September
2003
Going
Fishing? Child Slavery in Ghana
By Monika Parikh
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The difficult tasks of the small-scale fishing industry
in Ghana, on which many local villagers survive, are done by children
who, from as young as six years old, are forced to work, without pay.
Oftentimes these children are swimming for the very first time in their
lives, and without being taught how, are forced to dive to the bottom
of the lake to pull the nets caught on buried tree stumps. They may
get stuck in the nets—and drown; others freeze in the water because
it is so cold, and their bodies just wash up on shore. If they survive,
children are sometimes able to earn a little money on the side, and
they save up to get their own boat and their own slaves.
Instead of relying on middlemen to kidnap or buy children and transport
them to the work site, local fishermen procure children themselves
from
nearby villages, often by telling parents that they’ll get an
education or learn a good trade. Parents agree, and receive an initial
payment, usually about 200,000 cedis (about $25) from the fishermen,
who then disappear with their children.
Lake Volta is one of these fishing villages, and the fishermen are
considerably poor themselves—some of them have money to send their own children
to school in Accra, the capital; others don’t even have that.
APPLE (Association of People for Practical Life Education) is a local
organization trying to combat this form of child slavery. Group members
try to build trust within the communities and get the fishermen to talk—to
think about questions like, “How would you feel if your own child
was in this situation?” and, “What would you need in order
to not enslave children?”
APPLE’s method is to, while giving technical support to the fishermen,
help the children figure out what it is that they want. Some children
don’t remember where they’re from; or are afraid to go back
to their parents because they were the ones who told them to go with
their slaveholder in the first place. They’ll stay in a transitional
home, where they may receive psychological rehabilitation, and where
arrangements may be made to get them vocational training or into school.
Monika Parikh spent 10 months in Ghana last year working to
free enslaved children and to build relationships with the fishermen
in search of a long-term solution to this problem. Parikh was working
with Free the Slaves, an international anti-slavery organization (www.freetheslaves.net).
She is currently working to free child carpet weavers in India.
The Unseen Victims of HIV/AIDS
Not only is HIV/AIDS affecting adult populations worldwide,
it is leaving behind a generation orphans—millions of vulnerable,
traumatized children.
According to a report by the Worldwatch Institute, at the end of 2001,
more than 13 million children under the age of 15 in Africa, Asia, and
Latin America had lost a parent to AIDS, with more than 11 million of
them living in Africa—roughly equivalent to the population of
the greater New York area. Of those, 3.8 million are “double orphans”—those
who have lost both parents, at least one of them to AIDS. This number
is expected to jump to 6.9 million by 2010.
AIDS orphans face particular hardships. In addition to tremendous physical
and emotional insecurity, many also face stigma and discrimination.
Without foster care, many children are forced to live on the streets.
Sexual exploitation and drug use heighten the risk that orphaned street
children will contract the same virus that their parents succumbed to.
—C.C.
Source: Vital Signs 2003 (Worldwatch Institute).
