Children involved in orphanage tourism are subject to multiple interventions, from a range of actors, including parents/guardians displacing them into orphanages; recruiters of ‘paper orphans’; voluntourists; NGOs; police and other agents of pity, rescue, power and control.

Recently, orphanage tourism has sparked outrage about child trafficking and ‘modern slavery’, and a growing body of academic and third-sector literature is calling for its eradication.  While the orphan figure is positioned as an object of suffering to be rescued by voluntourism, recent ‘modern slavery’ campaigns present the orphan as a child slave to be freed.

Both logics stem from Western liberal humanitarianism, and both separate children from the social and political context of their lives and strip the child of agency, voice and subjectivity.

Nascent research that directly engages with care-experienced children/young people reveals that their stories are, however, more complex and varied, and often inconsistent with the oversimplified and homogenous manner in which they are presented in dominant frameworks. This presentation draws on data collected during two periods of qualitative research with former orphanage residents in Nepal.

Through participatory action research and interviews, rich and varied narratives emerged, illustrating the ambivalences and contradictions of growing up with volunteers in the orphanage tourism sector. My work explores both the harms and potential benefits of institutionalization for children in tourism orphanages, and examines the problems associated with NGO rescue/reintegration programs, where children are taken from institutions considered harmful and returned to their families in the name of children’s rights.

The analysis draw attention to the inadequacies of the child trafficking/modern slavery framing, and I will argue that neo-abolitionist campaigns and other instruments of Western hegemony fail to meaningfully address the complex issues of labour exploitation and child welfare in Nepal (and other Global South countries).

I recommend that rethinking interventions is vital and should be done in ways that engage with the social, cultural, political and economic context in a bottom-up fashion and, most importantly, foreground the voices and subjectivities of the recipient group.

Speaker biography

Esther Bott is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham. She has extensive experience of qualitative research projects around the world, predominantly in Global South countries, where she explores power dynamics between a range of tourism actors.

Her current research focuses on orphanage tourism in Nepal, exploring the subjectivities of residents and the politics of humanitarian intervention.

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