It was news to me when I received an email with a link from the North East Reader that the Evangelists are engaged in Child trafficking, moving children way from North east India to the Southern States of India, to get Grants from the Churches!
The Churches in turn get Grants from the Vatican and other Christian Groups Funds marked for religious conversion.
Please read my posts on this under Christianity.
The phenomenon may be new to India.
But it is rampant in Africa and I am providing a Link towards the end of this post.
“New Delhi, Aug 6 : Promising proper education, pastors are trafficking children from the north-eastern states to Tamil Nadu and Karnataka with an oblique motive to get grants from churches and abroad, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights said in a damning report to the Supreme Court.
Inquring into recent rescue of hundreds of children trafficked from the NE states and housed in Homes illegally run by pastors in the southern states, NCPCR found that girls were even asked to give massage to the directors of these Homes and molested.
Analysing the situation in a detailed report, NCPCR said insurgency coupled with the virtual absence of government officials at the sub-district and block level to address the education, health and developmental problems have made the entire north-east an easy hunting ground for middlemen to lure out children from parents in the name of providing them proper education.
“All-out effort are being made by pastors and other category of persons who are reaching out to source areas through middlemen for getting children in order to obtain financial support from churches within the country or donations from outside,” the NCPCR said in response to a direction from the apex court to inquire into the incidents.
The source areas for the pastors are Tamnglong, Senapati, Chandel, Bishnupur, Churachandpur and Imphal in Manipur, North Cachar Hills in Assam and Meghalaya. The destination states are TN, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala.
“The main reason for children being sent out by the poor parents to far off places in southern states is due to their high expectation of quality education for their children which is not available at their own places,” the Commission said.
The other main reasons for the parents agreeing to send their children far away were no easy access to schools; lack of basic infrastructure such as road connectivity, power and hospitals; insurgency and lack of a sense of security among parents to send children walking to schools; poor financial status of parents preventing them from putting children in boarding schools; and absence of governance in sub-district and block level to address education, health and developmental problems of vulnerable families.
This provides a perfect opportunity for middlemen to exploit the situation and is being taken advantage of by pastors. But, the children get caught between the devil at home and the deep sea in the Homes in southern states, NCPCR said.
..”The book opens with a literally earth shaking event: the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti and the rush to adopt it engendered. Joyce focuses immediately on the infamous case of Laura Silsby’s band of bible-thumping pseudo missionaries from Idaho who were arrested trying to leave Haiti with 33 children and charged with kidnapping. Silsby and her Reverse Robinhoods felt justified and self-righteous, about taking from the poor to give to the rich, even building a resort in the Dominican Republic for adopters. A fit beginning to describe the zealousness that drives evangelicals to “save” children physically and spiritually.
In the end, many if not most churches dissociated themselves from Silsby after she was charged with kidnaping. The adoption industry and adoption advocates put the incident, like all adoption horror stories, in a neat little box labeled anomalies and continue right along, business as usual simply moving from country as they close adoptions in order to end the corruption. Not unlike claims that women cannot get pregnant from “legitimate” rape, Chuck Johnson at the Saddlebrook Church, argued that claims of fraud had been blown out of proportion, saying: “We have no indication of real, true corruption.”
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