French Abolition Memorial Begins Construction

19th century French abolitionist Senator Victor Schoelcher is indirectly in the news this week, as France's city of Nantes is undertaking the construction of a large memorial near a pedestrian footbridge named in his honor.

The memorial is not dedicated to senator Schoelcher per se, but rather to the 1848 abolition of slavery in France's colonies, the movement he played such a large role in bringing to fruition.

There will be two parts to the abolition memorial; one, an esplanade walkway along the Loire river, several miles long, aligned with 2,000 stones, each bearing the name of a French ship that had participated in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The riverside trail will connect the forementioned Victor Schoelcher footbridge and the Anne-de-Bretagne bridge. A second, wooden pathway, described as a "meditative route", will be constructed on the slope just below the Quai de la Fosse.

This branch of the memorial has some controversy attached to it: significant work, at great cost, will have to be done to shore up the riverbank to secure the ground for the 426 foot pathway, in a section of the river prone to periodic flooding. Officials admit that it is likely that the expensive pathway will be submerged under water, and therefore closed to the public, several times a year.

The city says that a "closing protocol" is being established, where it will be someone's job every Monday morning to determined whether or not to leave open or to close the pathway to pedestrian traffic, depending on weather conditions and tidal predictions projected for that week.

The entire memorial project is expected to be completed in 2011.

[Translated from an article in the French online newspaper Press Ocean]

It's great to recognize historical events that remind us of our ability to change for the better, as from such signs we may find encouragement that such progress may continue in our own time, through our own efforts.

But: one can't help wishing that more of that money might instead be directed towards curbing slavery in modern-day France instead...

[image of the Pont Anne-de-Bretagne and my best guess for where the memorial project will be built, courtesy of Googlemaps]

Two Lessons

While reading Reverend Parker's 1883 history of the American abolitionist movement, "Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles" this week, I came across an arresting quote:

When some discerning Romans saw how many statues were reared in their city to persons of only indifferent merit, while Cato, one of their wisest and best, had none, they wondered. But the great man had answered the question beforehand:
"Better that posterity should ask why Cato has not a monument, than why he has."

That anecdote seemed to put into focus some half-formed ideas I had been thinking about, on what I've learned since I started blogging about the scourge of modern-day slavery. From all the reading and researching, come two lessons learned.

Lesson One: The numbers involved are no longer quite so abstract.

The daily deluge of news stories that Google Alerts sends into my mailbox has made me much more able to visualize the mathematical abstraction of the number 27,000,000. (That's the calculated number of human beings undergoing various forms of enslaved labor, today, right now.)

It's a staggering total, but I think its true horror is hidden by our inability to comprehend such figures in concrete forms. It's a number outside of our experience. We've been in crowds of dozens of people at parties, so that's a number we "see" quite clearly. Same with hundreds, or thousands, even tens of thousands; we've all been to theaters, churches and sports stadiums, so larger numbers like these are within reach of our imagination. But "millions"? What does a "million people" look like? It's inconceivable.

If you point to my neighbor's lawn, and tell me that there are 7 million blades of grass contained within it, but quickly confess that you were only kidding, that in truth the number was actually almost four times that amount, at 27 million... I'd be unable to feel deceived: I simply can't put a mental picture to such numbers. You might as well have said there were 27 billion blades of grass on that lawn. It's an abstraction that has no shape.

Well, after two months' worth of daily deposits of stories of modern day slavery, from all around the world, such previously unimaginable numbers start to take clear shape indeed. When every day's revelations include stories of 3 teenage sex slaves found in Texas, 54 Burmese laborers rescued in Thailand, 200 children liberated in India, and more, these numbers add up over time like a crowd emerging out of a fog, until the immensity of a number like one million starts to assume a ghastly form.

When one is too many, when twenty is monstrous, the sound of millions of chains is deafening. May the day soon come when this sound is heard by more, by all, so that by our numbers we can gather the will and the strength to break these chains.

Lesson two has to do with another number: the delightful surprise in discovering the incredible number of heroes who succeed in rescuing men, women and children from enslavement on a daily basis.

As it says in my blog's sidebar, it was through reading the journals of obscure 1820s-'30s abolitionist Benjamin Lundy that I was motivated to start chronicling the various stories I was finding online about the scope of modern-day slavery. Lundy's was a solo voice when he began his abolitionist work, not one in a choir; Lundy's journey started off as a solitary walk, not marching at the front of a crowd; yet he persevered on, despite the unimaginable odds stacked against him.

