Bangladesh Nightmare: Children Stolen For Slavery, Body Parts, And Ritual Sacrifice

A bad dream from which there's currently little hope of waking: the nightmare story of how Bangladesh's poorest of poor street children are kidnapped by pitiless slavers into all kinds of horrors.

As reported in Scotland's Sunday Herald, the unfathomable laments from Dhaka's homeless women: "If We Fall Asleep The Gangs Steal Our Children":

Babu is four years old. [...] Three months ago he was kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken across the city by a man he had never seen before. Locked in a room for three days with little food or water, he was then sold for 4000 taka (about £35). [$55 CDN]
...
Babu is one of thousands of permanent pavement dwellers in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and the world’s most densely populated city. Official figures put the ­population at 14 million: on top of that, however, it is ­estimated that there are between 20,000 and 50,000 men, women and children living on the streets. [...]

As Babu tries to rest, a crowd gathers and a piercing wail begins. A distraught woman emerges from the darkness, a baby clutched to her chest, ­pleading for help and tugging at the clothes of those around her. “My daughter has gone,” she cries. “I have lost my five-year-old girl. Who has taken her? Have you seen her?” The crowd surges but the woman runs back into the night. We cannot find her. The ­onlookers seem unaffected. They say children regularly go missing.

Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, estimates that 400 women and children fall victim to trafficking in Bangladesh each month. Most are between the ages of 12 and 16 and are forced to work in the sex industry. Some become domestic slaves, and the boys are often taken to the Middle East and forced to be camel jockeys.

The annual report of the Pakistan-based organisation Lawyers For Human Rights And Legal Aid revealed that 4500 Bangladeshi girls are sold in Pakistan in a single year.

The pavement dwellers claim children are sometimes also stolen by religious cults for rituals and sacrifices and a report by the international organisation Ecpat (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) says they are sold for their organs and body parts, a claim backed by Unicef’s research.
[...]
Parents try to protect their children as well as they can. Mothers tie their toddlers to their bodies with their saris – little deterrent to the organised criminal gangs, known as mustans. One woman uses a padlock and chain.

Parents try to protect their children as well as they can. Mothers tie their toddlers to their bodies with their saris – little deterrent to the organised criminal gangs, known as mustans. One woman uses a padlock and chain.
[...]

Babu has no-one to tie himself to. His mother died of rabies and his father of asthma. Dhaka is one of the world’s most polluted cities and deaths from respiratory disease are particularly common on the street. The smog runs the length and breadth of the city, every road clogged with rickshaws, buses and cars. It chokes out the sun and blurs the sunset as yellow fog turns to grey. The pollution, the lack of clean water and the problems people have accessing even rudimentary medical care mean that skin disease, bronchitis and tuberculosis are commonplace.

The only respite from the noise and filth is from 9am to 5pm, when Babu can access one of Concern Worldwide’s nine day-centres across the city. The centres support more than 1000 pavement dwellers each day, offering a place for them to rest, wash and cook. Children under five are given nursery education and lunch, allowing their parents to work.

The centres also run savings schemes and encourage young people into vocational training courses to offer them an escape from the streets. The project is called Amrao Manush, meaning “we are people too” in Bengali – a name devised by the pavement dwellers themselves. This year Concern hopes to raise enough money to open night shelters for the most vulnerable, including pregnant women and children. It is at night that the children are normally stolen.

Sufia Begum’s son Shakil was taken seven months ago. He has not been seen since. “He was only four years old,” she says, tightening her grip on her baby daughter. “It was night and he said he was going to the toilet. He never came back. I ran around screaming, looking for him. [...]

“They say my son has been sold abroad. This happens often. Some children are stolen for the sex trade and others for their body parts. I know that religious people steal children for sacrifices and rituals.” She begins to sob. “I still look, but do not know how to find him,” she says.
[...]
Sufia gets about 100 taka (70p) a day from begging. Like the majority of the pavement dwellers, she has few possessions and no identity card, nor any chance of obtaining one without a birth certificate or address. Fewer than 10% of children in Bangladesh are registered at birth. This, coupled with high levels of police corruption, compounds the vulnerability of the pavement dwellers. Officials speak about them as if they are not citizens, not even human. [...]
...
[M]any of the pavement women, most of whom leave home before they are 10 years old, attribute themselves the surname Begum, which means Queen. As with Sufia, Ratna claims the name as her own. Now 21, she still remembers the bus she took with her stepmother, the confusion and noise of the city compared to village life in Shirazgonj, 250km away, and the shock of being sold to a Dhaka brothel for about 3000 taka (£25) [$35 CDN]. She was just six years old.

“It was terrifying,” she says. “I cried and cried. Three men visited my room for sex at the same time. Two other girls and I plotted our escape. After three months we bribed the gatemen and we ran away. I have been living on the street since then.”

