Stop Child Slavery

I wrote yesterday about the volume of stories I wanted to wade through and commented that I knew what I would find, many stories of pain and only a few of joy. I read that now and realize how defeated that sounds. So here is one of the stories of hope.

Shelley Seal writes one of my favorite blogs, Weight of Silence. She has a post about movies made by children rescued from child slavery in India. Her post is entitled, Through the Eyes of Children.

An excerpt:

Sahiful Mondal, who filmed that first movie “I Am” in 2004, is now 13 years old and has filmed or directed three other movies since. Sahiful is very tall for his age, an extremely attractive bright-eyed boy who is full of boundless, optimistic energy and always has a smile on his face. He has traveled to Athens, Cyprus and Melbourne in association with his films. He has come a long way from his early childhood. After his father died of tuberculosis when he was three years old, Sahiful began working in agricultural labor at a very early age due to his mother’s mental illness. The backbreaking work earned him the equivalent of 20 cents per day. Because the agricultural work was seasonal, in the off season Sahiful worked tending goats. He earned two portions of rice per day for this work. One day when he lost a goat under his herding watch, his employer beat him and refused him food for two days.

Please read it all if you have the time.

Child Prostitution is Horrific, Brutal and Evil and What You Can Do To Stop It! by Bruce Seah

Anderson Cooper Tackles Child Prostitution, Elephants, and Giant Squids by Suki Falconberg, Ph.D.

Why Are Child Prostitutes Treated Like Criminals Instead of Sexual Abuse Victims? at Injustice Anywhere

photo by .shyam.

I’m disturbed by the numbers.

I have been busy focusing on some other project for the past few days and left my Child Slavery reading to tonight. When I opened my google feed reader folder, I was shocked by what I found.

The image to the right is a screen capture of my feeds from various search criteria.

As you can see, there are literally thousands of articles to wade through. This may be as clear an indication of the scope of the child slavery problem as anything I’ll find in any single article. I wish I could say I look at this and am filled with hope. But I am quite confident what I’m going to find… many stories of pain and a few stories of joy.

I need to find a way to create more stories of joy.

This organization was brought to my attention today. I’ve not had a chance to go through their entire site yet, but the Convention on the Rights of the Child is dedicated to the idea that children, anyone under 18, are born with basic freedoms the inherent rights of all human beings. I agree.

The Child Rights Information Network (CRIN) is a global network that disseminates information about the Convention on the Rights of the Child and child rights amongst non-governmental organisations (NGOs), United Nations agencies, inter-governmental organisation (IGOs), educational institutions, and other child rights experts. The Coordinating Unit is based in London, UK.

The network is supported, and receives funding from Save the children Sweden, Save the Children UK, UNICEF, Plan International, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and World Vision International. Project funding is also received from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

I often think of Africa as “so” foreign. It seems like a world I could never relate to.

I am reading A Long Way Gone: Memoirs Of A Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah. I expected to be reading from a detached position… reading about a far off place, about people who live in a culture I can’t begin to understand.

I was startled by how familiar Ishmael felt as I read words like, “The only wars I knew of were those that I had read about in books or seen in movies such as Rambo: First Blood, and the one in neighboring Liberia that I had heard about on the BBC News. My imagination at ten years old didn’t have the capacity to grasp what had taken away the happiness of the refugees.”

His words could be my words now. I have no direct understanding of war, of abject poverty, of forced labor, of child slavery, of child soldiers. I read his words and thought, “this boy was like my son.”

I am not finished with the book. I’m reading it differently than I thought I would. It is hitting home because he was a boy who went to school, loved rap music, danced and had dreams of college. He was not so different. And so the stories of horror that are now flooding the pages seem more real, more painful.

Thailand is currently called “Disneyland for pedophiles” and has up to 600,000 AIDS cases and a huge sex-for-sale industry, driven mostly by European and American tourists who come to rent what they want. It is estimated that the number of prostitutes in Thailand ranges from 800,000 to 2 million. Among which 20% of Thailand Prostitutes are 18 or younger.(“Disneyland for Pedophiles”)
Why is this multi million dollar industry still functioning?”

As you can see, even though it is against the law in Thailand for persons to engage in sexual relations with anyone under the age of 15, it is still happening. Young women in Thailand are still being sold into sexual slavery by their parents, and Europeans and Westerners alike are all aiding the demand for this service. Read more about the violation of these young girls here.