Child Slavery

I just watched an episode of Nightline on ABC that I recorded last week. It was a 30 minute piece on child slavery in Haiti and it rocked my world. In about 10 hours from NYC, Dan Harris was able to negotiate the sale of a child for just $150!! The episode went on to show the story of a child who had been given away because her family couldn’t afford her. Her mother’s husband forced her to give her away and told her she would have a better life. However, the eleven year old girl was beaten day after day, forced to labor from dawn til dusk, sleep on the floor, and have no interaction with other children. When the mother revolted against her husband and rescued her little girl, she was banished from her village and was forced to put her daughter into an orphanage.

There are an estimated 27 million slaves worldwide today, more than any other time in history. That means of the estimated 6.68 billion people living on Earth, one in every 247 is living in slavery! Nightline got the idea of doing this piece from Ben Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern Day Slavery. I also found another good book on the subject, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy by Kevin Bales. Here’s a quote from that book:”They made the bricks for the factory that made the TV you watch. In Brazil, slaves made the charcoal that tempered the steel that made the springs in your car and the blade on your lawnmower…. Slaves keep your costs low and returns on your investments high.” I intend on getting these books and educating myself on this epidemic.

I couldn’t find a clip of the program on YouTube in English, but here’s a video of Dan Harris recapping it and showing some pieces of the program.

Another tidbit: After illegal drug sales and arms trafficking, human trafficking is today the third most profitable criminal activity in the world, generating $31 billion annually. As many as half of all those trafficked worldwide for sex and domestic slavery are children under 18 years of age.