Ratna, whose name means “ornaments”, sleeps all day at one of the Concern centres in order to be vigilant on the streets at night. “I have to stay awake to ensure my nine-month-old son, Jannati, is safe,” she says. “Two years ago my other baby boy was stolen. He was eight months old. I went straight to the police but they said I should not be a mother, that I should not have brought a child into the world because I am a pavement dweller. They beat me.”

[A] few metres away, in the shelter of a disused toilet block, Shati Begum lays out some newspapers and plastic on the ground before unfurling a colourful sari upon which she will sleep. Aged 25, she is seven months pregnant. Five months ago, her seven-year-old son was taken in the night. “We were sleeping next to each other,” she says. “I was so tired because of the pregnancy. When I awoke, he was gone.

“I was crying and looking for him. I went to the police straight away with a photograph but they said they were not interested and wouldn’t even write it down. They said that as a pavement person I had no identity and that they did not care. They said I needed an address and an identity card.”

Shati still carries the photograph of her son but has given up hope of finding him.

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.]

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.

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.

Enslaved Children Freed From Russian Factory

The following story may sound like it's lifted from the plot of a horror film, but news reports like this one from Russia are, sadly, all too common.

Immigrant children forced to work as slave labourers in an illegal clothes factory near Moscow have been freed in a police operation.

Fifteen minors from Kyrgyzstan had their documents taken away and were made to work day and night under 24-hour guard.

On a diet of bread and mayonnaise, they were punished for disobeying orders or refusing to man the sewing machines in the windowless cellar of an industrial complex in Noginsk, not far from the Russian capital.

The youngsters, all aged between 11 and 17, were recruited from poor families.

Parents were told the children would receive fair pay and be provided with appropriate accommodation. Instead they lived in squalor in the heat and dust of the factory floor.

Several adult Kyrgyz nationals were arrested in the police raid.

For every child rescued, we wonder: how many remain to be found?

Uganda Horror: Trafficking Children For Human Sacrifice

Where to begin with this story; police in Uganda are struggling to resolve the growing number of children being abducted and murdered by witchdoctors in ritualistic acts of human sacrifice.

Back in February, the British publication The Independant carried a detailed background report on the unfathomable crime wave. From their interview with Timothy Opobo, programme coordinator with the Ugandan Chapter of the Africa Network for the Prevention and Protection Against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN):

“For a long time, sacrificing has been done in secrecy. Child sacrifice centres on witchcraft,” says Timothy Opobo. “Today, sacrificing children appears to be exposed because traditional healers and herbalists are everywhere. So witchdoctors have taken advantage of the traditional herbalists by hiding under that umbrella and have advertised in the media.”
...“Children are vulnerable and are believed to be pure – this is why they are being sacrificed”.

Opobo says that poverty is leading people come to believe they are cursed, that witchdoctors prey on that belief and convince family members to kill their children, and the children of others, in order to relieve themselves of that curse. The article lists a handful of the cases investigated in late 2008:

Shs 50,000 [$26 US, $28 CDN] was enough to tempt Patrick Makonzi to chop the head off his 12-year-old nephew, Eriya Kalule, of Namusita village in Kamuli District on Boxing Day. That same month, a boda-boda cyclist in Masajja, Wakiso district, beheaded his twin children for Shs 12 million [$6,266 US, $6,724 CDN]. In another bizarre case, Ssenoga Setubwa, 21, stole a child from Bwaise and sold him for Shs 100,000 [$52 US, $56 CDN].

The Masajja murderer told Ugandan media outlet The Observer back in August that "a rich man had asked him for his twins in exchange for Shs 50million, a deal Mugerwa agreed to; prompting him to behead the three-year olds."

In this connection, the African news site All Africa reports that Uganda's newest Police Inspector General, Major General Kale Kayihura, has reshuffled the ranks of the police force in order to achieve greater efficiencies in resolving this and other ongoing criminal problems plaguing their nation. Several hundred new cadets are replacing senior officers, in the hope that progress can be made... starting with better policing of law enforcement officers and government officials themselves:

The Minister of Internal Affairs, Kirunda Kivejinja recently said the police report into ritual murders named government workers as some of the people behind the recent spate of ritual murders.

Yet it's not just the poor that are trying to buy their way out of their penury through the ritualistic murder of children.

Throughout 2009 Uganda has witnessed the high-profile court case of "philanthropist" Kato Kajubi, an international businessman accused of organizing the beheading of a 12-year old boy lured away from his poverty-stricken village with promises of better education and a job at Kajubi's chicken farm. The court was told that the murdered boy was the first of three children Kajubi was said to have wanted for his ritual. The 12-year old child's body was later found at the construction site of one of Kajubi's newly-built properties, in fulfillment of some sick superstitution that such placement would herald good luck for the owner by dispelling bad spirits.

Human sacrifice is increasingly being seen as a worthy means to get-rich-quick ends, according to Florence Kirabira, Acting Head of Child and Family Protection Unit:

Some of those obsessed with getting rich quick are ready to do anything, including killing –if that is what the witchdoctor recommends - to reach their goal.
“It’s a difficult and complex situation where children have been sacrificed because of an urge for people to get wealthy. We have people who believe in getting rich [at all costs],” Kirabira says.
According to James Ongom, an investigating officer, 40 children have lost their lives to ritual killings this year alone. Out of these cases, 15 have so far been investigated, but no one has been convicted.

