British kids need care
Shaadaab S. Bakht
@ShaadaabSBakhtShaadaab S. Bakht, who worked for famous Indian dailies The Telegraph, The Pioneer, The Sentinel and wrote political commentaries for Tehelka.com, is Gulf Today’s Executive Editor.
The photo has been used for illustrative purposes.
Nothing leaves us as vulnerable as adversity does. It leaves us with a set of eyes, which stops seeing reason and a mind that turns incorrigibly manipulative. That’s why the hardened criminal is constantly found prowling for those felled by adversity. He invariably lands on one, he throws crumbs, he rules.
While the victim lives, the crime boss flourishes in this reprehensible alliance. The latter’s luxuriant ways are built bead by bead with the former’s sweat. That has been the truth and that’s why truth is fast losing its sheen.
Therefore, I wasn’t surprised to read a report saying how underfed and homeless children were being exploited by drug peddlers in Britain.
Details about what prosecutors have called one of Britain’s largest-ever modern day slavery rings have emerged with the conviction of eight people.
And some of us will call them streetwalkers derisively after having created the street for them to walk on
Prosecutors say more than 400 victims were forced to work for minuscule wages while their masters earned some £2 million ($2.5 million) and lived a luxurious lifestyle.
The group preyed on the homeless, former convicts and alcoholics in Poland and lured them to Britain with false promises of well-paid work. Some ended up being paid less than $1 for a day’s work and were held in squalid conditions.
British schoolchildren as young as seven were being exploited by criminal gangs and forced to deal in drugs, with some duped into debt bondage, reports said.
Thousands of children in Britain were being used by so-called county lines gangs to carry drugs from cities to be sold in rural areas, according to a research by The Children’s Society, a charity.
The fear is that in some years some of the boys will grow up to be criminals and some of the girls will be forced to turn to the streets. And some of us will call them streetwalkers derisively after having created the street for them to walk on.
When they are children the police have to tell us they are being abused. When they grow up some of us abuse them or look the other way when it’s happening. And yet we are never tired of hard selling ourselves as progressive. If such a report comes from a society as liberal as that of Britain, one wonders what’s going on in patently backward countries where the only vigilance is fate.
It’s high time we did everything to stop the malady of child abuse.
It is all very modern to gush about the great utility of Artificial Intelligence and issue of climate change, but our feelings for our fellow humans should never turn artificial and that position should never change.
