World News & Stories

They may not share the same views when it comes to politics, but on the issue of child slavery, these five Canadian MPs all agree: it needs to stop. Wayne Easter, Russ Hiebert, Dean Allison, Wai Young and Isabelle Morin, took to the bustling streets of Phnom Penh and Bangkok, where they met slavery’s youngest victims.

Fourteen-year-old Haitian Sonite Edmond despondently recalls being forced to work as a restavek when she was just six years old. Meaning “to stay with” in Creole, restaveks are children working in domestic slavery, as Sonite was forced to when she went to “stay with” her godmother in Port-au-Prince.

For fifteen-year-old Mao, poverty turned an innocent sleepover at a friend’s house into a childhood trapped in Cambodia’s sex trade.

Canadians might categorize child labour as something that happens in the dark corners of far off places, but the reality is, child labour remains a rampant issue today, both at home and abroad.