Child exploitation

Today I decided to write on a serious and non-fictional matter for some reason. Possibly to counter the hilarity that Simpsons: The Movie is. In any case... The topic is child exploitation.

And no, I'm not going to talk about African child soldiers. Or about South America's field-working kids. Or Asian sweatshop workers. Or even the good old times when all good children of England worked as chimney sweeps (and got stuck in the chimneys and died - which is true) or factory and coal mine workers. I'm going to talk about our own democratic etc society.

First of all, I would like to point to the following picture. What do we see? We see a young African boy, looking sad and serious. Now, if we look at majority of UNICEF pictures, what we see is similar imagery - sad and serious children. Occasionally, it's a happy child (To show the help UNICEF provides) or a woman. One nearly never sees an adult male in the picture. While this is clear sexism, the point is in the following fact - by "following the call of your heart", which these pictures evoke, you essentially condone exploitation of children and women.

Why so? Well, first of all, the images are used to manipulate - quite well so - the viewer into sympathy. We don't know the background of the kid, but we presume he's sad over not having eaten for ten days, having little water, no education and so forth. The woman on the picture will, of course, mean powerlessness in the male-dominated world, lack of career, education and freedom (Undeniably, this is too much so in many cases, but that is besides the point). The picture furthermore draws on either parental feelings or feelings of compassion/solidarity/generosity or, most importantly, guilt. I mean, you can't let a child starve, can you? Tsk, tsk, heartless you for passing by such a picture without signing up as a benefactor.

But now, let's think about it. These children, do they know and fully understand the purpose of being taken pictures of? That they will be used to trick money out of people for what the benefactors call "saving their people" or whatnot? Do they fully approve the fact that millions of people will see it and give their money just because of the sad look upon a child's face rather than studying the facts and doing charity out of their own premeditated decision? This is no better than someone begging at the street by lying that they're blind, out of place to live and will have a foot amputation tomorrow. It is a manipulation and a lie.


But in fact, a lot of manipulations are based on children - or women. Considering the age we're supposedly living in, it is odd, to say the least. Have you ever heard the phrase, "But think of all the children!"? Well, how about thinking of all their parents, or people that can as easily make children as well? Like, how about thinking of "the people"? But nah, people are already grown up, they aren't helpless, they can stand up for themselves. Right? So let's use the "children" card again, since they're the flowers of the future and so on - a better, more enlightened us. If this isn't exploiting a child, I don't quite know what is. This isn't even exploiting the child physically, this is exploiting on an ideological level - in order to get your agenda through. UNICEF uses kids to get cash to presumeably save the world, Mattel uses kids to gain millions in Barbie sales (what good parent can refuse a crying child a new, shiny, lovely toy?), some governmental official uses the phrase to carpet-bomb a minor third-world country... Doing it all for the kids.



Don't get me wrong, I like kids just as much as any normal person does. Besides, as our Literature teacher Lidya says, children are people. There's the good, the bad, the ugly. One can't like all people, same way, one can't like all children, either.

It's just that I like them enough to not like having them used.