WUNRN
AFRICA - THE GIRL CHILD
African
Human Traffic is Catalyst for Child Abuse
18
Nov 2007
Reuters
By
Alistair Thomson
DAKAR,
Nov 18 (Reuters) - Akissi was not even 10 when she was sent abroad from Togo to
work as a domestic servant for a woman who beat her and twice forced chilli
peppers into her vagina to punish her.
Now
15 and struggling to care for her 6-month-old baby and a husband who beats her,
Akissi's tale was discovered by researchers investigating the psychological
effects of child trafficking in West Africa and the way it encourages abuse.
Researchers
for U.S.-based non-profit development agency Plan International, who shared
their findings with Reuters ahead of Monday's World Day for the Prevention of
Child Abuse, gave the girl the pseudonym Akissi to protect her identity.
Working
with researchers, Akissi drew a "life-line", with flowers to
represent good experiences and stones for bad ones.
A
green flower marks her return from domestic servitude in Benin to her village
in Togo at the age of 12. A black stone indicates when she was raped there
before her next birthday.
Akissi
is severely traumatised by past and present abuse, and is at serious risk of
committing suicide by consuming agricultural chemicals, having already tried to
do so once, Plan researchers say.
"There
are very few institutions ready to help them ... there is no psychological
support for these children. Their families do not understand, and sweep it
under the carpet," said Plan's Serigne Mor Mbaye, who worked on the pilot
research programme in Togo that interviewed Akissi.
"This
really is the tip of the iceberg," he said.
"MODERN
SLAVERY"
The
U.N. Children's Fund UNICEF estimates that 1.2 million children are trafficked
every year into what it calls "the modern-day equivalent of slavery".
This
trafficking takes many forms in West Africa, encouraged by a tradition of
"placing" young children with families of wealthier relatives to
receive an education or learn a trade.
"It's
a high-risk practice," Mbaye said.
"Many
of those who are placed are victims of abuse. This traditional practice
continues to happen, but (social) solidarity does not function like
before," he said, adding that many children are placed these days with
unrelated strangers.
The
Plan research in Togo found most trafficked children went to Nigeria, girls
generally as domestic servants and boys working in agriculture, markets or
serving food.
Different
types of child trafficking networks have sprung up in other parts of West
Africa.
Police
in tiny Guinea-Bissau uncovered a trafficking network last week when they found
over 50 young boys headed to Senegal, where hundreds of children sent from
neighbouring countries to attend Koranic schools end up begging for coins on
street corners.
"You
should have seen the state they were in. Aged between 4 and 21, these exhausted
children were barefoot, poorly clothed, some naked from the waist up,"
said Carlos Abdulai Djalo, governor of the Bafata region where the 52 children
were found.
Rights
activists have campaigned against the use of "child slave" labour on
farms in Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together produce most of the world's
cocoa beans. But researchers have said the situation is often more nuanced than
appears, with children working on family-owned fields in traditional fashion.
The
child trafficking debate has been revived by the arrest last month in Chad of
French humanitarian activists on child kidnapping charges over a bid to fly 103
children to Europe.
The
children were presented as orphans from Darfur, even though most turned out to
be from villages in the Chad/Sudan border area and had at least one living
parent. (Editing by Pascal Fletcher)
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