How much less hopeless things must be today! I had no idea that there are so many heroes who toil day after day to identify, to rescue, and to help, those slaves shackled to modern-day chains. (Please visit them in my "Breaking The Chains Today" link section in the sidebar!)

Friend Lundy had to stand in opposition to his own government, in addition to the slave-owners and slave-traders; his mission placed him against his own society. Today, in theory, there are no nations that still legalize slavery. The slave traders are criminals, not businessmen. The odds are on our side, that an end can be conceived, a day can now come that the chains of slavery may be somehow broken, and that all may taste freedom. The victories of today's abolitionists need to be heard, if we are to find the most valuable resource needed in the fight against slavery: hope. The hope that this second lesson brings almost balances out the despair brought by the first.

It's been the greatest surprise I've received since I began my research, because these heroes tend to be just as hidden to our eyes as the evil they fight against. Why is such goodness kept such a secret?

Where are the honors, for example, for the wonderful team of doctors led by Dr. Jeff Barrows who are headed to Nicaragua to care for the rescued former prostitutes sheltered at the House Of Hope?

Where are the medals for heroes like Charlotte Salasky for her work in helping rescued sex slaves in Cambodian shelters organized by the Somaly Mam Foundation, as they provide medical attention and vocational training for their young charges?

Where are the red carpets for the Australian former police officer whose quick-thinking rescued a 10-year old and 14-year old Vietnamese girl from the nightmare of sexual exploitation?

Where are their monuments?

In the smiles of those they've served, that's where; smiles animated by the previously unimagined possibility of better tomorrows.

Hearing The Chains Of Modern-Day Slavery In Montana

Inspiring story out of Montana. High school student Tierney Strandberg steps up and teaches us all about the difference even one person can make to change the world, by changing one mind at a time.

The beginning of the journey sounds innocuous enough: the young student read a book while she was home sick. Yet that book seems to have left its mark on her, giving her a sense of mission that she probably didn't expect to find when she started it. Not for the first time, random chance introduced someone to the problem of modern-day slavery, and an unexpected passion was ignited by a surprising source.

Somaly Mam, enslaved as a child prostitute in Cambodia at the age of 12, had written about her decade-long half-life in South-East Asian brothels, as well as her efforts on behalf of girls still trapped in sexual slavery, in her 2008 book "The Road of Lost Innocence” (now in paperback). From her foundation's website:

Written in exquisite, spare, unflinching prose, The Road of Lost Innocence recounts the experiences of her early life and tells the story of her awakening as an activist and her harrowing and brave fight against the powerful and corrupt forces that steal the lives of these girls. She has orchestrated raids on brothels and rescued sex workers, some as young as five and six; she has built shelters, started schools, and founded an organization that has so far saved more than four thousand women and children in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos.

Montana high school student Tierney Strandberg said that after finishing the memoir she was "overwhelmed", eager to do something, anything, to help:

“I knew as an International Baccalaureate student, I would have access to people who would help,” Strandberg said. “People are interested [in international issues] and they have power in the school to do something about it.”

Then a further coincidence occurred. Shortly after her return to school, a representative of the Flathead Abolitionist Movement asked if the group that Strandberg was involved with could show “Call + Response,” a documentary about the global slave trade, at the school.

“I just about jumped out of my seat,” [coordinator Genia Allen-Schmid] said. “I said, ‘We have a student who wants to do this very thing.’”

Strandberg leapt at the opportunity to get involved with the abolitionist group. She started a corresponding student group, FAM at FHS, and has worked tirelessly to help the community group find ways to get high school students involved in the cause.
...
Strandberg is in a unique position of being able to raise awareness about human trafficking nearly every weekend. She is a member of Flathead’s speech and debate team, and her original oratory speech is all about modern-day slavery.

“It’s really cool to give my speech all over the state every weekend,” Strandberg said. “I’m trying to cultivate awareness. It’s really hard to realize as a teenage girl that this is happening all over the world — and people don’t know. Really, people don’t know.”

The judges who hear her speech are often shocked, she said. Judges give feedback on speeches, and Strandberg’s comments have ranged from, “I can’t believe I didn’t know about this,” to “You need to be president.”

