Human Goods

IRIN recently reported on the International Labor Organization’s study of child labor in Pakistan’s bangle industry.  According to the study, children must hunch over hot stoves for average 12-hour days in order to produce glass bangles.

Pakistan’s Federal Bureau of Statistics claims 3.3 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are currently involved in the industry.

IRIN quoted Fazila Gulrez, national manager of promotions for the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child, arguing that educating children in the workplace is not the solution to the problem.  She added:

The notion that poverty is a cause is inaccurate.  In fact child labor itself leads to poverty and creates a vicious circle…  The high drop-out rate from schools with 50 percent leaving education within the first 5 years of primary education also contributes to child labor.

Child participation in the industry provokes ethical dilemmas across the board.  For student Raheela Abbas, exposure to the plight of children and their working conditions caused her to renounce wearing bangles altogether.

But it’s important to understand the broader picture as well.  These children, like most others in their families, are working in deplorable conditions because they have no other options.  Boycotting something that is repulsive is often an attractive option, but it’s also necessary to take into account the repercussions if the industry’s overall economy takes a hit.

So …  What DO you do?  Human Goods appreciates your comments.

(photo source: Vitaly Shepelev/flickr)

After the Christmas 2004 tsunami, Hannah Lobel, in a 2005 article from the Utne Reader, described “slimy ’sexpatriates’ who’ve set up shop as purveyors of women free from the influence of ‘feminazis’” that took advantage of young women and girls struck by the disaster. She’s referring to an article by Alex Renton describing the tendency of international sex tourists to exploit regions of the globe most brutally hit by natural and economic hardship.  Renton writes:

It was the tsunami, of course. Patong beach, one of the worst hit parts of Phuket island, is among Thailand’s best known destinations for tourists seeking sex. So the men transferred their holidays to Bangkok. Happily for them, there was a drought in northeastern Thailand at the end of 2004. The poor rice crop that resulted sent more young girls than usual down from their impoverished villages on the plains of Isaan to harvest the tourists in the big city. This seasonal migration goes back, historians of the sex trade will tell you, to the Vietnam war and the establishment of Thailand as a brothel for American GIs on leave. Prostitution for foreign visitors developed into a major industry, although official Thailand shrouds its economic and social significance in misinformation and a variety of interesting hypocrisies.

Sex tourism, Renton argues, is at best difficult to measure.  Immigration officers don’t list sex as a qualifier when questioning incoming tourists whether their trip is for business or pleasure.  He adds, however:

Westerners form an important—albeit not the major—part of this economic picture. A few have settld here because of it, calling themselves “sexpatriates.” In towns like Pattaya on the Gulf of Thailand, on Phuket island and in the sex trade districts of Bangkok, they run bars, hotels and brothels, mediating the transactions between male tourists and Thai women. They are vocal on websites and in local publishing ventures, churning out guides for sex tourists. Some of these men see themselves as exiles, refugees from the “feminazis” who are crushing the spirit of the western male. Here, the old order of the sexes still reigns. Women know their place, they wash your feet before they have sex with you, they say thank you and help you in the shower afterwards. And, of course, westerners’ savings and pensions go a long way. Beer is a dollar a bottle, and a woman for the night available for £10 or less. It’s the “last place you can be a white man,” says one bar-owning sexpat on his website.

Interestingly, Renton also identifies another industry revolving around the Thai sex trade– that of NGOs that seek to combat sex trafficking.  Despite all the activism around the issue, it is difficult for journalists to obtain accurate statistics measuring just how big the problem is.  This is, perhaps, because no one actually has such numbers.

Nevertheless, Renton predicts that the trend will continue to escalate as long as tourists have disposable incomes and oppressed countries have disposable people …

The country’s beaches are overexploited, its forests shrinking and the islands poisoned by tourists’ waste. But Thailand and its neighbours retain one renewable resource for the tourists that is not in danger of running out—the supply of poor, smiling women.

(photo:  Osvaldo_Zoom/flickr)

A UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre report entitled “South Asia in Action: Preventing and responding to child trafficking” is calling on South Asian nations to crack down on the enslavement of children, a problem that is widespread in much of South Asia.

