Trials and Tragedies
It isn't unknown, throughout the developing world, for children to be sacrificed by their parents, through dire necessity. To be handed over, as valuable possessions, to others who barter for them to accomplish their own ends. It's a situation that has been repeated throughout the history of humankind.Destitute parents with too many children to adequately care for, dispossess themselves of one or more of their children. In Japan, comely young girls were often sent from their fishing villages as paupers, to spend long years as apprentice geisha, or concubines or serving maids, abandoned to their fate.
Often enough, in the British Isles, young children were sent by their impoverished families into servitude - or service. To be trained as housemaids or cooks for wealthy families. Their meagre salaries sent back home to help their parents raise their brood of younger children.
Or children sold into servitude to work in factories, to be trained so their clever little hands could produce objects that mature hands could not manipulate into being. Even yet, small hands weave intricate patterns on fine fabrics, and costly rugs, earning a pittance for their labours.
In most civilized countries child labour is no longer considered legitimate. Children are no no longer sent down into dank, deep and dark mines. They are no longer sold as apprentices to do hard labour for often uncaring masters.
But this kind of trade of children still occurs elsewhere on the Globe. As does another kind of child slavery, when children are abducted by militants throughout Africa, to be trained as fighters, killers, struggling for a cause they know nothing about.
In China, Malaysia, India, and throughout Africa - as well as many other parts of the world in countries that consider themselves free, mature, wealthy and democratic, children are sold into slavery as sex objects.
And then, of course, there's a thriving market for young children to be sold by their parents for adoption by wealthy and sterile couples.
In Afghanistan currently, children of wealthy parents are often kidnapped for ransom. Their abductors feel little pity for the children, their concern is for the ransom they're able to extract from the parents of the abducted.
In that country too, young boys are given over as sex slaves for the use of older men. It's an old tradition, one practised freely enough, horribly victimizing young boys, maiming them for life in the process.
And young boys are also sold to rich women, themselves unable to conceive, and anxious to have the experience of raising a child. These activities take place, for the most part, in rural areas, far from whatever laws are enacted for the presumed preservation of human rights in the country's capital.
It presents as a cut-and-dried business opportunity for a woman able to pay the freight, to take a child from its family. The parents of the child grieve, yet are complicit, because they have other children to feed and haven't the means to do so, otherwise.
One such woman, whom a television cameraman, shooting footage for a documentary, was characterized as behaving badly when she ordered the child, 8 years of age, to peremptorily take his leave of his parents, had a ready self-absolution.
"Yes, you're right", she admitted. It's cruel. But I have two aims here. First, to give this boy a bright future and a good education. And second, to save their other children. The winter's coming and I've given them money so the children don't die of hunger."
The father of the child explained "I sold a piece of my heart to stop my four other children dying of hunger. I don't have an elder son. I'm also sick. My kidney is failing. My body is in pain."
These are the choices made in desperation by indigent parents. Children never have any choices of their own to make. They are disposable and dispensable, mere material fodder in a world of misfortune and dire poverty.
Labels: Realities, Social-Cultural Deviations, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, December 23, 2008
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