18 Aug 2008 |
|
According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of the sixth edition; a child is a young human being who is not yet an adult. Trafficking is also defined as an act of buying and selling things illegally. So, child trafficking is an inhuman act where children are being used unjustly as objects of business transaction and making profit by the greedy people that carry out this act. The children who fall victim of child trafficking usually come from very poor parents who are living mostly in rural areas. Such parents have been easily deceived by the traffickers who promise to take their children to school either abroad or in the urban cities because of the general thinking of the villagers that there are gold, silver, and diamonds scattered on the streets of the big city. Probably out of greediness they willingly give out their children with the prospect of getting rich through them. Instead of putting the children in their trust to schools and for skill acquisition, the traffickers force them to work as house girls, prostitutes, drug traffickers, and in some cases especially in West Africa are either forced into combatant fighting as child-soldiers or use for rituals. In Nigeria, children as young as 7 years of age are being trafficked for child labour while those in their teens are forcefully engaged into prostitution. It is an open secret that many Nigerian girls engage in the sex trade in Italy while there is an upsurge in the number of Nigerian girls for the same trade in Belgium and Netherlands lately. The most frightful dimension to the escapade is he route to the escapade. They trafficked victims have to pass through difficult terrains either by sea, air or road where most of them lost their lives. What could have been the gain from these unwholesome exercises? The activities of traffickers and their victims have increased the prevalence of STDs including HIV/AIDS, violence, crime rate, drug abuse, increased school drop-outs, poor national image, and the massive deportation of Nigerians from other countries. According to a recent news report, child trafficking in Nigeria is taking a new dimension with unregistered and illegal hospitals and maternity homes are springing up as baby factories where young girls who mistakenly got pregnant are harboured and their new born babies being sold to syndicates without going through the existing laws and procedures of adoption in Nigeria. And due to ignorance and greed some girls are even ready to be put to bed for monetary rewards of exchanging their babies. All hope is not lost as every problem has a solution. The government can still curb this evil practice in order to save children and the good name of the country. Firstly, government should provide free education in every government owned school in the country from the nursery to the secondary level so that parents will have no excuse of giving out their children to strangers in the pretext of taking them to learn new sill in new environment. Secondly, government should pay workers salaries at the end of each month because they have personal bills to foot; children to cater for and they depend solely on their salaries. Thirdly, the parliamentary arm of the government should make and amend law that all Nigerian families should not have more than 3 children and any found to go against the law would be punished because one of the causes of child trafficking in Nigeria is the inability of parents to cater for their so many children. Also, government should make laws for children against child abuse and intimidation which should be strictly adhered to. Last but not the least, government should come to an agreement with leaders of other countries that any Nigerian child suspected to be abused or trafficked should be rescued and the trafficker, punished.
Tola Ojo Department of Mass-Communication Lead City University Ibadan
|
|||||||||
# 
Your Comments
Please make The Square an enjoyable experience for everyone by refraining from gratuitous ad-hominem contributions, defamatory comments and off-topic posting. Such posts will be removed.