Fears of tsunami child abductions mount

[Kellanved]

HAMBURG - With UNICEF estimating that 1.5 million children have been affected by the tsunami disaster, German relief agencies have expressed growing fears that child traffickers have been moving into the devastated area around the Indian Ocean's coastal rim.

Children have vanished from camps in Sri Lanka, according to the Kindernothilfe relief agency in Duisburg, Germany.

"We are greatly concerned that children are being forced into service with Tamil guerrilla fighters," says Sascha Decker, spokesman for Kindernothilfe in Cologne.

Washington is also alarmed: "There are sufficient credible reports to lead us to the conclusion that a real and present threat exists and that immediate measures must be taken to prevert abuse," said US State Department spokesman Adam Ereli.

http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=26&story_id=15504&name=Fears+of+tsunami+child+abductions+mount

[Festivito]

1. Morning shows spoke this was shown as false.

They passed that there was a case of a child abducted from a hospital, that thre needed to be blood evidence to take a child out of the country (no quick indication of which of many countries).

I think it was ABC. But, I'm reading, listening to NPR and occasionally switching to ABC or NBC. Local FOX and CBS are not working well on this TV, so it was not them.

[onecent]

2. May I ask where you are located? Local FOX and CBS are not

working here as well - North of Kansas City

[Festivito]

7. Detroit, Michigan: Our PBS is out, CBS stunted.

Detroit's PBS channel 56 antenna down for months after a lightening strike.

Our CBS station had been channel 2 until ten years ago when FOX bought it and kept the news staff. CBS bought a local, small, poor quality, mostly African-American operated channel 62. Tried a local news, gave up. Still lacks power to transmit a good picture.

The FOX affiliate, locally channel 2 now, always had reception problems for me. It's just very bad in my computer room, and I have not adjusted the antenna.

What really bothers me is NPR occasionally going silent for several seconds especially during commentary about Republicans.

[Kellanved]

3. this is another story altogether

This is about Tamil guerrilla and other military groups drafting orphaned children.


And even the Swedish child who caused the first warnings of this kind, has not been found yet. Only the man accused by the hospital staff has been cleared of all allegations.

[OneBlueSky]

4. while I'm sure there's SOME substance here . . .

a lot of it sounds like more fear-mongering to me . . . check out this piece from the Times of London . . .

Child kidnapping stories have long been the stuff of urban legend
by Mick Hume
January 7, 2005

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1054-1428775,00.html

THE WORST reports to come out of the tsunami disaster are surely the claims that many orphaned or lost children are being kidnapped by predators. But is this horror story just too bad to be true? There appears to be little evidence to support warnings of mass child abduction. To me, it looks more as if the West’s own unhealthy obsession with seeing child abuse everywhere is now being projected on to the Asian disaster zone.
Child kidnapping hit the news this week with reports that Kristian Walker, a 12-year-old Swedish boy separated from his family by the tsunami, had been abducted from a Thai hospital by “a moustached European man”. After two days of worldwide media panic and an international police operation, it became clear that the missing boy had never been admitted to the hospital, far less abducted from it. The suspected paedophile turned out to be a good Samaritan from Germany, who had helped to reunite two German boys and a Swedish youth with their parents.

So the only report to date of a named child being abducted was revealed as untrue. That has not stopped Unicef and other child protection and aid organisations spreading stories that thousands of children are at risk of abduction. These have been prominently reported under headlines such as “Perverts on the prowl” and “$50 buys a kid in Asia chaos”.

Of course terrible things can happen in a disaster zone. But look for the evidence to support these stories, and what you find are “unconfirmed reports”, “rumours” and “suspicions”, alongside repeated references to a single anonymous SMS text message, allegedly offering Indonesian children for illegal adoption. Hard evidence does not come much softer. Yet Unicef’s director of child protection in Indonesia felt free to announce from her office:

“I’m sure it is happening. It’s a perfect opportunity for these guys to move in.” Thousands of miles away, self-styled child protection experts in Europe or the US seem even more certain that “these guys” must be abducting tsunami orphans.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1054-1428775,00.html

[Earth_First]

5. Sounds about right...

[The Backlash Cometh]

6. I hope that prosecuting child porn traffickers goes beyond just the

tsunami victims.