Strandberg said she is just glad for the opportunity to raise awareness about such an important topic.

“I’m not necessarily changing the world, but I am making a difference, if even a small one,” she said. “I really believe in the power of one.”

How does that old expression put it...: "Being the Right Person, at the Right Place, at the Right Time"... When I was Ms. Strandberg's age I would have interpreted that saying to mean that favorable chance and good fortune are out of our control, yet hers is a case study in how one's own self-initiative, the spark of taking action, ennobles us to become the Right Person, it puts us at the Right Place, it assists us in finding the Right Time.

God Bless you, young lady, for believing you can make a difference: that belief has to come first, if the difference is to come later.

[An equally inspiring story of Illinois teenagers embracing the challenge to raise awareness of modern-day slavery, here.]

Haiti Tragedy

Some links on the awful aftermath of Haiti's earthquake.

The scope of the problem:

The devastation included the parliament, the cathedral, the only two fire stations, hospitals and schools, the tax office, the prison and the headquarters of the United Nations mission, which had been trying to build a nation out of a failed state.

Video of the earthquake. Frightful.

Mounting security fears:

Fevil Dubien, an aid worker, said some people were almost fighting over the water that he handed out from a truck in a northern Port-au-Prince neighbourhood.

Security was the biggest problem, Delfin Antonio Rodriguez, the rescue commander from the neighbouring Dominican Republic, told the AFP news agency.
"Yesterday they tried to hijack some of our trucks. Today we were barely able to work in some places because of that."

The history of Haiti's poverty, and the state of the nation in the wake of a parade of dictatorships, especially the recent father-and-son kleptocracy that embezzled 80% of Haiti's international aid:

[W]hat has really left Haiti in such a state today, what makes the country a constant and heart-rending site of ­recurring catastrophe, is its history. In Haiti, the last five centuries have combined to produce a people so poor, an infrastructure so nonexistent and a state so hopelessly ineffectual that whatever natural disaster chooses to strike next, its impact on the population will be magnified many, many times over. Every single factor that international experts look for when trying to measure a nation's vulnerability to natural disasters is, in Haiti, at the very top of the scale. Countries, when it comes to dealing with disaster, do not get worse.

"Haiti has had slavery, revolution, debt, deforestation, corruption, exploitation and violence," says Alex von Tunzelmann, a historian and writer... "Now it has poverty, illiteracy, overcrowding, no infrastructure, environmental disaster and large areas without the rule of law. And that was before the earthquake..."

A smart response to Pat Robertson dumb explanation of Haiti's historical poverty.

Tragic aftershocks of a different kind: Adoptions of Haitian children thrown into chaos.

Normally, these adoptions must be approved by a Haitian court. But the government building that houses the offices that process the applications is reportedly in ruin, and there are reports that the Haitian judge who signs off on adoptions has been killed.
...
Dana and her husband, Ryan, recently visited Haiti to spend time with Carmalisa and sign some legal documents; since the adoption still didn't have final approval, they returned to Canada without her.
The Smids heard quickly the child was unharmed but the Haitian judge in charge of the adoption wasn't so lucky, he was killed. They now worry the paperwork could also have been lost, which could force them to start all over again.
"We wait so long and its been so emotional and we fought so hard to get her home," said Dana. "The thought of having to do that all again and leave my daughter there breaks my heart."

It's incredible to discover just how many charitable organizations were already operating in Haiti at the time of the earthquake. The good often do their work in humble obscurity. Unfortunately, that goodness of heart did not spare them from the natural disaster: Food For The Poor Missions Director Hospitalized After Being Buried Alive 17 Hours Beneath Rubble:

[Food For The Poor’s Missions and Travel Director, Leann Chong], had lain trapped for 17 hours beneath 3-feet of concrete, chin tucked and face to the floor, since the 7.0-magnitutde earthquake hit the struggling country on Tuesday evening.
Chong was on the second floor of the Hotel Montana in Pétionville at the time of the quake. She was in Haiti leading a mission trip, which included 12 students and two faculty advisors from Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla.
...
There are six from the group who are still unaccounted for.

..."It is truly heartbreaking what is happening in Haiti. Hearing Leann, and the students who were found are all alive brings us much joy, ” said Robin Mahfood, President/ CEO of Food For The Poor. ”I know she is tremendously worried, as are we, for those who remain missing. Our hearts and prayers go out to their families and to all of Haiti.”

