I was watching a documentary on TV last night regarding child slavery in India. The documentary revolved around a German activist [female] who pretended to be a German exporter searching for cheap raw materials. She was roughly ~24,25 and was accompanied by a translator whom had a secret camera installed. They went to workshops and found several dozens of children under the age of 12, bordering and sewing logos on brands such as Gap and Fitch. These children were locked in a room of about 3m by 3m and were given food [brown rice] in a bucket. Like pigs they rushed to the bucket and picked the rice up with their hands. Their hands were full of calluses, that they had to spit on their hands and use it as a sticky solvent to be able to pick up the rice.
The activist visited fields where children worked in:
Some of these children were rocking back and forth from the constant beatings and malnutrition.
Here's an excerpt from the Anti-Slavery Society,
Many children in Asia are kidnapped or otherwise trapped in servitude, where they work in factories and workshops for no pay and receive constant beatings.
Typically, an agent from the city arrives in the village. He shows great sympathy for the child’s parents and a deep understanding of their plight and financial problems. He purchases two dresses for the mother and purchases a cow for the father (but the cow is an old sick cow which dies after a few months).
In due course, the family’s new friend tells them that he could get a job for the child in the city where the child would be properly trained, receive wages and have good prospects for promotion. The parents, seeing this as the opportunity of a lifetime for their child to escape from rural poverty, agree.
The agent gives them a piece of paper with the name and address of a non-existent employment agency.
In reality, it is all a scam. The children live in a den or a squalid shed, with no prospects and no pay. Many are beaten with sticks and iron rods and not even allowed to see their parents. They are branded with red hot irons, burnt with cigarettes, starved, whipped, beaten while hanging upside down, chained up, abused in an intimate way, and kept locked in cupboards for days on end. One child, Shankar, described his experience thus:
“We were poked with burning cigarettes on the back and legs. If we cried for our mothers we were locked in a room without air or enough light. We were forced to work for 20 hours a day without pay. We were kept half fed and beaten up severely by our masters if we were found talking or laughing among ourselves. One night I jumped into the nearby River Ganges to kill myself to escape from this painful life. We were never allowed to go back to our parents, to our villages.”
This is really sad. You have to see the documentary to be able to visually their living conditions and the hardships these kids go through. They pick up sledgehammers and break rocks for 12 hours a day and are paid 5 rupees a week.
What's your opinion on child slavery?
Comments
was she hot at least?
It always amazes me how rarely these types of stories make it into N. American media... I guess we're too up our own asses to care hahaha
Even if child labour was legal, it would probably still be cheaper for the Chinese to manufacture our goods for us.
The documentary was in German and translated in Spanish.
What's even more amazing is that the exporters have a "certificate declaring that no child labor has taken place in the process." The activist investigated the origin of the certificate signer which turned out to be an exporter of products produced by child labor. :facepalm:
This world is really fucked up.
Back to Mexico. Amirite?
This.
What a load of self-loathing leftist tripe.
Natural selection applies to social systems as much as it does individuals; the fittest will dominate. Currently, capitalism is the 'fittest' system and no amount of guilt ridden hand-wringing is going to change that. Besides child slavery predates capitalism by several thousand years; child slaves would almost certainly exist in this world in the complete absence of capitalism. The 'blame' for the existence of this slavery goes far deeper than the superficialities of transient economic models; slaves will be useful no matter what.
Will do.
Grow up.
Your society is the way it is, theirs is different and that is the way of it.
Those societies do not produce enough of a surplace so the state can feed, clothe and educate those children to a certain age. Far from it. Without this labour, those societies would collapse and every single person in them would be worse off.
Sure, their life sucks by your standards, much in the way that the children of Bill Gates think you are the lowest of the low in comparison.
Think of it in this way - we truly level the assets of all the people in the world. Every family has a small patch of land on which to grow enough food to feed themselves?
Do you think the kids:
A. Get to play X-box live all day long?
B. Spend the day pulling weeds and carrying water?
These societies only tollerate what happens in them because any other realistic choice would be worse.
Who am I to question your ideals tho? I am sure you are so morally upstanding you will let all of the 'child slaves' live at you house and you can feed and clothe them.
Which brings me to the question:
Why should children have the right not to work when adults have to? Surely, one day these children will become adults and have to work themselves. What is the difference? Show me where it is written by some higher moral authority than my morals, your morals or his morals that children should not work?
People are people - children or adults - and we should all share the burden of work until as such time technology means it is no longer necessary.
Pretty much this.