Child Labor and Child Slavery
A Guest Post
by Cassie
Cross-Posted at Political Teen Tidbits.
I do not know the real difference legally between child labor and child slavery, but I do know that it’s at least 75% a joke (maybe 80%!) when I list on my facebook that my occupation is “kitchen slave”. The girl in this article isn’t kidding and doesn’t have facebook or any other fun in her life. I work harder on chores than a lot of kids I know, but I am NOT a slave/
Child maid trafficking spreads from Africa to US
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, Associated Press Writer
AP – Shyima Hall, 19, who was 10 when she was trafficked to a gated community as a domestic worker, is shown …IRVINE, Calif. – Late at night, the neighbors saw a little girl at the kitchen sink of the house next door.
They watched through their window as the child rinsed plates under the open faucet. She wasn’t much taller than the counter and the soapy water swallowed her slender arms. To put the dishes away, she climbed on a chair.
But she was not the daughter of the couple next door doing chores. She was their maid.
Shyima was 10 when a wealthy Egyptian couple brought her from a poor village in northern Egypt to work in their California home. She awoke before dawn and often worked past midnight to iron their clothes, mop the marble floors and dust the family’s crystal. She earned $45 a month working up to 20 hours a day. She had no breaks during the day and no days off.
The trafficking of children for domestic labor in the U.S. is an extension of an illegal but common practice in Africa. Families in remote villages send their daughters to work in cities for extra money and the opportunity to escape a dead-end life. Some girls work for free on the understanding that they will at least be better fed in the home of their employer.
The custom has led to the spread of trafficking, as well-to-do Africans accustomed to employing children immigrate to the U.S. Around one-third of the estimated 10,000 forced laborers in the United States are servants trapped behind the curtains of suburban homes, according to a study by the National Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley and Free the Slaves, a nonprofit group. No one can say how many are children, especially since their work can so easily be masked as chores.
Once behind the walls of gated communities like this one, these children never go to school. Unbeknownst to their neighbors, they live as modern-day slaves, just like Shyima, whose story is pieced together through court records, police transcripts and interviews.
“I’d look down and see her at 10, 11 — even 12 — at night,” said Shyima’s neighbor at the time, Tina Font. “She’d be doing the dishes. We didn’t put two and two together.”
What I don’t understand is why, if the people next door saw her working in the kitchen during school days, why they didn’t think something was wrong and ask more questions. There’s more to the article.
That is so effed up. There is no fire in hell hot enough for anyone who would steal childhood, through whatever means.
welcome to the world of domestic abuse and domestic violence, it’s the a silent killer of women across the globe, as well as here at home.
women in these situations have no voice. and when the do say something, they are abused even more.
it’s a terrible, horrifying, yet largely neglected issue.
I guess I’m naive. I know about adult domestic help and laborer’s in the US but I had no idea that children were involved and it was hidden. After the last several years it seems any human atrocity is more possible than before.
This is ugly, no matter what gender the child. Slavery is slavery is slavery.
Regards,
Tengrain
slavery, absolutely.
yet, when I read that this child’s garage would pass for a better-than-average house in her neighborhood back home, I was even more shocked.
and then, to read that her parents blamed HER when her situation came to light—
I feel guilty for living in a world where these things can happen.