DAY OF THE AFRICAN CHILD: African Union calls for action on trafficking

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[NEW YORK, 16 June 2007] – The African Union marked the Day of the African Child with a call to increase efforts to prevent child trafficking.

“Globally, an estimated 1.2 million children are trafficked each year, within countries as well as across borders,” said UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman. “Children are trafficked into prostitution, into armed groups to serve as child soldiers, to provide cheap or unpaid labour, and to work as house servants or beggars.

“Trafficking exposes children to violence, sexual abuse, severe neglect, and HIV infection. It violates their right to be protected, to grow up in a family environment, and to have access to education,” she added.

UNICEF is calling on governments, communities and families to work together to end trafficking.

One element in this collective approach must be the punishment of the perpetrators. Human trafficking generates an estimated $9.5 billion a year, attracting organised criminal gangs and leading to corruption on a global scale. The profits from human trafficking fuel other criminal activities.

Social and economic factors

But concerted action is also needed to tackle the social and economic factors behind this crime.

Poverty is central to child trafficking. Children are frequently lured with promises of good jobs in other countries or in cities in their own countries.

In reality they are traded like commodities to work in brutal conditions and many children face beatings and other forms of physical and sexual abuse from their employers.

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals will help families stay together and keep children in school. These are vital safeguards against child trafficking.

The Day of the African Child is celebrated on June 16 in recognition of the day when, in 1976, thousands of black school children in Soweto, South Africa, took to the streets to protest the inferior quality of their education and to demand their right to be taught in their own language.

Hundreds of young boys and girls were shot; and in the two weeks of protest that followed, more than 100 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured.

Further information

 

pdf: http://www.unicef.org/media/media_40002.html

Country: 
Algeria
Attachment Link: 
http://www.unicef.org/media/media_40002.html

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