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IN-DEPHT STUDY |
| 6 JANUARY – MISSIONARY CHILDHOOD
DAY |
| SOLD LIKE OBJECTS |
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Every year about one million children are victims of
human trafficking. UNICEF’s report Stop the Traffic, reveals
the phenomenon of the criminal components of exploitation of minors
which entails the moving of children from developing countries (central
Africa and west and south east Asia) to the prosperous areas of western
countries.
These are the slaves of our times, exploited in the sex industry,
low cost labour, domestic workers.
For the luckier ones there may be adoption but there are also cases
of children who disappear mysteriously and are killed to supply transplant
organs through illegal channels.
The ‘price list’ follows market request: 50,000 Euro for
a new born male child in good health, 30,000 Euro for a liver according
to a report in a Brazilian daily newspaper Manchete.
Illegal trafficking of children is worth 1.2 billion dollars a year
and few of the little victims can defend themselves, they are too
small, defenceless.
Or they are silenced with death.
One of the most painful chapters regards ‘sexual abuse’.
Nevertheless successful ECPAT awareness campaigns led to the discovery
of international paths of sexual tourism involving minors, reporting
that millions of children all over the world are abused, bought, sold
as is they were goods to be moved around the country (in tourist resort
areas of Thailand and Brazil for example) or sent beyond national
borders (girl prostitutes from Cambodia and Nepal) or initiated in
the squalor of the pornography market.
Sexual abuse for profit has many sides. In Thailand a report on illegal
economy revealed that between 1993 and 1995 prostitution represented
between 10 and 14% of the gross domestic product and it is estimated
that about one third of the Thai women involved in prostitution are
minors.
Victims of all kinds of abuse the only future open to these little
slaves of the sex market death caused by AIDS or some other sexually
transmitted disease.
Even if they manage to escape from their captors their families would
never take them back. |
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