At the start of the new millennium, the trafficking and exploitation of children is one of the world´s greatest scandals, enslaving around 400 million youngsters. They are robbed of their childhood, of education, of health, of play and the chance of a humane future. Getting the upper hand on it means attacking the root causes of poverty and boosting law enforcement….
At the start of the new millennium, the trafficking and exploitation of children is one of the world´s greatest scandals, enslaving around 400 million youngsters. They are robbed of their childhood, of education, of health, of play and the chance of a humane future. Getting the upper hand on it means attacking the root causes of poverty and boosting law enforcement.
For millions of children throughout Asia, Latin America and Africa, many as young as five, life offers nothing but the endless round of toil on the streets and in sweatshops. As poor countries try to pay their debts by chasing export orders, the use and abuse of cheap labor to keep down costs becomes systematic. This in turn stores up trouble for those countries, leaving adult labor unemployed or under-employed, and under-developing the labor potential for the future: the children, burnt out before they are grown. Far from disappearing, the problem seems to be worsening, and is now apparently spreading in Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Data here is hard to come by, as with the other intolerable evil of child exploitation: prostitution. We live in a world where millions of children, as young as six or seven, are forced to sell their bodies, often to Western tourists.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) reckoned in 1995 that 73 million children under the age of 10 were “economically active” worldwide. On this ground, new forms of exploitation have developed. Due to the illegal nature of child slavery and trafficking, it is extremely difficult to collect data on its extent, but several recent studies give some idea of the sheer magnitude of the problem.
- Every year, around 200,000 women and children are victims of the trade in Southeast Asia, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Trafficked children are being forced into sweatshops, crime, brothels, begging on the streets, or killed for their organs.
- Between 100,000 and 150,000 Nepalese women and girls were sent in 1995 to India, where they were sexually exploited, reports the Committee on the Rights of the Child. The Bangladesh National Women Lawyers´ Association reports that more than 13,000 children were trafficked out of Bangladesh in the last five years.
- UNICEF estimates that there are 200,000 child slaves only in West and Central Africa.
- In June 2000, Human Rights Watch denounced the practice of employing children in slave-like conditions on U.S. farms. About 50,000 women and children enter the United States each year to be used as slaves, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency admitted in April 2000.
- In Brazil, 40,000 children are sold every year to work on farms and as domestic servants. The traffickers lure girls with promises of jobs in restaurants in remote parts of the Amazon. Once there, they are forced to work in nightclubs and moved from one mining community to another.
- Girls from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are taken to Mexico and sold to brothels for $100 or $200 each, according to Casa Alianza, a human rights NGO that defends children in danger in the region. In Nicaragua, an average of one child disappears every three days.
- In 1997, workers at the Nike show company in Vietnam were paid $1.60 a day, when a modest meal of vegetables, rice and tofu cost 70 cents, so they didn´t have enough money to eat three times a day: the founder and chairman of Nike had a net worth at the time of about $5.3 billion.
- A Haitian worker earns only 7 cents for every pair of Disney Pocahontas pajamas she sews, which sells at Wall-Mart for $11.97. These wages amount to one-half of one percent of the sale price of these pajamas.
From Nepal to Nigeria or Brazil, the methods are the same. Traffickers win the confidence of the parents with a small amount of money or clothes and the children are then entrusted to them. The recruiters promise to look after the children and find them a job that will help raise the standard of living of the whole family.
Trafficking in children arises from poverty, the decline of the extended family, lack of education for the children and of other sources of income for the family. But the illicit trade is also a result of how some societies regard children. The parents themselves are often responsible for the enslavement of their offspring, seeing them as an investment and hoping they will be able to make some contribution to the family income, either in cash or in kind. This view creates fertile ground for child slavery and trafficking to develop.
The dreadful conditions which trafficked children work in and their contact with dangerous machinery and materials, as well as the harsh discipline meted out to them, do not simply harm their health. It also subjects them to severe psychological trauma. Separation from their families, the coercion involved in all trafficking, made worse by sexual abuse of child domestics, street children and prostitutes, makes them prone to depression. For many of these victims, this torment paves the way to a life of crime or drug addiction.
