Week 3 Blog 3 Child Exploitation and Abuse

Triangle:

There are several pressures that a child in faces when they are led into the world of sex work.  A graphic example of this is “Thailand in general, and in Baan Nua especially, this sense of duty was reversed.  Children are said to owe a debt of gratitude (bun khun) to their parents and

Especially their mothers; they should be the ones to repay their parents for giving

The life and it is part of children’s duty to support their parents in whatever way

They can (Mulder, 1979; Tantiwiramanond and Pandey, 1989).”  In these cultures it is not uncommon for the parents to be the reason that a child turns to sex work in order to help the family financially.  For those that cannot find work or a means of sending money home to the family, generally the sex trade is where they turn.  Children as young as 5 in a story done by Chris Hanson’s Dateline were reported to be turned out to the sex trade in order to financially help their families.

Poverty is something that links all of this together.  All of the stories in today’s readings and viewing had one thing in common and that was poverty.  The fact that families even combined in the labor industry still have taken to turning to illegal and the shady sex trade in order to maintain the minimum needs of life. 

Square:

It is difficult to find one thing that squares with you on a topic that in itself is very wrong.  I cannot say for oneself that if I woke tomorrow with no other means to taking care of myself or my family what I would do; it is repulsive to think that sending one of my children out to work in the sex trade is something that some could consider.  In reading of the children of Taiwan and Vietnam you see that these girls and in some cases boys probably see nothing more than their responsibility to family; it makes you truly consider how lucky you are just to have the freedoms we do. 

Circle:

A point that is worth noting in the writing on the 22 women in Vietnam was what their stories have to do with helping tomorrow.  Today “Life stories or narratives are increasingly being used in social science research as a means to describe and give meaning to experiences and choices in the lives of people. Narratives are understood as stories that ‘include a temporal ordering of events and an effort to make something out of those

Events’ (Sandelowski, 1991: 162).”  What at least can be hoped from all of this is that the stories of these to young youth can in some way change the way that children of the future are treated.  Groups are studying the common links between poverty, child labor and the many different realms that children are pushed into way to early in their lives.  With these continuing studies they learn more how not only to help these children but maybe someday how to curb different trades that these young minds are forced to live through, and possibly hand down to future generations.

 Montgomery, H. (2007). Working with child prostitutes in Thailand: Problems of practice and interpretation. Childhood, 14(4), 415.
Rubenson, B., Hanh, L. T., Hojer, B., & Johansson, E. (2005). Young sex-workers in ho chi minh city telling their life stories. Childhood, 12(3), 391.

Taylor, L. R., Mulder, M. B., Formoso, B., Liddell, C., Montgomery, H., Nieuwenhuys, O., et al. (2005). Dangerous trade-offs. Current Anthropology, 46(3), 411-431.