Slumdog Millionaire Girl To Join Ranks Of Brown Babies For Sale?
20 April 2009, 3:00 PM. By Camilla Rowan
Oscar-winning Slumdog child-star Rubina Ali might soon join the other 1.2 million children that are trafficked worldwide in developing countries like Peru and Colombia–her father is reportedly offering to sell the nine year old girl for around $300,000.
Rubina still lives in a slum town in India and her father, Rafiq Qureshi, says he’s angry that the film’s directors didn’t support Rubina’s family more and that selling her is his way of helping Rubina and the rest of his family find a better life. Apparently Qureshi didn’t get the memo about child trafficking still being totally illegal, not to mention gross and unconscionable.
Impoverished parents selling their kids isn’t anything new, and despite Ricky Martin’s best efforts to protect exploited children it’s an increasingly severe problem in Latin America, too. Human trafficking is the second biggest and most profitable crime in Latin America, right after drug trafficking. UNICEF estimates that around 1.2 million children are trafficked per year in a market valued at more than $12 billion dollars. Children are one of the groups most vulnerable to trafficking, as they’re sold not just for labor or sex work but in illegal adoptions to buyers in North America, Europe and Asia. The average starting age for female sex workers, (often taken from Central or South America and sent to the U.S.) is 13 years old.
The anti child-trafficking group Ahava Kids comments on the severity of the situation,
“There are more slaves now than ever before according to the US Department of State, the United Nations, the International Labor Organization. Human trafficking is worse now than the Pharos of Egypt, the Roman Empire, or the transatlantic slave trade of the colonial era. Vatican Quote: ‘It’s worse than the slavery of those who were taken from Africa and brought to other countries.’ “
Seems the demand for brown babies is on the rise, and we can’t put all the blame on Angelina Jolie and Madonna- in Rubina’s case, it’s the parents themselves.
Slumdog Millionaire Star Rubina Ali OFFERED FOR SALE By Her Father [Huffington Post]
Statistics [Ahava Kids]
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Children like R Ali (like her except for the whole Oscar winning thing) are routinely sold for as little as $300 in India and parts of SE Asia. Most often the sales are within the country, either to brothels or to middle class families looking for cheap domestic servants.
It would be hard to sell a child in America. They don’t clean up $hit and you have to buy them a Wii to get any exercise.
That is so terrible. I would buy her for 300k if I had the money. I wouldn’t make her a slave though, just a spoiled, bratty, self-indulgent, self-entitiled teenager.