Child-Trafficking in Guinea-Bissau

“Medica Mondiale” is an aid-organization that helps rape victims in troubled areas like Afghanistan – Sparkasse Köln-Bonn • IBAN: DE92 3705 0198 0045 0001 63 • BIC: COLSDE33” is their bank account if you are going to support them. As the name implies – “mondiale” is French and Spanish for worldwide – they are active in many countries, including Guinea-Bissau where violence against women and forced prostitution are common. However I mentioned Afghanistan, because now they had an interview with “Domradio” about their work in Afghanistan. Surprisingly they have a rather positive picture about the future situation of women in Afghanistan. As more girls attend school respect towards them increases just as well and that results in less violence towards female citizens of Afghanistan. However they also state fears if after our troops retreat from Afghanistan this country will be forgotten and nobody will willingly donate to projects there anymore.

I’m sorry if today I’m a little late with my (almost) daily news report, but the following will explain to you what was keeping me: Due to many of my lecturers being ill right now I neither had any lectures on Wednesday nor am I going to have any on Thursday. Thus I decided to use Wednesday for a little excursion with a friend whose situation is just the same. She comes from Bamberg and decided to use this situation for a trip to her family and to the church she knew from her childhood and I was eager to join her – although I made it clear from the beginning that I was not gonna accept her family’s invitation to spend the night at their house as I wanted to go home again after attending the mass there. I don’t regret this trip. Not only was the church beautiful with this tree as Christmas decoration and the painted windows, but considering that today is the “Day of Human Rights” the priest held a preach about what he calls 21st century-slavery. He says that 21 million – yes I sat there with a paper and a pen I pulled out of my bag to take notes – people still work under about the same conditions as Afro-American slaves that were used by white US-citizens in the 18th and 19th century. The majority of them are underage and work on plantations, in mines, as child-soldiers in battlefields or even as forced prostitutes. Not only is this work extremely harmful to still growing and still developing people, but many of them also get mistreated, sexually abused, malnourished, get denied access to medicine etc.
He says he’s shocked that people shrug things like these off as “a cultural thing” as “in these countries it’s just normal to make people work at a very young age and to have sexual contacts at a very young age”. I think I quoted correctly that he said “If that’s so, not the human rights got to change, but cultures need to admit that something’s wrong with them.”
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Re-upload: As far as I’m informed, a man planned to smuggle these children to Senegal. Meanwhile this so called “child-trafficking” has become a big issue in developing countries. The “smuggled goods” often are street children, but luckily there are organisations that want to put an end to this, e.g. the organisation, you get informed about on this website: “http://www.streetchildafrica.org.uk/pages/senegal.html”. They are great! They even give YOU the chance of getting involved!
Also “Domradio” says that if you want fair-trade products, you should look for labels that belong to the “Fair Wear Foundation” or “IVN Best”.

“GEA” said on Monday that police officers who worked in Baden-Wuerttemberg (Germany) had arrested a couple of ladies and gentlemen who were accused of having forced several (foreign) ladies into prostitution – also by using threats and violence.

I do know that Canada is far from Guinea-Bissau and that the women I’m going to talk about are adults or at least adolescents, but at least this is about human-trafficking, too: “Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker” now published an article about the mysterious disappearance of 1.200 native-American women since the early 80’s in Canada. They say that there is a prejudice in this country according to which native women work as prostitutes and are alcoholics. So it is believed that possibly a high number of them simply got abducted and forced into prostitution. If they ever told someone about their abduction nobody would take them serious as nobody would take an alleged alcoholic serious. Also it is most likely that a lot of them were murdered as judging by statistics that concern unsolved murders you would say that getting away with murder on a native is a lot easier than getting away with murder on a white woman in Canada.

The latest episode of “Top10” dealt with the ten most searched google-queries concerning pornography. Did you know that most men and also a very high number of women worldwide who are looking for this kind of footage google for pornography that includes teenage boys and /or girls? That’s disgusting, because it’s so obvious due to their young age that most of these teens must have gotten forced into this. Also I presume that most of this footage is as illegal as disgusting child-pornography. Media keep telling people that the children and adolescents involved in these videos often are mistreated and got sold by extremely poor parents into sex-slavery.
What disgusts and enrages me even more however is that the following also made it to this Top 10-list: Many people also search for footage of adults or senior adolescents who do in mere children. That is disturbing and this result of this “Top 10 list really is a shame to society. I just hope that alerted by this video more people will report relatives and acquaintances who watch this kind of stuff to the police.