Child Slave Trafficking Spreads to US
Child maid trafficking spreads from Africa to US
IRVINE, Calif. (AP)—Late at night, the neighbors saw a little girl at the kitchen sink of the house next door.
They watched through their window as the child rinsed plates under the open faucet. She wasn’t much taller than the counter and the soapy water swallowed her slender arms. To put the dishes away, she climbed on a chair.
But she was not the daughter of the couple next door doing chores. She was their maid.
Shyima was 10 when a wealthy Egyptian couple brought her from a poor village in northern Egypt to work in their California home. She awoke before dawn and often worked past midnight to iron their clothes, mop the marble floors and dust the family’s crystal. She earned $45 a month working up to 20 hours a day. She had no breaks during the day and no days off.
Once behind the walls of gated communities like this one, these children never go to school. Unbeknownst to their neighbors, they live as modern-day slaves, just like Shyima, whose story is pieced together through court records, police transcripts and interviews.
The U.S. State Department found that over the past year, children have been trafficked to work as servants in at least 33 of Africa’s 53 countries. Children from at least 10 African countries were sent as maids to the U.S. and Europe. But the problem is so well hidden that authorities - including the U.N., Interpol and the State Department - have no idea how many child maids now work in the West.
“In most homes, these girls are not allowed to use so much as the same spoon as the rest of the family,” said Hany Helal, the Cairo-based director of the Egyptian Organization for Child Rights.
It is sad that children are being forced into slavery and even working in the sex trade around the world; but even sadder that we have it going on in this country, mostly by alien residents.
Read the full story to understand not just how these children are being brought here legally, but the lives they must lead. The truth is, far too many aliens coming here to prosper insist upon not assimilating and becoming Americans in spirit, but yheu bring their ways of living with them and not only refuse to change, they are offended that we would ask them to obey our laws.
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