Graduation project tackles child trafficking

Advancing Yemeni law could help these children.

The trafficking of children from Yemen to neighboring  countries is a new phenomenon that should concern every Yemeni, said Emarat Ali Saber, a fourth-level student in the Faculty of Media at Sana’a University. To help raise awareness off this scourge, she chose child trafficking to be the focus of her graduation project.  “I believe in this problem and I wanted it to be the topic of my project,” said Saber. “I can see that there is childhood being killed and innocence being insulted.

I want every child to live a normal childhood like the one I lived. I hoped I could do something even to focus light on this problem, which is one of many others which children in the Yemeni society face.” A symposium held last Sunday, as part of this project, addressed this problem from various perspectives, and discussed the roles of law, the media, educational organizations, and families in combating this phenomenon.  Khaled al-Anesi, executive director of the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms, thinks that this problem is a serious one, especially in Yemen, where there is no law to protect those children.

The government does not help in solving the problem but make it worse, he said.  This problem has degenerated into organized crime, said al-Anesi. “There is a mafia specialized in child trafficking. This mafia includes officials and members of the Parliament. I met judges who told me that they could not stand against the problem because there are people who stand with those smugglers and increase the phenomenon,” he said. “It is a trade just like trading with terrorism.” Al-Anesi thinks that there are articles in the Yemeni law that  could help, but they are not enforced.

“Yemeni law does not include a punishment for child trafficking. There are many other laws, such as those to protect motherhood and childhood, the law of the child, and law of juveniles, but Yemeni laws are insufficient to address child trafficking.”  One article in Yemeni law discusses the crime of slavery.  This law says that child trafficking is not a slavery crime. International laws hold that those who sell, buy, offer, or use a person in any way should be punished with prison for a minimum of 10 years. 

“We used to read the article in Yemeni law which talks about the crime of slavery, but when it is compared with the international law, the international law basically says the same thing as the slavery law. So this law should be enforced and be used to stem child trafficking. Children are being trafficked in two ways. The first kind of child trafficking is economic child trafficking, which is done at the urging of the child’s parents. “Parents think that their children should work to be real men,” said al-Anesi.

Yemeni society looks at child labor as a way for a child to earn his manhood, said al-Anesi. To use children this way is a slavery crime.  The second kind of child trafficking involves kidnapping the child. This is done without the parents’ knowledge or acceptance. This crime is punishable by Yemeni law.  “Even if we do not have a law, and even if it is one child who has been trafficked, it is a personal freedom and the government should do something to solve a problem of more than six years.” 

If articles in the Yemeni law are not clear, then there should be a treatment for this law. “Judges should know there are crimes now that did not exist before, like the crime of child trafficking,” al-Anesi said.  Abdul-Qader Dahman, a researcher, spoke about the role of the family and educational organizations in treating the problem.  He narrated a story of the complaints of a student who suffers from her father’s bad treatment. Her mother, sisters and brothers also suffer from his mistreatment.  He suggested the creation of a family association, which the Yemeni family lacks most of the time, could help this family.

This story is one of many. “We usually hear old people either saying how wonderful it is to leave the house and to come back again, but with young people today we hear how wonderful is to leave the house and never to come back,” he said.   Families should sit together, and have a family library, said Dahman.  He conducted a study of 300 students, and found that only 10 percent of these students had a family library.  The second thing Dahman suggested is to have real social specialists in the schools.  He did another research on 20 schools in Sana’a, and he found that 70 percent of the social counselors had no specific training, but were merely failed teachers. 

Or, in some cases it turned out that they were friends of the headmaster who took jobs as counselors to avoid teaching.  He also pointed out that there are no TV educational programs for the family on national TV.   Many journalists and mass media have magnified the problem, said Ahmed al-Qurashi, a media worker and among the first to report on child trafficking.  He prefers to call it unlawful emigration, or escaping from hunger and unemployment, rather than child trafficking. “We cannot call it child trafficking like other foreign countries may call it. It is not, because Yemeni children are coming back, not being traded or sold,” he said. 

Al-Qurashi blamed many journalists and the mass media, which he says have reported the problem in wrong ways. Many reports used old or copied statistics, and referred to declarations, statements, and information from unknown sources.      As a citizen of these places where children are being smuggled, he can see that it is not a new problem. Part of these families in these areas live in Saudi Arabia, and this facilitates their going to Saudi Arabia.  Ali al-Borayhi, a researcher, said that the problem should be solved in a scientific way, and not with speeches. Al-Borayhi was one of the team who went with the UNICEF to Hajjah and al-Mahweet. 

The team found parents who had contracts on trafficking their children as if they want their children to bring money from these countries, he said. “We thought it to be child trafficking, but what we found was a desire from well-known parents to sell their children. There are children who smuggling heroin.”   The child trafficking project includes three parts: a symposium, brochure, and CD.

Saber achieved the first, and hopes she could do the same with others, and distribute them to all mass media and NGOs. She is also asking for help and support from mass media, NGOs, Ministry of Human Rights, Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, and families to stand with these children and to help them.    

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