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Archive for the ‘children’ Category

Genesis Ramirez was 15 years old when she turned her first trick.  The following years blended together in a traumatizing series of rapes, beatings, stabbings, miscarriages, and addictions.  Now, at 18, Genesis has pulled herself out of the abyss of Chicago’s sex trade and is trying to forge a life with integrity for the sake [...]

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(image by the International Labor Rights Forum)
The absurdity of the fact that many of us in the first world show our love for one another with products produced by the blood, sweat, and tears of others ought to give all of us pause.  Valentine’s Day offers a unique opportunity to probe into the reality of [...]

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(t-shirt worn by anti-trafficking volunteers in Miami)
Millions of football fans are celebrating the biggest American sporting victory of the year tonight.  But in the alleys of Miami, host of this year’s Super Bowl, just a handful of social workers, police, and volunteers are roaming around in the shadows, looking for underage girls who might have [...]

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They go and capture other people’s children. They bring the heart and the blood directly here to take to the spirits.
In January the BBC aired an episode of Newsnight on what it claims is a rise in human sacrifices and ritual child killings in Uganda:
One man said he had clients who had captured children and [...]

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In Haiti’s unstable post-quake atmosphere, at least one industry is poised to flourish. For those who buy and sell children for sex and cheap labor, Haiti is ripe with opportunity,
Nicolette Grams, staff member of the International Justice Mission, writes in the Atlantic.  Grams uses her article to illuminate the escalating threat of child trafficking through [...]

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Dutch filmmakers Chris Relleke and Jascha de Wilde’s 2002 film, Starkiss, depicts a young girl gripping a rope with her teeth as she is spun several meters in the air in front of a mesmerized audience. The film explores the enslavement of children in Indian circuses, what the filmmakers describe as “a world hidden [...]

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These are the hands of an 8-year-old …

Child laborer in a Dhaka garment factory (photo: G.M.B. Akash – click for more)
The ubiquitous smile of the poor should not be taken at face value; it conceals inexhaustible grief,
Jeremy Seabrook cautions in his September piece in the New Internationalist. The longtime reporter on poverty in South Asia [...]

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(photo: Monica Almeida/The New York Times)
On Halloween this year, the little mountain town of Ashland, Oregon reverberated with the rhythms of drum circles and laughter.  Following the annual Halloween parade, the streets were throbbing with Little Bo Peeps and Buzz Lightyears, offbeat zombies and chuckling middle-aged women in street clothes.
I sat in a small cafe [...]

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Democracy Now! interviewed Free the Slaves founder Kevin Bales, a lifelong abolitionist and author of several pivotal works in the corpus of today’s anti-slavery literature, including Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, and the recent The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America. He defined slavery for interviewer Amy Goodman as,
“One [...]

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This month, The Nation publishes the second in a two-part series on attempts to combat sex trafficking in the U.S. and abroad.  The first article, published in September, profiles (oftentimes quite critically) the work of the Christian NGO, International Justice Mission (IJM).
IJM works on a variety of issues, including not only the pursuit of freedom [...]

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