Library Spotlight - Not My Life

By Clarice Grooms, ESTN Librarian

Flim: Not My Life

Directors: Robert Bilheimer, Richard Young

Narrated by: Glen Close

Not My Life is a documentary that brings home the realization of the wide-spread unspeakable violence in which millions of the children in our world are trapped. Many of these innocent children do not survive the filthy living conditions, hunger, and abuse they endure each day. Child slavery exists in almost every country in many forms:

Fishing boys on Lake Volta in Ghana are purchased from their parents to fish as slaves. They work fourteen hours a day and are given one small meal each day. The water is polluted with disease and many of the children get tangled in the nets and drown.

Child street beggars are in many countries like India and even Britain. These children are rented out by their parents, owned as slaves or living on the streets. The children are given a quota to collect each day. If they do not collect the quota, they are beaten. Some are forced to work in the landfills of India, which is a hot-bed of disease. 

Factory and apparel industry children are enslaved to work in the apparel business at very young age in deplorable conditions. As the girls mature they are groomed for the sex trade.

The child sex trade is perhaps the most recognized human atrocity. Victims include children of Europe, United States, India, China, Uganda, Nepal, Pakistan, Haiti, Brazil, Bangladesh...and these just the top known providers of child sex. Sex tourism is rampant in countries like Columbia. The most violent pedophiles and the largest number are from the United States of America.

Military child slavery in Sudan are girls and boys who are abducted and forced to serve in the military. Girls and boys are forced to kill and are killed if they try to escape.

Involuntary child servitude can be found serving the rich and middle class in most any country.

With so many forms of slavery that is spread widely over the world, it is foolish to ignore the possibility of slavery touching our lives.

NOTE: All items reviewed in Library Spotlight are available to borrow from the ESTN library.