Written on January 27, 2006

This is an article I wrote for the Youth Town newspaper, a publication for the University of San Diego’s annual World Link program.  

What do children need? Food, shelter, and protection are three essentials. But more importantly, according to Christine Mundt-Pérez, children need hope.

Mundt-Pérez works for Project Concern International (PCI), a non-government organization founded in San Diego, California in 1961. PCI operates in various parts of the world, including Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Mundt-Pérez and her collaborate Bettina Halvorsen recently traveled to Ethiopia, where they examined the brutality of child trafficking and worked with local organizations in an effort to end this crisis.

Traffickers, who can be men or women, sift into rural villages to take children into the city for the price of a small fee.

Parents usually pay this fee, believing that the traffickers will provide shelter and an education for the children. But upon arrival to the cities, traffickers force children to become prostitutes in brothels. The children undergo genital mutilation, rape, or are cornered into exhaustive labor in sweat shops. And because the children owe their trafficker a migration fee, they keep selling their bodies to fund this perpetual debt.

But children should not owe anything, according to many groups like PCI.  This idea inspires them to solve the problem on different levels, from the countryside where children are snatched to the cities where they are sold.