Ignorance, Laziness and Fear

When some of my friends read my "What we can do” post, they said that they were expecting little more, maybe details , maybe a real punch line.
I guess being it the first time I write on the subject it’s a little difficult to get into details & sometimes more difficult trying to find another punch line except that we have to do something to make it stop.
Sometimes people need gory details to wake up to the reality that a lot of kids are living & sometimes people need something to move them into action.
The truth is that the gory details have been said, they are being said all the time on the news, on the net, in the papers, magazines & not to mention word of mouth. Almost everyone has heard of "someone" that "something" has happened to them.

Just to say that 700 people are being investigated in England for suspected child pornography on the net is more than enough.
A huge group of pedophiles from around the world could watch a live videos of a child being raped through these websites; they could see pictures & videos with children, some only months old being subjected to the worst type of abuse.
There are children who are being sold as sex slaves for $3 a night in Cambodia to foreigners that come from Europe & the U.S. and this is acceptable in this country & all the pedophiles through their websites are informed of this. These child prostitutes are often sold to their pimps by their own parents, step parents & caregivers.
This is even one of the ways in which the country gets financial income in the form of USD & EUR, which goes a much longer way than their national coin.

There are children in Mexico that are beaten by their caretakers, mostly parents & relatives & there is nothing defined completely in the Mexican constitution that that is illegal. The industrial city & probably the most wealthy in Mexico, Monterrey has the second place in statistics of the cities where there are more abuse cases. Even though a city may grow in wealth, industry & supposed education, (being the city where the best universities are) people still are ignorant on the subject of child abuse.

Also in Mexico there are kids that work in brick factories, children as old as 4 years old who haul bricks from morning to dusk, for less than the minimum wage. Obviously this is also a way for the country to have its own cheap labor, much like the wetback labor in the U.S.

This being said, it is obvious that the government in countries like Mexico & Cambodia don't see the urgent need to enforce the laws of child labor & child abuse. If you enforce one you have enforce the other & that would not benefit financially.
And there is more, in Russia there are no laws that protect children from abuse & these are among the children that are subject to the worst forms of abuse with no hopes for help. Japanese & Chinese children are sold & exported to different European countries so they can become sex slaves of some sick pervert.
The list goes on folks & there very little being done about it.

I think that we can make our society a safer place for our kids & an unsafe place for child abusers but that needs education on the subject, getting off our butts, doing something and most of all loosing the fear that we may have of exposing a crime.
In many countries where this is a main problem the culture in those countries is a very conservative hush-hush culture, where people prefer to keep appearances even though someone is suffering because of it, even themselves. But these are innocent kids that only have our voices, and someone needs to speak for them.

There are some main negative tendencies within people that have to be addressed & changed in order for this to happen, one of them is Ignorance.
Ignorance can be very dangerous when it comes to protecting our kids, ignorance can cause death. Being informed can save your life & especially the life of your kids.
Children are dying daily because of ignorance, that of their parents, caregivers & even doctors. Ignorance has to be fought by giving more importance to education of the individual, even if that means addressing embarrassing, conflicting, and polemic subjects. Caring more about what’s important, your child's life & less about what isn't, what people may say.

There are people that are ignorant & then there are the ones that want to be ignorant, they aren't but they are too lazy to do anything about it. They see the problem, they know its wrong, but they don't have time or (according to them) the strength to do anything about it.
These people are in my mind accomplices of the abuse that these kids suffer.
Because they know what is wrong, because they know what can happen when a child is left in those circumstances & yet they do nothing, not even a small attempt, because of laziness.

Then there is the worst of all; fear. Fear is one of the main reasons that people do nothing, fear the they may look bad, fear of making a mistake, fear of exposing someone that may cause you harm, fear that nothing will be done about it. There are hundreds of things that can happen, or go wrong when you expose abuse, but if you do something there are hundreds of things that can go well also. When you are fearful of what people may say, you are caring more about your reputation than the life of a child.
If you are fearful of making a mistake, the best you can do is inform yourself & if a mistake is made on your part, you can rest with the assurance that you did something & making a mistake is the risk you must take to save a child's life. It is much more of an offence to leave the life if a kid at risk than to accuse some grown person of abuse. But the more informed you are, smaller the chances are of making these mistakes.
If you are fearful of exposing someone that may want retribution later & may cause your family harm, then your fear is the one that I feel most empathy with. There is nothing that can guarantee that you will come out completely untouched by the whole matter, but that is also a price that has to be paid.

If you are fearful that nothing will be done about it by the authorities, that is a very real fear, but something is being done by you & that is what counts.
It may seem like there are a lot of risks in helping children, but when you consider the horrible things they are being subjected to, then your risk in entirely too small in comparison.