CHILD PROSTITUTION AND SEXUAL ABUSE
This last summer an international conference was held in Sweden its primary concern was on the sexual exploitation of children world wide. Much of its focus however was on the condition of children in developing countries, countries that are now being targeted by multinational corporations for large scale investment as part of the so called new global economy.
The conference drew international attention to the matter of the international sex trade; the use of young girls and boys as prostitutes in countries such as India, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, etc. and the booming business of sexual tourism. Sexual tours of developing countries are organized for North American, European and Japanese businessmen. These tours have been a booming business for the past twenty years, despite the very real dangers of sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS.
The sexual tourism industry in many Asian countries is a direct result of the war economy imposed on these countries during the American war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1960´s and 70´s. Countries such as the Philippines and Thailand were major staging areas for American troops, resulting in a war based black market economy of sex, drugs and other goods.
There is a direct economic link between sexual tourism and the exploitation of developing countries by multinational corporations based in industrial capitalist countries such as the United States, Germany and Japan. While the news media focused on the sensational exploitation of children in third world countries during the conference, they did not make a clear link between child sexual exploitation and child labor. However many representatives at the conference, including representatives of the International Labor Organization (ILO), did make this link.
And the link is clear. As developing countries welcome increased foreign investment and major corporations move operations out of North America, Nike is a good example, they move into cheap labor zones in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. As the urban metropolitan areas in these countries develop a new industrial base traditional rural agricultural economies in these countries are destroyed. Traditional subsistence farming and manufacturing are destroyed and families are forced to send their families to the city to work. Money earned in the city is then sent back to support the family. In many cases children sold through brokers to work, whether that work is in a Nike soccer ball factory, a rug plant or textile mill or in a brothel matters little. In fact the wages differ little as well whether one works in a factory or a brothel.
While the patriarchal traditions in many of these countries places less value on young girls and women, conversely young women and children are highly valued in certain industries for their abilities, not skills, such as the ability to do fine stitching for rugs, shoes and soccer balls. CBC Witness aired a special one hour documentary on Nepalese girls sold by their fathers to brokers who then sold them to brothel owners. As the documentary showed these are the same brokers who also buy children for work in the rug industry in Pakistan and India. Which ever business will pay the broker the best price gets an indentured child worker.
In some cases young women are not so much sold into indentured servitude as forced by the family out of the home and into work. They then bring their income back home whether it is earned in brothel or factory. In the free trade zones work in factories is not only dangerous and unregulated but the women and girls face regular sexual harassment and rape. While the dangers of sexually transmitted disease, sexual torture, and abuse exist for brothel workers, work in the factories is equally dangerous and unregulated.
And who benefits?, the big corporations of course; Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Pepsi, Guess Jeans, Walt Disney the major textile and shoe manufacturing industry. And of course the middle class business men and corporate executives from Japan, Germany and the USA that travel to these countries in search of sexual thrills.
In Guatemala, Haiti and Brazil where street children and mass homelessness abound, so do new free trade zones taking advantage of cheap labor for the production of goods for North America and Europe. Meanwhile local businessmen and their military government allies set up secret death squads dedicated to ´eliminating´ the street kid problem. Its all part of a vicious cycle.
There is nothing new about the global economy, its just the same old industrial capitalism that created the ´satanic mills´ of the nineteenth century. The same conditions now facing women and children in the developing world also faced workers in Europe and North America not that long ago. Canada only outlawed child labor in the 1920´s! And only after years of struggle by the trade union movement. And that is the solution to the problem of runaway companies and the exploitation of women, children and workers in the Third World, the international recognition of their human rights and their rights as workers to unionize.
Often apologists for exploitation claim we cannot apply our morals, customs and values to other countries. Of course they conveniently overlook that they are applying the morals, values and customs of ´capitalism´ in these countries. Why should the values of trade unionism be any different. Trade unionism originated in response to capitalism and it applies as much to developing countries and peoples as it does to the industrialized countries.
