Torturing Children

I’m upset this morning, having read the headline and story about Philip Garido’s kidnapping, rape and 19-year incarceration of Jaycee Lee Dugard. She was abducted when she was eleven years old. I can’t imagine what that little girl went through.

This story is shocking because of the youth of the child and the way years were stolen from her childhood, her life. It’s more shocking because such stories are very unusual in the U.S. or anywhere in the first world. When we hear about such an outrage we are stunned, but throughout the world such stories would be more commonplace, if the child victims had a voice to tell them.

That story was a reminder about what kids all over the world suffer due to their lack of power. One of my students once told me about how she left her country. Let’s call her Grace. She was six when soldiers came to her village in Sierra Leone, and burned it. Her parents were killed, and

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Grace and her 10-year-old brother ran. They ran and ran until they had run right across the country, from Sierra Leone into Guinea, the ten-year-old protecting the six-year-old. My own son was ten at the time and I was aghast at the prospect of a child of that age looking after himself, let alone a younger child. The children I have known just didn’t have very much commonsense at that age. I guess that little boy, Grace’s brother, learned fast, and Grace kept it together in unimaginable circumstances, somehow, until she and her child managed to arrive in Australia, after many years in refugee camps.

The stories of children are more compelling than those of adults because their suffering is more tragic. They have no power to change their circumstances and overcome their oppression. We must feel for them. I support Oxfam because of their successful program which frees child soldiers.

The militias which kidnap children and force them to become soldiers are proxies of multinational companies and foreign powers. See http://www.globalwitness.org/media_library_detail.php/782/en/global_witness_uncovers_foreign_companies_links_to_congo_violence
Because we all consume the products which are developed from the raw materials mined in places like the Congo, we are all culpable in this kidnapping and torture of children.