Allison Alert reports for the UNICEF Innocenti Research Center, which authored the report:

Children in South Asia are being trafficked for many forms of exploitation - for sexual exploitation, labour, begging, early marriage, forced military recruitment, to work on camel farms, and for several other harmful purposes …

Girls who have not yet reached puberty may be married off to older men so that their parents have one less mouth to feed. Children are often sent to the capital city or an urban area to ‘have a better life’, which often involves deprivation of food, sleep and shelter, restriction of movement, and severed contacts with their families. The unprepared child who lacks awareness of the risks may voluntarily leave the home to migrate to another country and increase her or his vulnerability to trafficking.

While the report demands that South Asian countries improve anti-trafficking legislation and intensify enforcement, it is key that it also advises a collaboration between health, education, and social services, and the legal system, to name a few factors that exacerbate complications that lead to trafficking.

Most parents don’t want to sell their children.

They also don’t want to see them starve to death, and when someone promising who has money will give them a little so that one of their children can get work in the city and the remaining ones can eat … it is tempting to believe that a future is possible.  To believe what you have to to see them live.

When you place people without options up against the faceless global forces of supply and demand, it’s easy to make moral judgements about how those people respond to such forces; but morally murkier when you try to convince them to stand up to that system.

Also this week, the UN released another report claiming that “a significant number” of the 15,000 children in Nepal’s orphanages are admitted as a result of fraud or coercion, and many of those adopted out are not orphaned but separated from their families.  The report recommends a cessation of intercountry adoption which UNICEF fears has encouraged the illicit sale of children across international borders, according to the UN:

“The vast majority of children in centres don’t need to be there,” said Joseph Aguettant, Tdh Country Representative in Nepal.

“They have family… The first priority, therefore, should be to reunite 80 per cent of the children in institutions with their families, not to re-open intercountry adoption.”

To truly curb and eliminate the problem, we must address — in a real way — the circumstances which force parents to give their children up in the first place and deprive children of safe environments to grow up in.

(Photo: Bullit Marquez/Associated Press)

As the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics kick off this weekend, William Sparrow for the Asia Times asks,
“China has the Games, doesn’t it expect the players to show up, too?”

In an article also featured on The Human Trafficking Project’s site, Sparrow refers to the inevitable influx of Olympic-going foreigners who double as sex tourists.

Anyone who studies human trafficking will tell you that wherever there is a congregation of people with money who are open to a good time, there is a market for prostitution.

Dissecting a published set of guidelines for admitted foreigners released by the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, Sparrow writes,

Under the rubric “Which categories of foreigners are not permitted to enter China?”, the HRC-translated guide included, “Those who are believed to potentially engage in smuggling, narcotic trafficking or prostitution after entering China”, and “Those who are suffering from a mental disorder or insanity, sexually-transmitted disease, or an infectious disease such as active tuberculosis.”

How the Beijing government plans to enforce these policies, namely prostitution-seekers and those with sexually-transmitted disease, is impossibly unclear. Even for an authoritarian government as strict as Beijing, it seems an immense undertaking to pre-determine the health and intent of millions of expected tourists.

It is obvious, however, that the government has thrown down the gauntlet and will do whatever it must to crack down on vice in an effort to present China’s best face for the Games. In terms of stopping prostitution, and its alleged negative effects on society, this may be a laudable endeavor. But on the ground, let’s be honest, it’s laughable.

Sparrow references a Washington Post article by Maureen Fan that points to China’s economic boom as a major factor for rising numbers of sex workers. This will be undoubtedly exacerbated by the arrival of millions of tourists with money to spend on fun.

Sparrow concludes,

In the main cities where the Games will be held - Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai - any efforts to prevent or even tame prostitution will prove unmanageable. The confluence of history, economics and human nature - all in a carnivalesque environment - will simply be too much to overcome.

Holly Fox’s Familienpolitik blog recently posted on a Washington Post article that describes U.S. allegations of baby-selling and trafficking in Vietnam. According to the article, some brokers go to rural Vietnamese villages to buy babies that eventually get adopted.  Inconsistencies in adoption paperwork led authorities to investigate, and new parents most likely would never know that their babies had been trafficked.

