Education About Child Slavery In The Developing World: Sierra Leone

An issue that people often run into when considering child slavery is the perception of people of different cultures. In many places in the world it is perfectly acceptable to take advantage of orphaned street children and make them work for little or no pay. One of these places is Sierra Leone.

The diamond industry in Sierra Leone took off after the civil war when soldiers were left jobless and looking for easy cash. They found this in the form of diamonds and the war had created many perfect workers, orphaned children. These kids are lured into working for these diamond barons with promises of gifts and quick and easy money if they find that perfect stone, which they get $800 for but will sell for $10000 elsewhere.

The thing about this is that the barons don’t think they are doing anything wrong, they actually think that they’re helping these children, making it harder for people to try to convince them differently. Another problem with this is that children miss years of schooling and so they cannot find a proper job when they’re finally released from these mines, this eventually leads them back to a life of crime.

So next time you’re buying a diamond ring, think about the children in Sierra Leone, who are lured in to work for the barons as slaves without basic human rights and privileges. We’d really like to hear what you think about this issue so please leave a comment below.

The Child Slavery Circus

As many as 500 Nepalese children have been sold into slavery to Indian circuses over the past year, according to a new report from the Himalayan state.
From The Times
September 20, 2008

The reason for the degradation of the lives of hundreds of children? They look exotic and different with their pale skin. Many mothers are told that their children will live the life of a movie star. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Are movie stars kept in conditions worse than an animal? Are they sexually abused? Forced to work with horrendous injuries and sold as prostitutes if they are no longer valued? Not unless you work in a circus in India. And it’s not only the small circuses in the provinces that are enslaving these children. Raj Mahal, one of the biggest circuses in India is a user of child slaves. Indeed one of the scariest things is the ease in which child slaves are acquired. Simply tell a desperately poor mother that her child will be a film star, pay her the equivalent of $20 US and you now have a nice new slave ready to be trained.

This begs the question, why aren’t these people stopped? Surely someone watching a girl being swung around on a rope held by her teeth 40 ft. in the air without a safety net would think for a second? Unfortunately this is rarely the case. When at the circus, world weighty matters like the fate of children’s lives are rarely on a person’s mind. A few bruises are easily covered up in the presence of so much make-up, and sexual abuse is even easier to hide. And is it possible to tell if a person is terrified or exhilarated when they are spinning like a top 40 ft. above your head quite literally by the skin of their teeth? Not likely. The real part to the slavery comes backstage where “The circus animals got a better deal than us,” as stated by a girl who was rescued from a circus by the Esther Benjamins Trust, a charity that has rescued more than 350 Nepalese children from Indian circuses over the past four years.

Despite the immeasurable good that charities like these do for the lives of children everywhere, India remains as an ever-growing hub for child exploitation and slave trading. Where figures of 10 million were being quoted before, some say that as many as 20 million children are enslaved in various industries in India with agriculture and the textile industry being some of the worst offenders, not to mention the sex slave industry.

What can we do? the government has advertisements, but really more could be done, please comment with your ideas below or contact us.

Restaveks and The Haitian Earthquake

As mentioned in the previous post, the situation of Restaveks (Creole for “Stay With”) in Haiti is a fairly poor one. Not only do they do all the housework within a house, in addition some are physically and/or sexually abused. This all occurs under the pretext of richer families taking on the responsibility of the children and promising to care for and educate them.

The only way that this situation can go after a major disaster like the Haitian Earthquake is down. If a family does not have basic necessities for life like food and shelter, then what is the likelihood that they will give their slaves the food that they need to live. If the family that owned the Restavek dies, then the child will end up on the street. How can we end this Lose-Lose situation?

One way may be to rebuild Port Au Prince in such a way as to provide people with basic needs for its inhabitants such as plumbing and sewerage. Restaveks have to carry two 10 litre containers of water, each weighing 10 kilos up a rocky cliff face up to seven times a day, everyday. Doing this while suffering from malnutrition, caused by a lack of adequate food sounds bad enough. All this in addition to cleaning out the house, scrubbing the floors, emptying out the chamberpots and being beaten if you work is not satisfactory adds up to a miserable existence. Rebuilding the town with basic plumbing and sewerage necessities would automatically lessen the burden on, and the need for, these children.

