Orphanages in tourist resorts and disaster zones are abusing, buying and even renting children from their parents to fleece gullible Westerners

As a child welfare expert who has worked amid bullets and bombs in some of the world’s toughest war zones, Jennifer Morgan is not someone easily shaken. But even she admits she was shocked by some of the orphanages she visited recently in Haiti.

‘Outside it is a sunny day. Then you step inside the walls of an orphanage and realise that the children there have been exposed to rapes, severe beatings, emotional and mental trauma,’ she said. It was even more disturbing, she added, than the damaged children she came across amid the deadly mayhem of Darfur.

But perhaps the most troubling thing is that these tragic scenes in Haiti are not unusual. In dozens of places around the world, unregulated orphanages have become a boom business trading off Western guilt. Our desire to help is backfiring in the most dreadful fashion.

Morgan, whose job is to reunite children with their families, was even screamed at one day by the director of an orphanage in Port-au-Prince. ‘Stop reuniting children with their families,’ he shouted. ‘You’re destroying my business.’ Read More