Beyond Despicable
Trafficking in human beings presents as a business opportunity around the world. From marketing young women as sex slaves, to kidnapping babies and infants as potential adoptees, this kind of trafficking represents big business, and a general degradation of society's values, respecting fundamental human rights. Young people or homeless, able-bodied men are abducted for slave labour at work sites in some countries and never again heard from by their families.Women are brought to foreign shores on work visas handled by 'entrepreneurs' who promise them legitimate job opportunities only to find themselves without legal documentation, stranded in foreign countries where they have no command of language, working as prostitutes for the benefit of human traffickers. And these situations can and do arise anywhere in the world. Including developed countries that think of themselves as champions of human rights.
The underground network and economy of illegal transference of migrants living in refugee camps hoping to bypass the difficult procedure of normal refugee-claimant or emigration-seeking opportunities also fall victim. They pay traffickers to produce the lengthy paperwork and make all arrangements. Where professional traffickers stealthily and dangerously transport desperate people into countries to declare themselves refugees, or just disappear into the general population armed with dearly-purchased false documentation, thrive.
And parents of children in North America, adopted through agencies working out of China are now discovering the cachet of the foreign-born adoptions of their adorable babies or infants may be tarred by the simple fact that their adopted children may represent the results of children stolen from their biological parents. Whisked away to orphanages complicit with the illegal trade, and making plenty of money through the trafficking of abducted children.
Alert to the growing incidences of children abducted from their biological parents, the government of China has felt compelled to finally act on the problem. Inside China itself, with its one-child-per-family policy, and with boy babies at a premium, abductions make hefty profits for the sale of baby boys and infants to anxious couples with problems relating to sterility. Realizing for quick and easy sales within the country.
Female babies find eager adoptive customers outside China, with no end of potential adopters willing and eager to pay whatever it will cost to expedite their parenthood via adoption. This morally reprehensible, but extremely profitable business with its squalid disregard for fundamental human rights has suddenly found itself facing a government initiative determined to put a stop to the practise.
Chinese security forces have been tasked to crack down on child trafficking. Since the inception of the crackdown in the spring, police have been successful in tracking down over two thousand missing children in a succession of raids. Intense and often extremely difficult identification processes, including posting photographs of the children as they now appear on Internet sites, have been successful in restoring most of the abducted children to their biological parents.
Parents of kidnapped children have themselves long bewailed their loss. And become actively engaged in advocacy work. Most keep hoping that their children, abducted fifteen years earlier, may soon re-surface to be restored to them. In that space of time much depends on the biological family's ability to recognize their children long after the abduction has taken place. As for the children themselves, they seldom have any memory of who they might have been before their abductions.
Knowing little of who their real parents might be, where they originally came from within the country. This soul-destroying activity goes on oblivious to the grief and loss it represents. Sociopaths whose goal is to make profit from human tragedy cannot easily be persuaded that their risk-taking may now be apprehended by security forces intent on tracking their activities.
Meanwhile, the perplexed gaze of children innocently peering into cameras are pictured on a Chinese government website named Babies Looking for a Home. Except that this is not a site used by human traffickers inviting the highest bid to reward those unable to conceive who long for a child of their own, or of a widower or a lonely unmarried male hoping to purchase a child-bride.
Labels: China, Security, Social-Cultural Deviations
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, October 31, 2009
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