Child trafficking in Cambodia
Child trafficking in Cambodia
Thursday 01 January 2009
Caring investigates child trafficking in Cambodia. Despite stricter legislation, the problem is still rampant. On one side are parents who want to foster a child, and on the other, Cambodian parents' poverty which pushes them to sell their own.
Special Report Caring: humanitarian reports around the world
By FRANCE 24 (text) / Michaël SZTANKE (video)
Child trafficking, a loose term with negative connotations, is essentially when young offspring are given away to wealthy foreigners in exchange for money.
For lucky adopters, the actual sum is inconsequential. Exhausted after costly and upsetting attempts in their own countries, many gratefully look to smaller, developing nations in their bid to find a child, countries like Cambodia, where widespread poverty forces many locals to consider desperate ways to make ends meet.
Dazzled by the promise of a better life for their loved ones, parents and families readily relinquish control and sign away their offspring. But an increasing number of abuses of the system by rogue adoption agencies has prompted many Western governments to immediately suspend all adoptions of Cambodian children.
In France, the government has only just recently lifted the ban that had been in place for some five years, but French authorities are enforcing stringent tests and vetting on would-be parents.
In Cambodia, there are as yet few laws against the widespread corruption and not enough incentive to make parents stop this tragic practice of selling their children.
Child Trafficking/Selling Children
By Vijet - USA Dallas
This is the most dispicable and sad stories that often broadcast by the media all the time, but nothing ever been done by the government. When I visited Cambodia in 1996, I too encountered a woman who tried to sell her 6 months daughter and her one and a half years old son to me for $20.00 each.
According to this woman's story, she said she wanted to sell her children because she's too poor and she can't afford to take care of them. She said her family are poor, her husband gamble and sold all their farm land and divorced her. She came to Phnom Penh to find a job and she got raped and ended up with two children. The man who raped her left her to died on the street with her two baby so she had to force herself to sell her children. I did not have the heart to buy any of her children, so I offer approximately $60.00 dollars to go back to her hometown in Kompong Chhnang Province to live with her relatives. After giving her the money, I saw her took off with her two babies on a bus from the Old Market in Phnom Penh, but whether or not she went back, I've never seen her since. I left Phnom Penh after approximately one month of visiting the country.
I bet there are thousands of poor families out there that does the same things as the woman I've encountered. It's a horrify story to hear, but believe it or not, these kinds of unhumane act always occur throughout the country around the world. At the same time, there are whole lots of preditors out there who are waiting for opportunity to purchase children for their benefit such as selling them illegally into child prostitutions and so forth.
