YEMEN: Children Pushed by Parents Into Slavery

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nabil Sultan

SANA'A, Yemen, Nov 28 2005 (IPS) - Twenty children, five of them handicapped, were rescued from a gang of traffickers in Yemen earlier this month. Rights group say the arrests point to large-scale operations.

The ministry of social affairs has acknowledged that about 300 Yemeni children are caught in Saudi Arabia each month.

A centre has now been opened to house rescued children at the Harad border crossing into Saudi Arabia. The centre houses large numbers of children caught before being taken to Saudi Arabia, or those deported from there.

According to several indications, child trafficking in Yemen has been increasing over the years since Yemeni workers were expelled from Saudi Arabia in the 1990s following the first Gulf War.

Children began to be sent into Saudi Arabia instead, because Saudi authorities do not prosecute children; they merely deport them. Many of the children were taken by organised groups, but large numbers were sent to Saudi Arabia by their families, social workers say.

“Extreme poverty and unemployment led many Yemeni families to take their children to traffickers, who deal very inhumanely with the children,” Amat al-Rahman, a social worker specialising in family affairs told IPS.

Many of the children were found to have been taken across the border by a member of their own family and abandoned there. In several cases parents were found to have paid traffickers to take their children away to Saudi Arabia, social workers say. The traffickers usually take a cut from the children’s earnings.

Many Yemeni families live off the earning of their banished children. Most children earn money in Saudi Arabia through begging or hard and sometimes dangerous labour, according to children’s accounts gathered by workers.

The great fear in families is deportation of the children, and not their safety, social workers say.

The ministry says the children face violence, hunger, sexual exploitation and extortion at the hands both of the traffickers and of border guards and authorities if they are caught.

“The hardship is particularly severe for very young children aged five or six, who cannot tell authorities where they are from, and therefore have to stay in detention for long periods,” a social worker told IPS.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) says children are often detained at the Harad centre along with adults who are deported. The children in detention are often abused. “By default anyone deported to Yemen is considered guilty of a crime,” senior programme officer for Unicef in Yemen, Solofo Ramaroson told IPS.

“In cases where we are able to return children to their families, we sometimes find that their families force them again to try to find work in Saudi Arabia,” a senior official in Harad told IPS.

Souad al-Habashi, Unicef officer specialising in child protection in Yemen says the legislation is being tightened. “There is no law against trafficking in Yemen. Agents can only be prosecuted for abuse and imprisoned for three to six months. This is being changed.”

Detention is no solution to the problem, social workers say. Families need to be helped out of difficult living conditions, and need to be educated about dangers from traffickers, they say.

“We cannot tell families to keep their children at home and live in hunger and poverty,” Prof. Mohammed al-Sharafi, an academic who has studied the problem told IPS. “Finding out the reasons and finding solutions is better than deploying guards along the borders to arrest the same child many times.”