children

i am going to write an essay/article on children - i hope sometime this weekend. child soldiers to be exact. i came across this article today. i know a while ago rory shock did a GRAND piece on young boy camel jockeys. how can we allow ourselves to be 'buds' with countries who allow practices like this?

Dubai princes accused of masterminding trade in jockey slaves

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Published: 15 September 2006

Dubai's ruling family has been served with a class-action lawsuit in the United States accusing them of masterminding an international child slave trade to provide jockeys and attendants for the popular desert sport of camel-racing.
The suit names both Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the crown prince of Dubai, and his brother, Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid al-Maktoum, as being "the most active participants" in the slave trade, which was described and denounced in a US State Department report on human trafficking last year.
According to the suit, as many as 30,000 boys from South Asia and Africa could have been victimised in what it calls "one of the greatest humanitarian crimes of the last 50 years".
"Because camel racing is extremely dangerous and arduous, especially for children," the suit says, "the Arab sheikhs would not make their own children jockeys and trainers. The sheikhs instead bought boys who had been abducted and trafficked across international boundaries and enslaved as young as two years old............