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West African countries adopt child fostering or kinship placement as a traditional form of social protection that balances care and support for families with limited resources, experiencing unforeseen setbacks; or requiring household support. The traditional kinship placement advocates the provision of nurturing and education for the child by the fostering family. However, the traditional kinship placement appears exploited with children taken away from their homes, by such familiar persons as relatives and family friends, who may or may not fulfill the traditional expectations of fostering. The aftermath is that based on the mistreatment experienced by several children, they are removed from their kinship placement and placed in agency care as survivors of trafficking. This again prompts the question of whether children removed from kinship placement should be considered trafficked children. This paper explores this situation by presenting the experiences of some children in kinship placement in Nigeria. Children’s narratives within the paper will provide a further understanding of how child fostering or placement could transform into child trafficking that will inform services provided to affected children.

Research on trafficking for prostitution in West Africa is focussed mostly on the experiences of women. When attention is directed to children, their voices are silent; and attention is placed on traffickers, therefore, downplaying the role of relatives in children’s movement from home. Moreover, when children are removed from trafficking, the usual path to re-integration is to unite them with their parents. Two issues drive this paper: if a parent that is implicated in the trafficking of their child for prostitution should be included in decision-making for reintegrating the child; and if a child understands their experience of trafficking to make informed decisions about moving on after trafficking. Based on this foundation, the paper explores one child’s journey from Nigeria to Burkina Faso for prostitution, with attention to the child’s perspectives on their journey and decisions for moving on after trafficking to inform the inclusion of children trafficked for prostitution in decisions about their reintegration.