I pray that those in need may find sufficient strength of will to endure the ongoing tragedy in Haiti, and as this article reminds us, prayers are also needed for those who wait for positive news of their missing loved ones.

Praying For Haiti's 300,000 Child Slaves

Haiti was last in the news a month ago, as many media organizations carried stories on the tragedy of that island's high number of child slaves: as many as 300,000 of Haiti's 2 million children are believed to be enslaved as household servants... and worse. Now the beleaguered nation is back in the headlines, with news of the dreadful earthquake that struck near the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Child slaves in Haiti are called Restaveks (derived from the French "reste avec", or "stay with"), and a majority of Haiti's enslaved children were being kept as property by wealthier Haitians in the areas hardest hit by the earthquake. About a third of the island's total population were living near the epicenter of the quake.

The suffering of the disaster's survivors has been compounded by worries we can only imagine; the fate of their families, the fate of their friends, and the weakening of the many organizations pledged to help them escape their lives of poverty and servitude, as well as the death of so many individuals engaged in charitable efforts to help them.

Many of the schools, medical centers, orphanages and other shelters painstakenly created for Haiti's rescued child slaves, seem to have been damaged when not destroyed, and now must be rebuilt.

There are many videos and interviews with former and current restaveks online, and this week we watch them with new eyes as we wonder about the fate of those testifying to the hell on earth existence they had to live with even before the added tragedy imposed by the earthquake. Will the aftermath of this week's aftershocks send them back into chains, or is this the hammer blow that can bring freedom to Haiti's slaves, once and for all?

Godspeed to them in their time of need, God Bless those working so selflessly to assist them through these dark days, may we all do as we can to help ensure that a ray of light will emerge out of the cloud of darkness that has descended over the island of Haiti.

[Photo of destroyed church courtesy of Missionary Ventures]

Starvation, Torture, Murder: Life As A Maid In Today's Middle East

The headline is horrific: "Saudi Throws Kenyan Maid Out Of Top Floor Window".

Sadly, the story that accompanies it is merely the latest addition to the ongoing revelation of the cruel exploitation faced by migrant workers in the oil-rich Middle East, and the especially vicious treatment of their household servants.

The news report details several incidents of Kenyan women suffering in their role as Shakala, "house-help", in Saudi Arabia. The tragic case referred to in the headline alleges that she was pushed off the third floor while hanging out clothes on a clothesline. "You are better off dead", she claims she heard her employer say right before he shoved her out the building; luckily she landed in a nearby pool rather than on the pavement, although the fall caused her to be hospitalized nevertheless. She says that while she was employed there, the man's children had often sexually exploited her. Enduring the labor for five months, she had only been paid for one.

Other Kenyan maids reveal more of the inexplicably sadisistic treatment they suffered at the hands of their employers: one woman was reduced to eating dog food to sustain herself, after working for 22 hours a day and receiving so little food for her labors. They say that they know of 100 other Kenyan women who are now homeless in Jeddah, stranded after being dismissed from their jobs.

“Their children insult us. We were never let out of the house and for the three months I was there [in Jeddah], I did not see the sun. I only saw it when I landed in Nairobi. I fainted on alighting,” she said.

These stories are not rare, but they differ in their degrees of misery. A Phillipino woman was punched, kicked and beaten with nightsticks and steel tubes, at a police station no less, by her employer and his sons. A particularly extreme case was reported back in 2007, where an Indonesian housemaid was so badly beaten and tortured by the Saudi married couple that abused her that she had to have her hands and feet amputated.

In the face of such a despairing existence, many of the immigrant workers choose suicide as the lesser of evils. Neighboring Kuwait is seeing a wave of suicides and attempts at suicide; examples include a Sri Lankan housemaid tried to kill herself by drinking detergent, while another hung herself after going months without receiving any pay for her work. A woman of unidentified origin grew so despondant that she poured gasolene over herself and set herself on fire as a final act of escape. (A photo gallery of examples of the appalling living conditions that trapped servants are forced to live under has been posted here.)

Last September, the nation of Indonesia grew so concerned over the treatment of its citizens at the hands of Kuwaitis, that it banned its women from working there as maids. The ban is now being tentatively lifted after the signing of a "Memorandum of Understanding", promising better treatment of foreign workers in Kuwait. A similar ban had been in place to Saudi Arabia, after the Indonesian embassy received hundreds of complaints of torture, mostly from housemaids.

