Clemente Ferrer/Special To The Santiago Times
NEW DELHI – More than 200,000 children are being exploited in India, working in harsh conditions.
Under labor exploitation, without access to education and without having covered their basic needs, these children suffer the consequences of a society that looks at them with indifference.
To publicize this unfair situation, the advertising agency McCann Erickson New Delhi has created the “Child in a Box” campaign, an initiative that aims to show this harsh reality to everyone.
These are boxes whose upper part presents a happy child but at the moment when it opens, show the subhuman conditions of exploited children. They have been put up for sale in various parts of the country and the money raised will be used to improve the living conditions of these children.
This reality should lead us to an active participation in favor of others, since South Asia has the worst rates of child labor exploitation, with more than 100 million children who exist as beasts of burden.
In Guatemala there are about one million children working in a precarious situation. The authorities have launched a campaign against child labor under the slogan “Do not wash your hands. Work is not childish.” This spot has been awarded at the Cannes Advertising Festival.
In Spain, Anesvad has been periodically launching a campaign to recover slave girls to train them and to gain a decent job under the slogan: “Sex trafficking is a destination marked by misery for many girls in Southeast Asia.” This slavery of children is denounced by two American organizations; Human Rights Watch and Domestic Child, in separate reports. For these creatures, the money paid to them by their exploiters is limited to food and something to wear.
According to the report of the Pontifical Mission Societies, the numbers of child slaves are appalling; 14 million AIDS orphans. Of the 600 million poor children in the world; 130 million do not attend school; 180 million suffer from malnutrition; 250 million suffer labor exploitation, and one million children fall into sex trade networks.