Another method that was having some success before the earthquake hit was the steady education of Haitians. An interview with one of the owners of a restavek included her admitting that she physically abused the child if she was slow in bringing the water because she “loved her”. I don’t know about the specifics of the Haitian culture but making someone kneel on a cheese-grater does not sound like love to me. This is a part of the world where physical abuse is commonplace. There are people in parts of the world that would not believe that we do not cane our children because they do not know of an alternate method of discipline. Education can inform people of a better way of dealing with children.

For more information on the plight of slaves in Haiti go to;http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/07/13/a-capacity-for-cruelty-is-never-justified/

Child Slavery in Haiti

In the news lately has been the story of 10 Americans who tried to take 33 children that had been orphaned by the Haiti earthquake. The fate of these Americans has not yet been decided but the government has been taking this very seriously because of the history of child trafficking in Haiti over the past 20-30 years.

The history of child trafficking in Haiti really started in 1980 and has since started to skyrocket now reaching twice as many numbers now than 10 years ago. As many as 225,000 children work as slaves in Haiti, these children, known as restaveks, are usually sent by their families to work as slaves so as to reduce the burden on the family to raise the child or to provide better schooling opportunities for the child in that neighbourhood.

“According to the U.N. Office for the Special Envoy for Haiti, unemployment reaches 70 percent           nationally and 78 percent of Haitians live on less than $2 a day.” – CNN

This poverty is the reason why children are being sent away from their homes usually to households where they are beaten and abused. The majority of restaveks are female and so are less able to defend themselves. The video below talks more about restaveks in Haiti.

Convention on the Rights of the Child

The UN came up with a document, outlining the rights that every child is supposed to have which was “adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 44/25 of 20 November 1989″.
Since then, most aid organisations in the world that seek to help children in bondage, refer to this document to guide what they should be striving for. Examples of this are UNICEF which has the top page on Google web search for “Rights of a Child“. So what does the Convention on the rights of the child mean for us in our lives? Not much.  But it does mean a lot for the child in this video and others like her all throughout the Third World.

Sadly this video, based on a true story tells a tale that is common in our world, but surely this contravenes the CRC which can be found here? What is the point of a document signed by practically every country in the world if it cannot prevent the needless suffering of children all over the world. I can think of a few reasons, such as giving people around the world a perfect goal to aim for and giving aid organisations something to work towards. But, are there any others? Or is this just another example of the human need to classify everything. Again I come to the need for education. If the people in our world who own child slaves knew even for a moment just how precious the lives of each and every child under their control is, would they still feel compelled to make them work for 15 hours everyday to fulfil his quota? Would families sell off their children to be indentured slaves just to pay a dowry that maybe shouldn’t even be paid in the first place? Of course they wouldn’t. But they do because they do not realise the full impact of what they are doing by enslaving a child and denying that child their rights.

Why do we still have child slavery? Part 2

We ended our last post with the equivalent of “to be continued”. Sorry, we will try to limit that as much as possible because we know how much you love our writing and hearing the end of our thoughts.

This post will be on possible solutions to the problem of child slavery.  Clearly, although there has been a great deal of progress in the western world since the time of the industrial revolution, the children in the Lesser Economically Developed countries in our world still suffer. So, one question we can ask ourselves is, “what is different from the poorer parts of our world compared to the richer parts that allows children to be slaves?”

There are many possible answers to this question. Is it that children are perceived to have a lesser value in poorer countries? As mentioned in the first post, children can be bought for less than a cow. Or maybe we should be asking ourselves, why there is even a market for child slaves? What is it about these poorer countries that allows slave traders to exist?

The most obvious answer to these questions is human greed. The fact that, without the proper education and teaching, a human is essentially a selfish being and will stop at nothing to ensure its own well-being. A quote from the Baha’i Faith reinforces this view.