330 Sri Lankan maids were reported to have died in the region in 2009, according to the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE). How many Indians, Philipinos, Indonesians, Pakistanis, and Kenyans will end up being added to the total?

[Thanks to the valiant Migrant Rights website for many of the links in this post]

US Abolitionists: 19th Century Bloggers

When I first found and started to read the early 19th Century abolitionist newspapers of Benjamin Lundy ("The Genuis Of Universal Emancipation"), and William Lloyd Garrison's "The Abolitionist", I was struck by how much these 1820s and 1830s weekly and monthly journals felt like our modern-day blogs.

The formats are remarkably similar: Lundy and Garrison collected stories from regional (and occasionally, international) newspapers that related to their journals' themes, acting more as editors than reporters, much as bloggers do today (It was part of the "rules of the game" that editors shared their newspapers with each other through mailed subscriptions, and that proper credit would be given when one editor would reprint a story originally appearing in another's journal, exactly how linked stories are handled today); readers wrote in with their comments and observations, and their letters in turn were commented upon by the editor; meetings were "live-blogged" by having their minutes published in subsequent journal entries...

It seems the urge to blog on a theme of personal interest is "something old made new again".

I see that I'm not the first to make this observation; I'm in the middle of reading Merton L. Dillon's 1974 book, "Abolitionists: The Growth Of A Dissenting Minority", and while searching this morning for more information on the author, I came across this 2005 exchange between Professor Dillon and a former student of his, on the amazing resemblance between abolitionist journals and blogs.

Dillon compares the work of early abolionist writers to their modern-day counterparts, and perceptively concludes on a hopeful note that hadn't occured to me:

The problem, then, in an age lacking popular print or other conduits of information, was how to reach like-minded people. How can such people find each other? How can random and inchoate ideas be gathered from these sympathetic but disparate people and molded into an acceptable, rationally consistent program? Interchange of thought must be the process. What shall be the agency?

Beginning around 1820 small, shoestring newspapers began the process. [Benjamin] Lundy's [The Genius of Universal] Emancipation was one of the first and most long-lasting. Lundy sent his paper where he thought it might be welcomed. He printed exposes of the slave systen and proposed remedies. He invited readers to contribute their ideas. Later, [William Lloyd] Garrison did the same. The remedies were as varied as the critiques.

It took a while before antislavery advocates found each other and developed something like a community. It took still longer for them to forge a program. It is not ungenerous to conclude that, despite all their writing, all their speaking, all their conferring, they never were able to set forth a program for abolitionism that all opponents of slavery found acceptable, but they did create a society or community.
...
How do people find each other? Bloggers in quite systematic and lightning-speed fashion are taking advantage of the opportunities technology has given them to speed and share ideas and, potentially, to create societies all with a facility Abolitionists could not have dreamed of.

Rescuing Ghana's Enslaved Children

Looking for a ray of hope today, and found one in the story of Mark, a six-year old West African boy who finds himself freed from the chains of slavery, and the brutal half-life of servitude in a Ghana fishing village on the shores of Lake Volta.

Back in October 2006, the New York Times ran a news item on the diabolical relationship between poverty and slavery in modern-day Africa, how desperately hungry parents sell their own children into cruel bonded labor in order to lessen the burden on the rest of the family. A six-year old boy named Mark put a human face on the practice; he carried such a haunted look that one of the reporters said she was struck by how he never smiled.

And no wonder; these boys' young lives, dodging alligators, eels and entangled fishing nets, are the stuff of nightmares:

A dozen boys, interviewed in their canoes or as they sewed up ratty nets ashore, spoke of backbreaking toil, 100-hour workweeks and frequent beatings. They bore a pervasive fear of diving into the lake’s murky waters to free a tangled net, and never resurfacing.
One 10-year-old said he was sometimes so exhausted that he fell asleep as he paddled. Asked when he rested, another boy paused from his net mending, seemingly confused. “This is what you see now,” he said.
...
The children’s sole comfort seems to be the shared nature of their misery, a camaraderie of lost boys who have not seen their families in years, have no say in their fate and, in some cases, were lured by false promises of schooling or a quick homecoming.

