Hundreds gather for human rights walk at pier

| Sunday, October 22, 2006 10:52 PM PDT ∞

ADRIENNE A. AGUIRRE - Staff Writer

OCEANSIDE ---- Imagine, as a child in Cambodia in 1975, being moved into a slave camp where girls as young as 10 were forced into marriage and younger children performed hard labor from sunup to sundown.

That was the experience of Chivy Sok, who shared her story Sunday night at the 18th Annual Candlelight Walk for Human Rights organized by the North County Chapter of Amnesty International.

Hundreds of people gathered at the Oceanside pier for the event, titled "Protecting the Children." The crowd listened to speakers in the seaside band shell, before joining in the candlelight walk down the pier.

According to Amnesty International, 250 million children worldwide are engaged in some form of labor, including 180 million who are subjected to the most severe forms of child labor.

"The slave-like conditions that I went through ... (are) still happening all over the world," said Sok, 37, who has been in the United States for 26 years. "Rather than focusing on the past, I want to focus on the future of others."

Following Sok's speech, the crowd heard from a man identified only as "Gerald," a 32-year-old former child soldier from Uganda. He said he came to the U.S. two years ago seeking political asylum. Amnesty International estimates that, worldwide, roughly 300,000 children serve as soldiers.

Gerald said he didn't like talking about the past and didn't want to focus on it, because he survived while others did not. He said that in Uganda, young boys are being kidnapped by a group called the "Lord's Resistance Army" and are trained to kill by shooting each other.

"Then they send you back to your village to kill your own people," he said. "If you run away, they shoot you."

Child slavery isn't just a far-away problem, said Marisa Ugarte, executive director of the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition that combats slavery and human trafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border. Ugarte has been fighting the local exploitation of men, women and children for the last 20 years.

She said even children in the United States, mostly immigrants, are being forced into labor as agricultural, restaurant and domestic workers. But the worst form of child labor, she said, is sexual slavery, which victimizes children of all backgrounds.

According to the U.S. State Department, 14,000 women and children are in forced prostitution nationwide.

Ugarte said girls can be lured at malls, beaches and schools by other girls who show them all the money and jewelry they receive. She said women are also tricked into pornography by perpetrators who lie to them, saying their faces won't be exposed and then threatening to show their family and friends the videos if they quit.

Ugarte said many recruiters are woman who appear to be professional and are clever at deception.

"They tell (girls) that they are beautiful when their parents don't," she said. "They'll hand them a (business) card and tell them, 'Here. Have your mom call me,' but they don't work that way and the child is unsuspecting."

At Sunday's walk, Ugarte was presented with the "Digna Ochoa Human Rights Defender Award," which was established in honor of a Mexican human rights attorney who was murdered in her law office in 2001 shortly after speaking at the Amnesty International conference in San Diego.

Amnesty International is working on ratifying the Unified Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which protects children's rights to an education, basic necessities for living, leisure time, and freedom from slavery, sexual exploitation and military combat, among other things.

Amesty officials said 192 nations have ratified the U.N. document and only two have not: Somalia, which has no government, and the United States.

Officials at Sunday's event asked people to write letters to President Bush asking him to send the Convention on the Rights of the Child to the U.S. Senate and urge ratification.

For more information on the convention or Amnesty International, log onto amnestyusa.org or call the local chapter at (760) 731-0735.

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