In northern Uganda, young children are being captured or abducted by an organization called the Lord’s Resistance Army. They are being forced to work as slaves and sometimes trained to become child soldiers. These innocent children are in fact being introduced to violence at a very young age, and this would badly affect their lives in the future, if they manage to survive until then. One boy who got abducted by the Army was James.
Unlike other typical children, James was being abducted during his school holidays to work as a slave in the Lord’s Resistance Army. He was also forced to brutally kill his own brother who too got abducted with him in a method too gruesome to be said. When the camp which the Army was located finally got raided, the children were set free. But though James is out of captivity, he still suffers from the mental horrors of his experience in the Lord’s Resistance Army.
How can a boy as young as James receive such harsh treatment from the Lord’s Resistance Army? It would definitely be a bad memory which would haunt him for the rest of his life. He would need enormous amount of emotional and spiritual help to enable him to recover from this traumatic experience and be able to lead a normal live once more.
Personally, I feel that slavery is a very terrible and horrible thing. It is the violation of human rights when a particular group of people are seen to be more superior then others, thus they would be the masters of those whom they despise, and treat them as slaves. Every living human being has their basis rights to survive, to do whatever they want freely and not be treated by others as animals.
But slavery is still happening in the world as it has been for hundreds of years. The slaves are being imported from foreign countries, either abducted or fooled into some scams where they are told of some promising land where they can get rich easily. They work under harsh conditions and the goods which they produce get sold at high prices and they receive a small percentage of the profit only while they masters get filthy rich. For example, Nike, a popular sports brand has sweatshops in various parts of the world where they employ slaves to help manufacture their high quality goods. These slaves earn very little income while the Nike gets rich quickly.
I feel that the government of every country in this world should help abolish slavery once and for all. There should also be more campaigns like The Amazing Change to aid in the process of creating awareness of slavery in the world. Just like environmental issues, everyone has a part to play to help remove slavery complete, be it writing of petitions or spreading stories like James’ to people to create awareness. I myself would contribute by boycotting companies which mistreat their slaves and continue to support fair trade.
