Source: The New York Times
NEW DELHI — The girl’s screams were brittle and desperate. Neighbors in the suburban housing complex looked up and saw a child crying for help from an upstairs balcony. She was 13 and worked as a maid for a couple who had gone on vacation to Thailand. They had left her locked inside their apartment.
After a firefighter rescued her, the girl described a life akin to slavery, child welfare officials said. Her uncle had sold her to a job placement agency, which sold her to the couple, both doctors. The girl was paid nothing. She said the couple barely fed her and beat her if her work did not meet expectations. She said they used closed-circuit cameras to make certain she did not take extra food.
In India, reported to have more child laborers than any other country in the world, child labor and trafficking are often considered symptoms of poverty: desperately poor families sell their children for work, and some end up as prostitutes or manual laborers.
Categories: Asia, Children, Human Rights, India
This is so heart-rending. Unfortunately, it is happening all over the developing and under-developed nations and there was a very in-depth article about this in a recent National Geographic.
It makes you cry to know that there are such desperate people in these countries and also that there are heartless so-called humans who can do such things to their fellow humans.
How pathetic! May Allah help these needy people so that they don’t have to end up having their own flesh and blood be mistreated….