As a result, Vietnam is now halting new adoption applications from U.S. couples.

The people of Afghanistan have never gotten a break. Newsweek recently reported on the “Opium Brides of Afghanistan,” referring to the now relatively common practice of poppy farmers selling off daughters to their debtors because the poppy market– a huge cash crop in many parts of Afghanistan– hasn’t been bringing in adequate money since the war started.

Yeah, things were bad before. Add to it the global crisis over skyrocketing food prices. For this Afghan father, interviewed by IRIN, it became “like selling your heart!”

(source: IRIN humanitarian news and analysis)

SHEBERGHAN, 18 May 2008 (IRIN) - Sayed Ali (not his real name) said he sold his 11-year-old daughter, Rabia, for US$2,000 to a man in Sheberghan city, Jawzjan Province in northern Afghanistan to feed his wife and three younger children.

With food prices in Afghanistan having soared over the past few months and the 40-year-old father unable to find work, he said he had no other choice but to sell his daughter to save his family from starvation.

“Even animals don’t sell their children, because they love them and want to die for them, not to mention human beings. For too many days I stood next to roads and asked people for work, but always ended up disappointed. I couldn’t go home empty-handed and disappoint my starving children, so I used to scavenge in garbage and collect leftover food.

“I would lie to my family and say I bought them food from the market. But now it’s even hard to find anything edible in the garbage because of [increasing] food prices. People now eat all their food because it’s very expensive and also the numbers of those who scavenge in garbage has increased.

“Because I am illiterate, no one will give me a job. I am illiterate because of war and poverty. I didn’t go to school because my parents wanted me to work. My children also don’t go to school and they’ll also be brought up illiterate like me.

“How can someone sell his own child? It’s like selling your eyes or selling your heart!

“As no one would give me work I had no other option but to sell my lovely daughter. I sold her only to save the rest of my family. I sold her only to buy food for my younger children who otherwise would have died from hunger.

“I know people will say I am a cruel and merciless father who sold his own child, but those who say so don’t know my hardship and have never felt the hunger that my family suffers.

“I know other poor people who don’t have children and say, if necessary, they will blow themselves up [in a suicide attack] and kill other people in order to feed their families.

“I hope the government will hear my voice and help people like me to find jobs and feed our families.”

Burmese child soldier in WWII

(photo by Henry Allen, from the National Archives, 1944)

Myanmar, Seth Mydans wrote in The New York Times this week, has one of the world’s highest recruitments of child soldiers, with many of them coerced through violence, kidnapping, and terror to join the army.

Mydans draws his information from a report recently released by Human Rights Watch on the use of child soldiers worldwide. According to the report, Myanmar is the worst offender, beating out Sudan, Uganda, and the Congo.

Mydans sums up Myanmar’s evaluation in the article:

The report, issued last October, said that military recruiters and civilian brokers scour train stations, bus stations, markets and other public places for boys and coerce them to volunteer.

The recent cyclone has only exacerbated the problem. With homes and families wiped away, some small children get lost and don’t even know the names of the villages they come from.

Relief groups are trying to do something about the swarms of children that wander around crowded and chaotic refugee camps, but they don’t have a program to try to help families reconnect in place yet.

This is a concern, because the chaos has put the cyclone’s most vulnerable survivors at extremely high risk of being trafficked into the military or sexual abuse.

(source: IRIN Humanitarian News and Analysis)

The Child Action Protection Network recently conducted a survey of dozens of brick-making factories in the Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan, IRIN reported.

The 38 brick factories in the area employ 556 families. 2,298 children in these families are bonded laborers who are forced to perform the incredibly dangerous work of making bricks. Many of them suffer broken bones and severe burns from the kilns.

In Afghanistan and other countries in the region, poor families are born into bondage, inheriting “debts” from older generations that are impossible to pay off. They are not allowed to leave under threat of violence, and it is common for the entire family– including young children– to work to chip away at debts that more often accumulate than shrink.