Human Goods

(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.

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.”