Look at the photo on this page: it shows a group of children searching for gold in the mud. They are working to make certain wealthy people even more wealthy.
Over 170 of these children died in the last few months in the Zamfara state of northern Nigeria. They were children who should have been studying and playing like their peers in more fortunate circumstances. Instead, they were turned into miners, and then died of lead poisoning from the mud they worked in, the tools they used and the water they drank.
Unfortunately, this sad episode is not an isolated incident. According to the International Labour Office of the United Nations, there are over 215 million working children in the world, with 115 million exposed to hazardous work, a proxy often used for the worst forms of child labour.
In Africa, Asia and Latin America, children are toiling away in dangerous mines and caves, or are being poisoned by the pesticides used in their agricultural jobs, while hundreds of thousands of boys and girls under the age of 17 are exposed to great dangers working in the building industry or in clothing and shoe factories.
Far too many children, from the age of 6 or even earlier, are employed as domestic workers, and often suffer hunger, cold, and physical or sexual abuse. There are 200,000 domestic children in Kenya, 550,000 in Brazil and 250,000 in Pakistan.
Those children who live by begging in the streets are also slaves. They are controlled by criminal or semi-criminal organisations that exploit their poverty to recruit them.
Likewise, children who are sold in China for $20 are also slaves. These children usually end up working for up to 15 hours a day in factories to manufacture those charming items of clothing such as sweaters, jeans, shoes, etc, which we find in our stores and which, for some ‘unknown’ reason, are so appealingly cheap.
It is not a nice picture that emerges from China, the country now experiencing an unrestrainable economic boom. Criminal organisations kidnap or purchase children from all provinces of the country, especially the poorest ones, and sell them to factory or mine owners who exploit them to the uttermost.
Slaves are also those children, some as young as five, who are trafficked in the filthy world of sexual tourism. Thailand, Cambodia, India, Brazil and Mexico detain the sad record here, but the clients are mostly people from rich countries. In Thailand, though the exact numbers are not known, it has been estimated that children make up to 40 percent of prostitutes, while in Cambodia about a third of all prostitutes are under 18. In India, the federal police say that around 1.2 million children are believed to be involved in prostitution, and Brazil is considered to have the worst sex trafficking record after Thailand.
Child soldiers also belong to the category of enslaved human beings, and there are hundreds of thousands of them in at least 13 countries. UNICEF estimates that 2 million child soldiers have died in armed conflicts in the past decade; millions have been turned into refugees, or have been permanently disabled or orphaned. Though some child soldiers wield weapons on the front lines of armed conflicts, others are used as cooks, messengers and even as sexual slaves.
Now this is hardly surprising when over half a billion children in the world live on less than a dollar a day. In these conditions, their destiny is sealed from birth.
What can we do in the face of such a miserable situation?
For my part I have resolved to follow this wise advice: “Fifty years from now it will not matter what kind of car you drove, what kind of house you lived in, how much you had in your bank account or what your clothes looked like. But the world may be a little better if you were important in the life of a child, especially if it was not your own”.
Updated on October 06 2016