Children without childhood
Went to see the last event in the Modern Slavery Awareness week at Malone College Tuesday evening with people from my small group. It touched some on child soldiers in African countries - children who are kidnapped and forced to serve as soldiers in rebel armies.
Ran across this story from Yemen yesterday:
SANAA (AFP) — A Yemeni court on Tuesday granted a divorce to an eight-year-old girl whose unemployed father forced her into an arranged marriage this year, saying he feared she might be kidnapped.
“I am happy that I am divorced now. I will be able to go back to school,” Nojud Mohammed Ali said, after a public hearing in Sanaa’s court of first instance.
…Dressed in traditional black, Nojud said she would now go to live in the home of her maternal uncle and did not want to see her father.
The BBC also has an article on it today.
Abuse in Gangs
Friday morning I saw the following article in the NY Times:
Abuse Trails Central American Girls Into Gangs
“I thought it would be like my family,†Benky said of her reason for joining the gang, asking that her full name not be used. “I thought I’d get the love I was missing. But they’d hit me. They ordered me around. They told me I had to rob someone or kill someone, and I did it.â€
When she tried to leave the gang five years later, her fellow gang members shot her six times. The scars still visible on her body vouch for her story, as do social workers who visited her during the nine months she spent in a hospital.
Gang initiation was being forced to participate in group sex with the males in the group. She was 14 at the time.
Slavery and Human Trafficking in the Modern World
Some links and definitions:
From About.com:
During 2001, at least 700,000 and potentially as many as 4 million men, women and children worldwide were bought, sold, transported and held against their will in slave-like conditions, according to the U.S. State Department.
http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa061202a.htm
From Infoplease:
public perception of modern slavery is often confused with reports of workers in low-wage jobs or inhumane working conditions. However, modern-day slaves differ from these workers because they are actually held in physical bondage (they are shackled, held at gunpoint, etc.)
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/slavery1.html
From Anti-Slavery.org
A slave is:
* forced to work — through mental or physical threat;
* owned or controlled by an ‘employer’, usually through mental or physical abuse or threatened abuse;
* dehumanised, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as ‘property’;
* physically constrained or has restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement.
http://www.antislavery.org/homepage/antislavery/modern.htm
Trafficking in Persons Report
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/10815.pdf
Related Media:
http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2002/
Not For Sale
http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/Default.aspx
Modern Slavery
This past Wednesday I went to an event at Malone College raising awareness of sex slavery in modern day Thailand and Cambodia. They’re having a series of events to raise awareness of modern slavery in general over the next couple of weeks.
For those of us living comfortable, middle class existences in the Anglosphere, it’s hard to imagine how such a practice could continue to exist. Indeed it’s hard to understand how it ever existed in the first place. One of the remarkable phenomena of the American Civil War is how, in the generations following the war, Southerners have felt the need to re-write the ultimate cause of the war to be anything other than slavery. Even for the segregationists of the 1870s, it was deeply embarrassing to admit that state governments had been driven to rebellion primarily to defend the right of large landowners to own other human beings in perpetuity. Yet, it is perhaps all the more remarkable that slavery and the slave trade were ever banned at all. (more…)