The Conclusion draws together the major contributions that the monograph makes. It recognises orphanage trafficking intersects with child protection, tourism and development and argues for a comprehensive approach to the issue.

Chapter 4 situates the process of orphanage trafficking as a form of child trafficking under international law. The chapter applies the international framework on child trafficking to the process of orphanage trafficking including the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. The chapter argues that the process of orphanage trafficking should be recognised as a form of child trafficking under the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime 2000. The definition of child trafficking has two elements: the act element and the purpose element. The chapter then turns to applying the definition of child trafficking found in article 3 of the Trafficking Protocol to the process of orphanage trafficking, establishing that the act element is present. It also demonstrates how the exploitation that paper orphans experience meets the purpose element of the child trafficking definition in the Trafficking Protocol.

The introduction highlights the significance of this book. It provides a brief overview of orphanage trafficking and outlines the central arguments put forward.

Chapter 1 articulates the process of orphanage trafficking in developing states. It explains how the recruitment of a child into an orphanage occurs and describes how the process of orphanage trafficking manipulates the procedural aspects of gatekeeping into alternative care by claiming children are abandoned or orphaned rather than relinquished. This manipulation is critical in the orphanage-trafficking process as it indicates an intent by the involved orphanage operators to utilise the alternative care framework to justify the admission of children into care. The final part of the orphanage-trafficking process is the maintenance of the child in institutionalisation for the purpose of exploitation and profit through donor funding and orphanage tourism. The chapter then turns to establishing the prevalence of orphanage trafficking in developing states across the world. To do this, it focuses on four regions where there is evidence that the rising number of children in institutional care is in part due to the presence of donor funding and orphanage tourism: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, South East Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.