Mozzeenet

It’s awful that people trafficking has become such a big trade all over the world. Vulnerable people are lured with promises of work and a better life. When you’re very poor it must be easy to fall into such traps. Wealthy, educated, self-sufficient people like us find it hard to understand how people can be duped into this type of thing.

Someone I spoke to recently had the view that these people have a choice so we shouldn’t feel any sympathy towards them. We’re so used to having choice in our society that we can’t understand when people don’t. We can’t understand how easy it is to be deceived especially if we’re a young teenage girl with very little experience in the world.

I attended a talk this week on ‘Child Trafficking in South Asia’, hosted by a non-profit organisation based in Melbourne, Friends of Kolkata. This organisation raises money to support NGOs in India. Representatives from one of these, the Centre for Communication and Development (CCD), based in Calcutta, which provide services to people who have been trafficked, spoke on the night. The speakers gave examples of young girls trafficked for prostitution, young boys as camel jockeys in the Middle East and disabled children for begging. One girl they spoke about from a very poor family had been tricked by a neighbour to go with a man who promised to marry her but then raped her and sold her for $AUD 700 to a brothel in Bombay. After that she was sold to brothels in Goa and other cities in India and contracted HIV. Finally she was rescued by CCD after a lot of hard work to find her and get her out.

This happens in many places including Eastern Europe and South-East Asia. It also happens here with the recent case of a woman being sentenced to gaol because she had held sex slaves, women who had been trafficked from Thailand, in Fitzroy Melbourne. The positive part of this is that our laws actually enabled her imprisonment to occur.

It’s shocking that people are treated as a commodity in this way. Of course slavery has been around forever. It’s not a new thing but in the world we live in today, it sickens me that there are so many out there willing to take advantage in such a terrible way of others who can’t defend themselves. I know it is a cycle and that those lower in the chain probably have very little as well but at the top, there are people who are raking in money from this, and that’s a travesty.

World Vision Australia have come up with a new website called One Big Village educating about social responsibility and the impact the choices and actions made by societies and individuals have on a global level.

One area of interest is how our buying habits can influence the lives of others. I guess most people are aware that some big corporations utilise sweat shops in third world countries to produce goods at the cheapest price possible. I went to an excellent photography exhibition coordinated by John Pilger a few years ago which brought this home to me and I also became more aware of this when living in Cambodia eg brand-name clothes selling for a couple of dollars at the markets in Phnom Penh. It is horrifying to think we spend hundreds of dollars on these goods in western countries to line the pockets of big companies while people are being exploited to make these items. Read more »

I’m a member of the Digital Divide Network Discussion Forum Listserv and the last few posts on the list have been about civiblogging or civic community journalism and its potential for providing alternatives to mainstream media, disseminating information and knowledge and allowing a wider range of voices to be heard. For more details, read the post titled multimedia blogging from the DNC in Boston.

The discussion was pertinent to a blogging experience I witnessed yesterday. My friend, Amit, writes a great blog about web standards, accessibility, digital photography and a bit more at Karmakars.com. He utilises a service on his website from a HUGE global internet company. It so happened that he had written a couple of entries about this HUGE global internet company over the past few months. Yesterday, the HUGE global internet company asked him to remove the blog entries from his site. One of these entries, in my opinion, did not breach any of the conditions of the service he utilises from the company, was not critical and constituted merely some personal meanderings about his own use of the service. Read more »