Young victims of natural disasters targeted by child traffickers
A number of speakers at Saturday’s Combating child trafficking conference in University College Cork said the turmoil would allow unscrupulous dealers to target young boys and girls for slave labour and sexual exploitation.
Advocacy officer with UNICEF Ireland, Kieran O’Brien, said a lot of its work in the aftermath of such disasters was to quickly reunite children with their parents.
He said child traffickers could exploit the consternation to claim children that are not their own and add to its estimate of 1.2 million children trafficked throughout the world every year.
Maureen Forrest of the Hope Foundation, which has received funding to run a pilot study on trafficked children in India, said the depravation and poverty, worsened by the Burmese cyclone and the Chinese earthquake, was a significant risk.
“Poor families send their children to work because they need their wages just to survive,” she said.
Mental health worker Sarbani Das Roy, who works with the Hope Foundation in India, said children were being promised better lives and lured by the prospect of an income for their families.
“It is very sophisticated. A trafficker showed me an album they bring with them to villages. It had pictures of other girls in nice clothes, on a nice couch smiling and looking happy.
“They are convinced by the dream of a better life and this could be as little as just having four square meals a day,” she said.
She said trafficked children could be passed on between owners several times and their parents may never know what has really happened to them.
The UCC conference was told the children taken from rural villages in south east and south Asia could be sent anywhere in the world.
And, although much of the trafficking happens within certain regions, many of the children are exported to western Europe to work on the black market and in the sex industry.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
