strangers and beg. By the time she was 15, Rebecca's mother could no longer support her, and she dropped out and slid into life on the street. She met an older man who promised to marry her but instead made her pregnant and left. The following year Lawrence Josiah was born.

"Even though I have other kids, he was my firstborn, he made me a mother," she said, fighting back tears. "I have searched in every children's centre, in Kiambu, Kayole, and I have never found him."

“不过是领养”

Vulnerable women are being preyed on in Nairobi to feed a thriving black market for babies. Over the course of a year-long investigation, Africa Eye has found evidence of children being snatched from homeless mothers and sold for massive profits. 

We uncovered illegal child trafficking in street clinics and babies being stolen to order at a major government-run hospital. And in an effort to expose those abusing government positions, we arranged to purchase an abandoned child from a hospital official, who used legitimate paperwork to take custody of a two-week old boy before selling him directly to us.

The baby-stealers range from opportunists to organised criminals. Among the opportunists are women like Anita, a heavy drinker and drug user who herself lives on and off the street, and makes money stealing children from women like Rebecca — targeting mothers with infants under the age of three.

"Sometimes she will speak to the mother first, to try and see if the mother knows what she plans to do. Sometimes she will drug the mother, give her sleeping pills or glue. Sometimes she will play with the kid.

"Anita has a lot of ways to get kids."

Anita said her boss was a local businesswoman who bought stolen babies from petty criminals and sold them for a profit. Some of the customers were "women who are barren, so for them this is a kind of adoption," she said, but "some use them for sacrifices".

In reality, once Anita has sold a child on, she knows little about its fate. She charges the businesswoman 50,000 shillings for a girl or 80,000 shillings for a boy, she said — £350 or £550. That is roughly the going rate in Nairobi to steal a child from a woman on the street.

There are no reliable statistics on child trafficking in Kenya — no government reports, no comprehensive national surveys. The agencies responsible for finding missing children and tracking the black market are under-resourced and under-staffed. One of the few safeguards for mothers whose children are taken is Missing Child Kenya. In its four years in operation, the organisation has worked on about 600 cases.

"This is a very big issue in Kenya but it is under-reported. At Missing Child Kenya we have barely scratched the surface." The issue had "not been prioritised in action response plans for social welfare," said Maryana Munyendo, founder of Missing Child Kenya.

That is partly because this is a crime whose victims tend to be vulnerable, voiceless women like Rebecca, who do not have the resources or social capital to draw media attention or drive action from the authorities.

“你能怎么办？偷个孩子”

The driving force behind the black market is a cultural stigma around infertility. "Infertility is not a good thing for a woman in an African marriage," Munyendo said. "You are expected to have a child and it should be a boy. If you can't, you might get kicked out of your home. So what do you do? You steal a child."

According to Africa Eye's research, child-trafficking rings are operating within the walls of some of Nairobi's biggest government-run hospitals. Through a source, we approached Fred Leparan, a clinical social worker at Mama Lucy hospital. It is Leparan's job to protect the wellbeing of vulnerable children born at Mama Lucy. But our source said Leparan was directly involved in trafficking. 

The source arranged to meet Leparan, and told him he knew of a woman desperate to purchase a child after failing to conceive. "I have this baby boy in the hospital," Leparan replied. "They dropped him off two weeks ago and never came back."

“我很安心”

Between the street snatchers like Anita and the corrupt officials like Leparan, there is another layer to Nairobi's child-trafficking business. Dotted around some of the city's slums you can find illegal street clinics with delivery rooms for expectant mothers. These makeshift clinics are a known location for the black-market trade in babies.

"This one, she is eight-and-a-half months pregnant, she is almost ready to deliver," Auma said, whispering. She offered to sell the unborn child to Kanaitha for 45,000 shillings — £315.

Auma did not appear concerned for the mother's welfare after the birth. "As soon as she gets her money, she will go," she said, waving her hand. "We make it clear, they never come back."

Adama was broke. Like Rebecca, she had been abandoned by the man who got her pregnant, and the pregnancy had cost her her job on a construction site when she could no longer carry heavy bags of cement. For three months, her landlord gave her grace, then he kicked her out.

So Adama decided to sell her baby. Mary Auma was not offering her the 45,000 shillings she was attempting to charge us. She told Adama the deal was for just 10,000 — £70.

"Her place was dirty, she would use a small container for blood, she had no basin, and the bed was not clean," Adama said later, in an interview in her village. "But I was desperate and I didn't have a choice."

"I did not want to sell my baby to someone who would not be able to take care of him, or someone who buys babies to go use them for other things," she said later.

So Adama left the clinic that day carrying her baby boy. She dropped him instead at the government-run children's hospital, where he would wait for foster parents and, she hoped, a better life. She never got the money she needed. 

She lives alone now, away from Nairobi, and sometimes she dreams about her son and wakes in the early hours and thinks about him. Sometimes, if she can't get back to sleep, she walks down the road in the dark until she finds someone else awake. But she doesn't regret her choice.

“要小心，非常小心”

Fred Leparan, the clinical social worker at the government hospital, called to say he had identified a baby boy given up by his mother that he wanted to steal for us. The boy was one of three children at the hospital waiting to be transferred to a nearby children's home. It was Leparan's job to ensure they got there safely.

At the hospital, Leparan filled out the necessary paperwork and made small talk with the staff, who had no idea that a child was being stolen on their watch. Rose, the undercover reporter, was waiting in a car outside. Leparan told the hospital nurses she worked for the children's home and asked them to take the babies out to her. He seemed increasingly anxious, but he assured our source that the nurses would not follow them.

Moments later, the team drove out of Mama Lucy hospital with three infant children in the car and instructions to deliver just two of them to the children's home. From there, the third baby could have gone anywhere, to anyone.

Later that afternoon, Leparan called Rose to a meeting and instructed her to place the agreed 300,000 shillings on the table. He instructed her to see a nutritionist. "The only thing to keep an eye on is the boy's vaccine mark," he said.

谁得到了惩罚？

     谁得到了慰藉？

For the mothers whose children were stolen, there will never be any real resolution. Most go on in limbo, hoping to see their child again, knowing that they probably won't. Rebecca would give "everything" to see her son, she said. "And if he died I would like to know too."

Last year, she heard that someone saw a boy in a distant neighbourhood of Nairobi that looked just like her eldest daughter. Rebecca knew it was probably nothing, and she had no way of getting to the neighbourhood and no idea where to look if she did. She did get as far as the local police station, but she couldn't get any help, she said, and eventually she gave up.

Sometimes Rebecca thinks about the wealthier women who paid for them — about what it takes to raise a child you know was stolen from someone else.