How does one imagine the pain and grief endured in such a place? My heart cries out for victims like this mother of four, who came home from the market only to find her beheaded six-month old baby boy in a plastic bag, murdered by the baby's own father, her 30-year old husband:

“I wanted my son to become an engineer,” she says amid sobs. “I cannot believe that the man I was living with, the father of my children, was the devil.”

[Thanks to Norfolk Human Rights Examiner and Liberia Past and Present for this story]

Modern-Day Slavers Preying On Famine-Stricken Women And Children In Kenya

Promises coated in the cruelest of lies are luring thousands of victims into lives of modern slavery, as small East African towns shattered by famine and poverty are being visited by human traffickers recruiting women and children for sexual exploitation, turning Kenya into a "notorious transit point" in human cargo fed with false hopes for better lives:

The Kenyan coast has been identified as being a notorious transit point for traffickers where children work as prostitutes and beach boys.
...
Investigations have established that trafficking is now being extended to smaller towns like Samburu, Makueni, Marereni and Ukambani due to famine and poverty.
Other places include areas where victims of the post election skirmishes have pitched tents.
"Unscrupulous people go to these areas and try to provide alternatives for the victims hence trafficking them," says Mr Japheth Kasimbu, IOM counter-trafficking officer.
... [Mr Paul Adhoch, the Executive Director of Trace, a counter trafficking organisation based in Mombasa] says that 6,000 to 9,000 people are trafficked annually in Coast Province with a third of them being children.
"Mombasa is a source, destination and route of trafficking. Individuals, especially girls from as far as Uganda, Tanzania and DR Congo come to Kenya with hopes of linking up with rich tourists but some of them unfortunately turn them into sex slaves," he says.
According to an officer at African Network for the Prevention and Protection against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANNAPCAN), an organisation that helps victims of cross-border trafficking at Tarakea, on the Kenya-Tanzania border, trafficking is caused by unemployment.
...
"Brothels and massage parlours have turned to be exploitation dens for foreign young women. Victims are trafficked from Rwanda, Democratic republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda and Somalia and are coerced to work in these establishments, increasing their vulnerability to sexual exploitation or forced into prostitution," he says.

How To Break The Chains Of Child Prostitution

"We, as a society, will not tolerate what basically amounts to selling these kids as sex slaves," said Arthur Balizan, special agent in charge of the FBI in Oregon. His remark was made after Operation Cross Country IV, a seasonal attempt to rescue children from the hellish bondage of sexual slavery in the United States of America. Sweeping raids are conducted in targeted areas of the country as part of the FBI's Innocence Lost National Initiative, in partnership with local law enforcement officials and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The latest result: 52 children freed from sexual slavery.

To date, the 34 Innocence Lost Task Forces and Working Groups have recovered nearly 900 children from the streets. The investigations and subsequent 510 convictions have resulted in lengthy sentences, including multiple 25-years-to-life sentences and the seizure of more than $3.1 million in assets.

Some newspapers are now following up on the current fate of the children rescued from prostitution; they report that one month later, very few of the victims are "receiving the help experts say is necessary to overcome such trauma and rejoin society."

The victims need intensive residential treatment, experts say, and only three such programs exist.
...
Lois Lee, founder of a 24-bed Los Angeles shelter called Children of the Night, sees the problems firsthand.
"When America's child prostitutes are identified by the FBI or police, they are incarcerated for whatever reason possible, whether it be an unrelated crime or 'material witness hold,' " she said. "Then they are dumped back in the dysfunctional home, ill-equipped group home or foster care, and [often] disappear back into the underground of prostitution with no voice."
...
Experts say that sex-trafficking victims struggle to find the care they need once they escape from an industry that may involve at least 100,000 U.S. children.
Donna Hughes, a women's studies professor at the University of Rhode Island who has researched U.S. sex trafficking, said domestic victims are shortchanged by the attention authorities and advocacy groups give to the illegal importation of foreign prostitutes.
"We need more treatment programs," she said. "There are a number of different programs that have existed for years, but they need more support."
Lisa Goldblatt Grace, who consulted on a 2007 study for the Health and Human Services Department, said child victims "lack a safe, stable place to live, and that's part of what made them vulnerable to begin with."
Grace is program director of the My Life My Choice Project, a nonprofit focused on reaching out to adolescent girls most vulnerable to commercial sexual exploitation.
The Health and Human Services Department study found only four residential treatment centers in the United States for child prostitutes, with a total of 45 beds.
...
[Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children ]said U.S. child victims numbered between 100,000 and 300,000.

The human race's capacity for inflicting cruelty upon itself knows no bounds; imagine the suffering of a young life so filled with misery that the evil of slavery can come to be seen as the Lesser of Evils...