Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi Aims To Eliminate Child Labor

This is  a very important topic that exists in America also.  I just want you all to know, anywhere children cannot play there is pain.  This occurs in America too

1. It occurs with certain parents like mine who make their children work in the fields (in rural areas of America where this slavery can be hidden) from Sun-up till Sun-down with out a break and not a dime for the work they have done.  I hoed weeds in fields, fixed combines, got run over by a tractor and not taken to the hospital and I believe this is a human rights violation.  My dad really acted like a new-age slave master with a whip that was his fist and the fear that he infused us with every day -- He could take our lives at any second and no one would know it and no one would care and he literally would scream over and over "You are my slaves; You do what ever I tell you to do. When I tell you to jump the only thing I want to hear from you is 'how high?' ". This is really where my childhood migraines came from.  This cruelty and perpetual lack of safety, humiliation and shame.

2. I also saw it occur with young hispanic migrant children who worked with their parents.  This was generally rare, I think because my dad tried to hire those without children, but I did see it occasionally.   It made me cringe.. I always wondered? Why aren't those children in school, at least in the fall when I started back up in school--- I saw school as my only escape? .  If they didn't have school?  How could they escape? I also saw the ransacked, lead paint soaked place my dad put them up in.  It was actually little worse than what my siblings and I were living in, a broken down trailer...just 400 ft max away.  This lead soaked ransacked place was my grandpa's house, the place where grandma had died, which by this time was in absolute ruins. Only the number of people my dad and the "migrant worker master"  or whatever the name is could fit in there was truly astounding... I was always concerned at how many people they packed in that small house without running water (but our trailer didn't have running water either)... It was very confusing but that is how I think my concern for all this lack of humanity was born... I saw what they were going through.. I could totally relate and I was morally disturbed to the core.  

3. Cecilia, a restless wisp of a girl, heard the pitch and ached to go. Her stepfather had been murdered, forcing her, her mother and four younger siblings into her aunt’s tiny home, with just three beds for 10 people. It was all they had — and all a smuggler needed. He offered them a loan of $7,000 for Cecilia’s journey, with the property as a guarantee. “I gave him the original deed,” said Jacinta, her aunt, noting that the smuggler gave them a year to repay the loan, with interest. “I did it out of love.”

The trip lasted nearly a month, devolving from a journey of want and fear into an outright abduction by smugglers in the United States. Freedom came only after an extra $1,000 payment, made at a gas station in Fort Myers, Fla., as her kidnappers flashed a gun.

Now in Miami, Cecilia, 16, is one of more than 50,000 unaccompanied minors who have come to the United States illegally from Central America in less than a year. Though the number of new arrivals has been declining, the Obama administration says it is determined to “confront the smugglers of these unaccompanied children,” and the “cartels who tax or exploit them in their passage.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014...l?referrer=&_r=0