While watching the news regarding Haiti’s devastation from its recent earthquake, I found certain reports even more disturbing than the huge numbers of people dead, missing or injured. Not only are the Haitian people subject to loss of home and family due to the quake, but their children are now prey to human traffickers. You would think that there would be some lines that even those people would not cross.
Some people are trying to kidnap Haitian children across state lines supposedly for purposes of adoption, claiming these children are orphans when that clearly isn’t the case.
Other traffickers, of course, have even worse intentions.
Human trafficking is just another word for slavery After all our history regarding slavery, you would think by now, in the year 2010, that slavery would no longer be a reality in our world. It’s not a reality that we want to think about because slavery is part of the world’s economic machine that we’re still a part of. Our choices as to what we buy and what companies we support directly affect other lives around the world, especially the lives of children.
FreetheSlaves.net’s definition of slavery is being “forced to work without pay under threat of violence and unable to walk away.” It reports:
- an estimated 27 million people are enslaved globally, more than at any other time previously;
- thousands annually trafficked in America in over 90 cities; around 17,000 by some estimates and up to 50,000 according to the CIA, either from abroad or affecting US citizens or residents as forced labor or sexual servitude;
- the global market value is over $9.5 billion annually, according to Mark Taylor, senior coordinator for the State Department’s Office to Monitor;
- victims are often women and children;
- the majority are in India and African countries;
- slaves work in agriculture, homes, mines, restaurants, brothels, or wherever traffickers can employ them; they’re cheap, plentiful, disposable, and replaceable.
Products made in China’s textiles factories use bonded labor, as do cocoa plantations around the world. Fish from the Philippines and woven rugs from Pakistan, India and China are also notorious for forced child labor.
So what can we do besides writing to our politicians? You can write to the companies to persuade them that the bad publicity is not worth the cheaper cost. And you can vote with your pocket books. Think before you buy, and find out where a product is coming from – why exactly is it so cheap? The cost is being cut from somewhere, and it frequently comes from the people making the product. Sweatshop workers may be paid pennies, if they’re paid at all, for an item that is then sold for $29.95 in the United States.
You can also join us for Sound Meditation on March 1st and Angel Meditation on March 15th. My plan for these classes is to focus our intention towards healing these children and changing their situation. I am also going to donate half the proceeds of both classes to Save the Children Fund for Haiti. Please bring as many people as you can to these meditations so that we can really make a shift for these kids.
As we move into the second decade of the 21st Century, we should do everything possible to make sure that slavery is in the past and no longer part of our present reality. We need to become conscious of our actions so that our actions are not part of the problem but part of the solution.
