World News & Stories

They’re known on television as the Property Brothers. Good-looking and confident, they stride into millions of Canadian living rooms each week with real estate and design advice. But when World Vision’s brand new ambassadors, Vancouver-born twins Drew and Jonathan Scott, stepped into a one-room hut in Delhi, India, they were clearly treading new ground.

Children should be playing, learning to read and write and experiencing happy, healthy childhoods. But when there’s not enough money to put a meal on the table, children have no choice but to earn their keep. It’s a growing problem, particularly in countries that don’t have strong governments, laws and regulations to make sure children are going to school, not down mine shafts.

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.