One person who read the NY Times article that day was Pam Cope, a mother who had channeled her grief over the loss of her 15-year old son towards financing orphanages and family health shelters in Vietnam and Cambodia, through their Touch A Life Foundation . Her and her husband Randy immediately took the initiative to contact the Times reporter on the story, and through her reached some people in Ghana who were in a position to make a difference. The Copes family, assisted by family and friends, raised enough money to free Mark and six other children from their hopeless lives of misery, giving them hope for a better future right in time for Christmas.

Working with a small Ghanaian charity, Mrs. Cope paid $3,600 to free the children and found them a new home in an orphanage near Accra, the capital.
After years of privation, the children were dumbstruck by the plentiful breakfast served at the orphanage, caregivers there said.
...
Few of the children had had any schooling. All now attend school.
When Mrs. Cope visited in January, she found Mark Kwadwo a transformed child — reveling in piggyback rides, spaghetti and his new school uniform.
“To hear him giggle,” she wrote by e-mail, “was priceless.”

"Jantsen's Gift: A True Story of Grief, Rescue and Grace", the book that Pam Cope wrote to bring her organization's hopeful story to the attention of others, was in the news again recently when it touched the lives of a vacationing St-Louis couple who also were prompted into immediate action:

“Jason began reading it, and every couple of pages he was saying, ‘Oh, my God, Jen, listen to this!’ He read it in 24 hours,” Jennifer said. “I read it within the next 24 hours.”
...
“After we read the book, it wasn’t ‘should we go to Ghana?’ It was ‘when are we going to Ghana?’” Jennifer said.
...
In August the Hackmanns boarded a plane in New York and flew to Accra, the capital of Ghana, with 37 other Touch A Life volunteers, who paid their own way....

Touch A Life works with George Achibra, a Ghanaian who has worked since 2000 to free children there. Volunteers work at freeing the children, yet they offer the masters no money.
Paying for the release of children likely would provide more incentive to continue the practice and make slavery there more lucrative.
“When you are negotiating the release of one of the children, you are doing it by making them feel bad,” Jennifer said. “You guilt them into it.”
...
So far, 69 children have been rescued, Newton said. Those include three children, ages 9 to 11, that Jason and the others helped free on their trip.
“One of the kids had been a slave since he was four years old,” Jason said. “I thought that kid would never smile again. He had the look of hopelessness. Two days after we rescued him, he had a smile on his face and he is happy.”
The children are not reunited with their parents, for fear they would be sold again, but live and are educated at two village camps, depending on their age.
Jennifer is back in Ghana this week and called Jason at his office Nov. 17. While they were on the phone, Teeteh, one of the boys Jason helped rescue, came up to her and asked, “Is that my father who rescued me?”
Touch A Life, which has an annual operating budget approaching $400,000, works not only to rescue children but also to make them self sufficient through strategies such as micro-financing, providing them with small loans to start businesses. “We work with Ghanaians in the country who know what they need,” Newton said. The foundation has been funded solely through donations, though it is preparing to apply for its first government grant, Newton said.
Another effort is to convert the fishermen to what is called sustainable aqua-culture, basically fish farms, using cages and ponds. “You get a better product, and you don’t have to use child labor,” Newton said.
As for the Hackmanns, they said they have made a commitment to see this through.
“People think, ‘Africa? It’s hopeless.’” Jason said.

“But this is 7,000 kids, not 7 million. This can be done.”

Child Chained In Plain Sight, Rescued From Delhi Restaurant

India: A child trafficked from his native village of Sehjana Kaparanda in the Katihar district of Bihar has been rescued from two months of being kept shackled to his post in a Delhi roadside restaurant.

The boy's father had been searching for his missing boy for weeks, having learned that a fellow villager had trafficked the child to India's capital city, Delhi. Having come so close, he was still far from finding, and rescuing, his son, as the local bureaucracy paid little attention to his pleas for assistance, sending him on a fruitless merry-go-round of visits to police station after police station. It's hard to imagine the degree of despair and grief that must have afflicted the father at this time; even after receiving a tip on the restaurant holding his son captive, he was not able to melt the government's icebound bureaucratic indifference. His son remained in chains.

Thankfully, the case came to the attention of the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) ["Save The Childhood Movement"], a private Indian organization dedicated to freeing India's children from bonded labor. The BBA have rescued over 70,000 children from slavery since the group's founding in the 1980s. Their experience allowed them to navigate the sea of red tape and got the father's complaint filed with the appropriate child labor agency, resulting in a rescue operation mounted against the restaurant and its heartless owner.

