HUMAN PREDATORS LURKING IN THE RUINS FOR HAITI'S CHILDREN

This just angers me to no end. Those that have followed this blog for the past two and half years knows that stories dealing with violence towards women and children really inflame my passion to do something to fight against it. After all it was the horrific incident at Dunbar Village that was the impetus for creating this blog in the first place.

Our brothers and sisters in Haiti continue to surfer in the aftermath of horrible earthquake of about two weeks ago. As if there wasn't enough to deal with, now there is the problem of human predators prowling the ravaged streets looking for children, many who have lost their parents, to take and exploit.

"Mia Pean's heart sank last week when she saw the Toyota pickup truck cruising the debris-cluttered streets of Leogagne, ground zero for the earthquake that has devastated Haiti. Each time the driver saw a child - especially a young teen - he would stick his head out of the window and shout, "Manje, manje," Creole for "eat." Pean says she watched the hungry kids, four or five at a time, hop into the back of the pickup, which then disappeared. "I saw the same man again a few days later in Carrefour," a poor suburb of Port-au-Prince, says Pean. "I asked him, 'What are you doing with all those children?' He said, 'Don't worry, we're going to put them in safe homes.' Then he drove off."

But Pean, a Haitian-American emergency consultant for the Andrew Young Foundation, doubts that altruism is the motive of the pickup driver, and others like him, who are now prowling Haiti's streets. The quake that has killed 150,000 people has left thousands of children orphaned, and vulnerable to being preyed upon by child traffickers and Haiti's shameful tradition of keeping child slaves known as restaveks. "I really fear," says Pean, "that most of the kids you see being picked up on the streets in Haiti right now are going to become restaveks or victims of sexual trafficking." Time Magazine article on Haiti. Read more here

Something must be done about this. We have to do something to protect and shelter these poor chidren from those evil people who would seek to enslave and exploit them.