The United States takes its first-ever ranking not as a reprieve but as a responsibility to strengthen global efforts against modern slavery, including those within America. This human rights abuse is universal, and no one should claim immunity from its reach or from the responsibility to confront it.
The problem is particularly urgent now, as local economies around the world reel from the global financial crisis. People are increasingly desperate for the chance to support their families, making them more susceptible to the tricks of ruthless criminals. Economic pressure means more incentive for unscrupulous bosses to squeeze everything they can from vulnerable workers and fewer resources for the organizations and governments trying to stop them.
Stop Modern Slavery and Free the Slaves are hosting a speaker from India, Suman, who has worked for more than 25 years for the liberation of child laborers, fighting not only for their welfare but their right to a healthy childhood. She is a pioneer in the struggle to end child labor and trafficking in India, tackling all aspects of the issue including: prevention, awareness, intervention, and rehabilitation.
Apart from organizing nationwide campaigns and creating awareness about trafficking at village level, Suman has been a part of many rescue operations of children over the years. However, Suman‘s most ground-breaking work has been in her development of methods of enabling children to recover from slavery, forced separation from families and experiences of violence and torture. Through the care of Suman and the teams she has led, hundreds of children have re-gained their strength, learned the value of education and become able to assert their rights. Her work with these children has shown that recovery is possible.
Join Suman as she speaks to Stop Modern Slavery and supporters of Free the Slaves on Monday, June 22nd at 7 pm at:
Capitol Hill Tower (www.capitolhilltower.com)
1000 New Jersey Ave SE
Party Room
Getting there: Take the GREEN line to the NAVY YARD metro stop. Exit the Dept of Transportation side (NOT the baseball park side). Once you exit the metro, you will see a CVS across the street from you on New Jersey Ave. Turn left out of the metro and walk one block down. You'll see a Courtyard Marriot on your right and a dry cleaners. Capitol Hill Tower is the next door past the dry cleaners--it's on the corner of K St SE and New Jersey Ave SE. The party room is on the first floor just past the elevators.Please RSVP to Sally Smith (that's where she lives) at sksmith1881@gmail.com if you plan to attend. Feel free to spread the word!
(The image, from the slide-show essay, is of an adoptive couple from Australia, their adopted children from India, and the kids' birth family whom the children visit regularly.)Westerners have been sold a myth that poor countries have millions of healthy abandoned infants and toddlers who need homes. But it's not so. In poor countries, as in rich ones, healthy babies are rarely orphaned or given up—except in China, where girls have been abandoned as a result of its draconian one-child policy.
Yes, tens of thousands of needy children around the world—many languishing in horrible institutions—do need families. But most children who need new homes are older than 5, sick, disabled, or somehow traumatized. Quite reasonably, most prospective Western parents don't feel prepared to take on those more challenging kids, preferring to wait in line for healthy infants or toddlers.
The result is a gap between supply and demand—a gap that's closed by Western money. Adoption agencies spend sums in-country that are enormous compared with local per-capita incomes. In poor countries without effective regulation or protections for the poor, that can induce locals to buy, coerce, defraud, and kidnap healthy children away from their birth families for sale into international adoption.
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