The indifference met by the desperate father is nothing compared to what the son witnessed during his captivity:

“I was working in this Dhaba for last 3 months. One day, he accused me of stealing Rs. 50,000 from his home and started torturing me physically. A fortnight ago, he decided to tether me with iron chains. I could move in the radius of one metre only and worked for more than 15 hours a day without any protection from the cold weather. Police personnel kept coming to the Dhaba and mocked at me. There is a mosque just opposite, even the people saw me like this everyday after their morning and evening prayers. Nobody came for my rescue”.

BBA's Chairperson, Professor Rama Shankar Chaurasia, draws a sobering conclusion from the child's rescue:

“A child found chained in the heart of national capital is a serious issue. It goes on to show how little concern we have for children of our society..."

It staggers the imagination to think that police officers in India's capital city can see a child wearing these shackles, and their reaction is... to mock him??

[Image courtesy of BBA's news report on the story]

[UPDATE: Some background to the rampant corruption stalling efforts to free India's slaves provided by Youngbee Kim at the Northfolk Human Rights Examiner]

President Obama Declares January "National Slavery And Human Trafficking Prevention Month"

President Barack Obama proclaims February 1st shall be "National Freedom Day", and January shall be "National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month".

The United States was founded on the principle that all people are born with an unalienable right to freedom -- an ideal that has driven the engine of American progress throughout our history. As a Nation, we have known moments of great darkness and greater light; and dim years of chattel slavery illuminated and brought to an end by President Lincoln's actions and a painful Civil War.
Yet even today, the darkness and inhumanity of enslavement exists. Millions of people worldwide are held in compelled service, as well as thousands within the United States. During National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, we acknowledge that forms of slavery still exist in the modern era, and we recommit ourselves to stopping the human traffickers who ply this horrific trade.

As we continue our fight to deliver on the promise of freedom, we commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation, which became effective on January 1, 1863, and the 13th Amendment, which was sent to the States for ratification on February 1, 1865. Throughout the month of January, we highlight the many fronts in the ongoing battle for civil rights -- including the efforts of our Federal agencies; State, local, and tribal law enforcement partners; international partners; nonprofit social service providers; private industry and nongovernmental organizations around the world who are working to end human trafficking.

The victims of modern slavery have many faces. They are men and women, adults and children. Yet, all are denied basic human dignity and freedom. Victims can be abused in their own countries, or find themselves far from home and vulnerable. Whether they are trapped in forced sexual or labor exploitation, human trafficking victims cannot walk away, but are held in service through force, threats, and fear. All too often suffering from horrible physical and sexual abuse, it is hard for them to imagine that there might be a place of refuge.

We must join together as a Nation and global community to provide that safe haven by protecting victims and prosecuting traffickers. With improved victim identification, medical and social services, training for first responders, and increased public awareness, the men, women, and children who have suffered this scourge can overcome the bonds of modern slavery, receive protection and justice, and successfully reclaim their rightful independence.

Fighting modern slavery and human trafficking is a shared responsibility. This month, I urge all Americans to educate themselves about all forms of modern slavery and the signs and consequences of human trafficking. Together, we can and must end this most serious, ongoing criminal civil rights violation.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim January 2010 as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, culminating in the annual celebration of National Freedom Day on February 1. I call upon the people of the United States to recognize the vital role we can play in ending modern slavery, and to observe this month with appropriate programs and activities.

Let's hope this proclamation is not just posturing political theater, but the first step in an effective attempt at curtailing a growing evil.

Slave Patrol Surgeon's Diary Found In Scotland

In the second half of the 19th Century the ships of the British Royal Navy patrolled the world's seas in an ernest attempt to stop the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Much of their valiant labor seems lost to history, good deeds being more easily forgotten than wicked ones, it seems.

Today we tend to only remember that the trade existed, forgetting that people were also trying to stop it.

Our historical amnesia may get a needed jolt by the recent discovery of a 400-page diary. The journal belonged to doctor Richard Carr McClement, an Irish assistant surgeon who served aboard six Royal Navy ships patroling West Africa between 1857 and 1869.

