Anti Child Trafficking
SAVE A CHILD FROM CHILD TRAFFICKING The Father Ray Sponsor a Child Foundation Save a Child Campaign
Every year, over a million children in some of the poorest countries in the world are trafficked and made to work in conditions of virtual slavery or be subjected to forced prostitution or worse.
Child trafficking means selling children so they can be exploited for gain. For example: forcing children, sometimes as young as six years old, to do hard physical work for long hours for very little or no pay. Trafficked children often work in factories, or as servants, beggars or child soldiers. Punishments for failing to work hard enough can, in the worst cases, be vicious beatings or death. Some children are sold directly into circuses or the sex trade..
None of the trafficked children have any of the most basic rights — no right to a family life, a decent place to sleep or eat, or time off. Education, healthcare, an adequate diet and loving care are not even a distant dream. None of them can escape — far from home, in another country, with no money or papers.
Sometimes, parents are duped into allowing their children to go with the traffickers, sometimes, desperately poor parents are persuaded that the only way they can care for their younger children is to sell the older ones.
The trauma suffered by children who have been trafficked is severe and rehabilitation takes a long time. The impact on the families can also be profound – if a girl has been sexually exploited, she may be rejected by her family after her rescue. Where child trafficking is common, it has a corrupting effect on the whole community.
Stopping child trafficking requires:
Preventative educational programmes for the whole community.
Protecting children by keeping them safe in school.
Rescuing and rehabilitating trafficked children, and if possible, reuniting them with their families.
Working with law enforcement agencies and local communities to prosecute traffickers.
Below are the current Save a Child Projects.
Every year, 5,000-10,000 Nepali children are trafficked to work in Indian circuses, in factories or as servants. Over the past 13 years, we have rescued and rehabilitated over 600 trafficked children, accommodating over 200 of them in our Kathmandu refuge. The charity works to reunite children with their families, but this can be hard, as the parents may have been tricked or paid to let their child leave with a trafficker. The charity conducts anti-trafficking initiatives in villages near the border with India, where trafficking is common. Attending school is one of the best ways of keeping children safe. The charity provides funds for both school improvements and bursaries to help some of the poorest children stay in school.
Mae Sot, on the Thai-Burma border is a centre for illegal trade in guns, drugs and people. Trafficking, especially for the notorious Thai sex industry, is never far from the surface. Children and young men have traditionally been vulnerable to enforced enrollment in the ethnic armies and the Burmese national army, which have pursued a 60- year civil war across the border in Burma. Illegal routes are used to traffic people into Thailand’s sex and fishing industries. Programs we support help keep more than 1,000 vulnerable children in school, reducing their vulnerability to trafficking. We help rescue children from traffickers, give victims a place of safety where a proper future can be planned, and return some children to Burma where it is safe to do so
Worldwide, we support several specially trained teams who make contact with the local population of street children, educating them on the dangers of living on the street, with a focus on human trafficking, drug crime and sexual abuse. The out-reach teams also gather information on offenders and pedophiles in their dealings with the young children living on the streets. This information is shared directly with the local and international police in order to facilitate the arrest of suspects.