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7-7-2008
 

ABC's Nightline Exposes Modern-Day Slavery

 

Journalist finds Haitian children being sold for $150.

On Tuesday's edition of Nightline, ABC News Correspondent Dan Harris learns "How to Buy a Child in 10 Hours."

As part of a five-month investigation into modern-day slavery, Harris traveled to Haiti to learn how easy it would be to buy a child slave. In just 10 hours, he flew from Manhattan to Haiti and negotiated to purchase an 11-year-old girl.

"I didn’t expect it to be so casual, so open," Harris said. "We’re sitting out by a pool, the sun’s shining, waiters are walking by. There’s bottled water and a fruit plate on the table. It was really a bizarre, surreal situation.

"We had not one, but two meetings with people who were very open and comfortable about talking about selling us a child. One of them set the price as low as $150; the other one was asking 10 grand, but he was saying he could get us papers that would allow us to take this child slave back to the United States.

"I’m comfortable using the term epidemic; that’s what’s going on."

Check local listings to watch the full report Tuesday on Nightline.

"People in the U.S. need to realize that we're contributing to this problem worldwide," said Daniel Weiss, senior analyst for media and sexuality at Focus on the Family Action. "Our country is one of the chief exporters of pornography. The message in pornography is that people are objects, to be bought and sold, or thrown away. It shouldn't surprise us when we see a country living this out, as we see in Haiti.

"If we want to get serious about tackling this problem worldwide, we need to get serious about our problems here at home — our cultural acceptance of pornography."

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Visit the Nightline Web site.

Visit the Shared Hope International Web site.

(NOTE: Referral to Web sites not produced by Focus on the Family is for informational purposes only and does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of the sites' content.)




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