But the difference of the qualities with regard to culture is very great, for education has great influence. Through education the ignorant become learned; the cowardly become valiant. Through cultivation the crooked branch becomes straight; the acid, bitter fruit of the mountains and woods becomes sweet and delicious; and the five-petaled flower becomes hundred-petaled. Through education savage nations become civilized, and even the animals become domesticated. Education must be considered as most important, for as diseases in the world of bodies are extremely contagious, so, in the same way, qualities of spirit and heart are extremely contagious.Education has a universal influence, and the differences caused by it are very great. – (“Some Answered Questions”, pp. 212–15)

The answer then to the question is, “How do we educate people so that they see the potential within each child as a human being, more important than the pursuit of profit?” A widespread teaching campaign over scores of countries, nationalities and languages? Or is there an easier way? So far, we can’t think of one. So maybe, what we need to be doing is looking for the root of the problem, the lack of people’s education.

With education, the poverty cycle can be broken, people can live better lives than their forefathers did, simply because they know how to earn a greater living through a trade or art of some kind. With less poverty comes a lesser need for child slaves. Education can also teach people the morals and ethics required to see that children are worth more than cattle and that the potential within each and every child is priceless.

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Why do we still have child slaves? Part 1

There are many aid organisations out there in the world, and if you ask anyone on the street, “Is child slavery a good thing?” Chances are you will get a negative response. Why then, is child slavery still a prominent part of our lives? It is obviously not because people do not care (we are proof of that) but maybe it’s because not enough people do anything about it. Or maybe it’s because people don’t want to pay the extra cost for products so that children don’t have to go into slavery!

“Children cost less than cattle; while a cow or buffalo costs an average twenty thousand rupees, a child can be bought and traded like an animal for five hundred to two thousand rupees.” -globalmarch.org

This is one of the reason that big companies all over the world go to places like India, Asia and Africa to make their products; this is also why clothes and electronics are so cheap in these places. Child slavery, which has quickly become the fastest growing illegal trade in the world, second only to weapons, has largely enabled this huge discount to our daily goods. This is because of a global need for cheap products; mainly in places like the US, Australia and the UK. One of the reasons for this is Globalisation, which in much the same way that the Industrial Revolution did, caused many to end up in complete poverty; while a select few grew rich.

As a concequence of our greed, children in many countries around the world live a life of drudgery and cruelty while we reap the rewards for their sacrifice. And still we come to the question, “why do we let this modern day tradgedy occur?”

Perhaps the answer is that we don’t have the ability to stop it from occuring. That all the Aid organisations are looking to solve this horrendous problem in the wrong way. But, we will look at this later.

The History of Child Exploitation

Child slavery has been commonplace since the beginning of civilisation. Records tell us of children being exploited as early as the Sumerian empire, with Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome containing young slaves and children born into slavery. These children were not paid and were physically owned by the people exploiting them.

A great upsurge in the amount of child exploitation began with the inception of the industrial revolution. Britain in particular saw a huge growth in the number of children being used for manual labour. Children were used in mines to dig for coal where no one else could reach. Machines that needed small hands to repair them required the use of children. In a time of no OH&S, these children regularly became maimed or disabled for life and frequently died.

In our current world, places like South East Asia and Africa are the current hotspots for child slavery. Many of the products that we use in daily life come straight from the hands of child labourers.

“Of the 35 million soccer balls stitched in Pakistan, children produce one quarter of the balls, most of them as bonded slaves.” (Mary E. Williams, Child Labour and Sweat Shops, 1999, citing Sydney Schanberg, Life, 1 June 1996)

Imagine if the entire population of Atlanta, 526,000 people, was enslaved to make clothes, carpets and utensils. That’s the amount of children enslaved in Bangladesh.

We believe that children everywhere should be freed from bondage. We can’t even imagine the horrors that these children, sometimes as young as 3 years old, live through, all the while believing that their life is as good as they can make it. I once heard a story of a child in India who wanted to become his boss, the person enslaving him, simply because he knew no better life.

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