Robots Ride Camels in Kuwait

naken writes to tell us that Kuwait recently held its first regional camel race using robot jockeys. The change was made after human rights groups got child jockeys banned in Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE."

Comments

Re:Human rights?

[magefile]

Wrong. These jockeys were slaves; beaten, starved, forced to throw up so they'd lose weight, etc. Horse racing in this case was not a sport for pleasure; it was a business, and the child jockeys were held hostage to the financial gain of their owners.

Re:Human rights?

[nursegirl]

The issue is that human rights groups had found that the vast majority of these kids had been abducted from their families and put into forced slave labour on these camel farms. So yes, if US soccer teams start abducting kids to play little league, maybe the human rights groups should get involved.

Particularly if they use electric shocks on kids if they don't do their work properly.

Re:They got it wrong...

[luvirini]

The problem was that many kids were bought from their parents in other countries and brought for the races, maltreated with too little food and so on.. to be as low weight as possible.

That was a horrible practice.

Re:How odd...

[smilingman]

I could have sworn CNN had a Reuters article on this very same thing over a year ago. Could anyone help prove me with a link? Maybe I'm just losing it... ...though some would argue I never had it in the first place.

You probably have seen it before, it's a dupe.

Re:Human rights?

[nursegirl]

While the Unicef site does say bought, Asia Child Rights, the Bangladesh Human Rights Network and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights all agree that both happened pretty frequently. In fact, the organization I cited in the gp post got involved because of trying to track an abducted child from Pakistan who ended up in the UAE.

Wired News has an article about this...

[antdude]

See here.

No laughing matter

[Godwin O'Hitler]

I happen to do a lot of translation work for a French agency that raises funds to finance organisations that combat child abuse. They do so by establishing full-blown infrastructures to attack the reasons why kids are vulnerable in the first place, as well as setting up rehabilitation programmes for rescued kids who are traumatised for life.
Their grant applications, notably to the European Union, go into all the sordid details about trafficking in children. In Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, tens of thousands of children every year are abducted into one form of slavery or another. There is a cross border traffic in both directions, with for example lots of Afghan refugee children undergoing similar ignomy. The camel jockeys are a particularly bad example because the kids are deliberately starved.

If Kuwait is going to fall into line that's good news, but it's really only the tip iceberg. For a start it's not the biggest market for these kids - the United Arab Emirates is huge in comparison.
And the traffic in camel jockeys is just a small part of the overall children's rights problem. If I told you about some of the other sordid things that kids have to undergo believe me it would make your skin crawl.

It's absolutley no laughing matter.