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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."
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From the Article:
child jockeys were banned from the lucrative sport following criticism by human rights groups.
Great. If I'm under four and know how to ride a camel better than anyone else, I can't race. My rights have been infringed to protect human rights. Way to go, guys.
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.
Particularly if they use electric shocks on kids if they don't do their work properly.
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.
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.
I'm sorry, maybe I am late to the conversation, but are we arguing about wether it is better to be bought or abuducted into slavery?
See here.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You probably have seen it before, it's a dupe.
Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just gone off topic, but what you've read so far speaks for itself. The innocent discussion has apparently been taken over - 'conquered' if you will - by an inferior race of photographic-memory slashdotters. It's difficult to tell at the moment whether they will troll the entire website or merely flame it.
I am certainly not surprised: the prior article was in April last year; dupes will inevitably be here. And I, for one, will never welcome our photographic-memory overlords. I'd like to remind our editors that as an average slashdotter with common sense, I can be helpful in rounding up other idiots to languish in the off topic viewing range.
Tiny robots on robot dogs would be cool. Damn, I feel like dropping a tab or two.
I bet these owners are pissed off about the Danish cartoon of Muhammed.
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.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
It was to increase the bidding between the Catholic Church and Michael Jackson.
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