Poverty is a very, very bad thing. Material, moral or ethical, whatever shape it comes in, poverty is dangerous. Poverty spawns discontent, envy, oppression, and more pertinently, desperation. It is a fact that 95 percent of all crime stems from one sort of poverty or the other; child exploitation is no different.
Moral poverty will lead an adult to abuse a child in any way: sexually, physically, psychologically, basically, all manner of abuse. No one with milk of human kindness in them will harm children who happen to be the most vulnerable members of our society. In Austria, recently, it was revealed that a man had locked up his own daughter in what amounted to a dungeon and systematically raped the poor child thousand of times over the decades, starting from when she was 11, and had in fact fathered eight children by her. This case is so shocking the mind can barely come with a why. My people have a saying that a man who has relationship with his own child is like a dog which vomits something and then goes back to eat it. What will motivate someone, who can only in the loosest term be called a human being, to behave in such a desperately manner? Moral poverty. When one loses the quality that makes one human, that person is no better than the animals which roam the forests.
By now you don't need to be told that exploitation is quite simply, to use unfairly for one's advantage. The range of abuse inherent in child exploitation is so wide and varied that it is hard to come up with a definition. For instance, there is the issue of child soldier in the war-ravaged parts of the world. Also child exploitation is the hydra-headed matter of child trafficking.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted in 1989. It proclaims that all children have the right to survival, the rights to food, the rights to family, the rights to cultural and indigenous identity and the right to education. These are the basic rights of every child, but the implementation is sadly deficient. Children are the future - there's no argument. You only get out what you put in. Sow the right seeds in the children in the children and they will grow up mentally, morally and totally balanced to sustain the world tainted by the shadows of residual trauma of bad childhood.