In that capacity he became an eye-witness to the vicious cruelty that seems to always follow in the wake of the evil that is slavery. Researcher Dr Karly Kehoe describes what she's found in her preliminary readings of McClement's journal:

“As a surgeon working on the west African patrol, Mr McClement was called upon to assess the health of slaves whenever a slaver captured a slave. You get a sense by the way he writes that he was touched by the sheer human misery. He couldn’t really believe what he was seeing. He would have seen extreme poverty in Ireland having lived there during the famine, and would have known about discrimination, but this was all of a different order.”

The report from Scotland's Sunday Herald contains an except from McClement's journal entry for January 7, 1861, revealing the horrible scene waiting for him when he boarded the intercepted slave ship the Clara Windsor:

9am went on board the Clara Windsor. It would be utterly impossible to describe the sight which presented itself to us when we first went on board, and it would be equally difficult for any one who had not seen it, to comprehend the amount of misery, the suffering and the horrors, that were contained within the wooden walls of that little craft.

The ship is about 250-tons burden, and has her slave deck running right fore and aft, which is about three feet in height. The stench from the vessel is so great, that even at the distance of 200 yards to leeward it is almost insufferable.

When I went on board, the majority of the slaves were on the upper deck, mostly squatting in rows, each row sitting between the legs of the one behind it.

On the foetid, sloppy and sickening slave deck were to be seen the remainder, consisting of men, women, and, children, huddled together; some emaciated to skeletons; some lying sick and heedless of all around; and, some on the point of passing into another world, where it would be hard to imagine they could suffer more than they had done in this; men and women lay promiscuously, some lying on their faces, some on their backs; and, the more enfeebled sat with their heads resting on the knees.

All were naked and had their skins besmeared with the filth in which they lay. On the upper deck were to be seen slaves of all ages from 30 years downwards; here also men, women and children lay or sat promiscuously and presented the same appearances as those on the slave deck. A skeleton woman – quite naked – might be seen in a dying state, with an infant sucking the already half dead breast, while adjoining might be seen another apparently dead; her shrivelled breasts showed that her milk had long since gone, yet a starving baby held the nipple in its mouth and struggled hard to obtain what man’s cruelty had robbed it of.

Here, indeed might be seen a specimen of that affection which nature implants in the bosom of woman, for her children, and, which, would show that the civilised and uncivilised possess it alike. In every case of misery, and where the woman was even senseless, or, apparently dead, or dying, her little baby was firmly clutched to her bosom as if it were the only tie that held her to life.

Washington DC: Sex Slaves For Sale In Freedom's Capital City

Washington DC TV news station WJLA reports on a 19-year old woman recently freed from a life of sexual slavery in neighboring Anne Arundel County, and the difficulties involved in fighting sex trafficking even in the nation's capital:

'Alana' says she could not see a way out "because (she) was all the way out here, with no family, no money."
Experts say traffickers use that financial and psychological dependence to control the girls -- along with drugs and alcohol.
"And the next thing they know, it's like brick after brick and suddenly they're stuck behind this wall of exploitation," said Andrea Powell, the director of Fair Fund, a non-profit group that works with girls like Alana.
Powell says D.C. found 35 teen victims of commercial sexual exploitation last year, which is just the tip of the iceberg.
...
[U.S. Attorney for Maryland Rod Rosenstein] says the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force was formed to combat the problem.
Accused traffickers are prosecuted under federal laws, which are tougher than state
laws. And law enforcement says it's important to recognize young girls as victims, instead of criminals.
"We don't want to take these 14-, 15-, 16-year-old girls and lock them up in jail," Rosenstein said. "It's not going to create the relationship that we want to develop with them so they'll work with us in prosecuting perpetrators of the trafficking violations."
Alana eventually broke free from prostitution. She has a job now and is considering
going back to school.
But she wants the world to know: "If you see girls outside late at night and you're wondering why are they outside and why are they dressed like that, sometimes it's not they're own choice, it's not their own fault," she said.

Video version of the story available here.

An unrelated report from NPR on under-age girls being sexually exploited in Washington DC, just blocks from the White House, how they are tattooed as a sign of ownership by their exploiters, and the shelter being established as a refuge for girls trafficked into the capital, can be heard here: Survivor Battles DC Teen Trafficking.

Washington DC is the capital of the free world, and it is outrageous to discover that the chains of modern-day slavery even extends there... establishing that it truly is everywhere.