I don’t know much about child maid trafficking, but I have to say this: couldn’t it be a great opportunity for rich families not only to get in-house help, but also to help a bright child from a poor family have a chance to make something more of his or her life?
What if a rich family hired a child maid and she only worked a couple of hours a day, had a nice room, went to school and was treated kindly?
It seems wrong to make any child work for money; then again, it also seems wrong to let them lead the life of leisure most North American kids and teenagers seem to be living.
I wonder what former child maids would have to say about this. Abusive households aside (no one should ever be abused, child or not, employee or not), would they have preferred to be left in their village with the limited options it offered, or be shipped off at the age of 10 to a house where they are well-treated, not overworked and with a chance for an education?
Until I get to converse with such a young lady, here is an article worth reading on the topic.
Child maid trafficking spreads from Africa to US
By Rujkmini Callimachi, Associated Press Writer; published on December 28th 2008
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.”
Read the rest of the article here.