CHILD SOLDIERS
We must not close our eyes to the fact that child soldiers are both victims and perpetrators. They sometimes carry out the most barbaric acts of violence. However, the main responsibility lies with us, the adults. There is simply no excuse, no acceptable argument for arming children.
Children are used in wars taking place in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Burma. In the civil war in Sierra Leone children fight for both the rebels – the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the pro-government local militia, the Kamajors. The Kamajors do much of the front-line fighting for the government and the West African peace-keeping force, ECOMOG. Often after the RUF attacks a village they abduct the surviving children. The children, many of whom have seen their parents slaughtered, are then removed to special camps. Those children who escape often join the Kamajors who give them shelter and food.
The proliferation of small arms and use of land mines are among the various obstacles threatening the creation of a world free from fear. Eighty-five per cent of the world´s arms trade is supplied by the permanent members of the UN Security Council (UK, USA, Russia, France, and China.) The development of lighter weapons – such as the AK47 – means that boys as young as eight can be armed.
The smallest boys are placed closest to the enemy. In war, they are said to be fearless. Children are often less demanding soldiers than adults. They are cheaper to keep as they eat less and are easier to manipulate. Both sides believe the unpredictability of small children makes them better fighters. Some are sent into battle high on drugs to give them courage. In combat children are often captured and threatened. They fight for whoever controls them in order to stay alive. In continuous civil war there are many children who have often fought for both sides.
According to UNICEF, in just one decade, two million children have been killed, up to five million have been disabled, 12 million made homeless, 300,000 forced to fight, one million orphaned or separated from families, and 10 million have been psychologically traumatized.
Thousands of Sierra Leonean boys and girls have been abducted to provide slave labor for troops. Now a second generation of child soldiers is being born of girl children forced into sexual slavery.
CHILD ORGANS
International federation Terre des Hommes estimates that 6,000 children between the ages of 12 and 16 are trafficked from eastern Europe each year, with more than 650 being forced to work as sex slaves in Italy. The price of a girl trafficked to Italy can be between $2,500 and $4,000, with up to $10,000 being paid if she is a virgin. According to the French human rights organization, Albania is the county most involved in the sex trade, with women and children being lured to go to the West with false promises of marriage, jobs or education. When they get there, there is no husband, no job and no education. Alone in a foreign land without any means of support, violence and coercion ensure they are soon earning money for their new “owners.”
A recent article in the Guardian newspaper reported the case of a retired Italian couple who had been arrested for buying a three-year-old Albanian boy, paying $6,000 to the trafficking gang that specialized in “underage merchandise.” The boy had allegedly been traded for a color TV set by his father.
Detectives working on the case say they have identified 67 other Albanian children less than 14 years old trafficked into Italy by the same gang. One of the arrested gang members was a member of the Albanian intelligence service.
Italy is not the only destination for children and young people being trafficked. An article on the Terre des Hommes web site notes that 80 percent of the young women and girls brought to Germany by smuggling rings come from eastern Europe. It has also found an increase in the number of young boys being introduced into the sex market.
“We notice that the number of children going missing in the east does not tally with the numbers we trace in Europe”, said Marina Rini of Terre des Hommes in Italy. “We know that gangs offer children for sale dead or alive. We can only conclude that the missing children die or are killed for their organs.”
“Italy is to legislate against the sale of human organs after police apprehended three Ukrainian women who auctioned an unborn baby whose organs might have been used for transplant” (SPUC News, from Daily Telegraph 18 May 03). “The gang accepted 350,000 for the child and the authorities are investigating people who expressed an interest in using his or her body parts. The child was born 10 days ago and handed to undercover officers.”
Thousands of eastern European children and teenagers are being reduced to commodities in a trade in human misery. They are bought and sold like chattels to satisfy perverted sexual appetites, to provide slave labor, or, worst of all, to be “harvested” for their organs and body parts so that the rich and their children can live at their expense.
