http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/03/world/cambodia-child-sex-trafficking/index.html

“Mothers sell daughters”–the title is sensationalist. It does not weave a fictitious narrative, but rather, it misses the point. This paints human trafficking as parents profiting from selling their children, as though their children’s lives are worth so little in comparison to their virginity on the market. This particular girl’s mother received $1000 for selling her daughter, and what did she do with it?

Her mother used the money to pay down a debt and for food for the fish they raise under their floating house — their primary income source.

Paid down a debt. Bought fish food. Such senseless things.

But they miss the point: It is not simply “a debt.” As much as children are being sold into sexual slavery, so are their parents themselves slave in debt bondage. A loan of a hundred dollars or less incurs thousands upon thousands of dollars in interest, taking decades to be paid off–and if they aren’t paid off in one lifetime, their children inherit the debt, and by that time, the interests are virtually impossible to pay off, and generations are sentenced to bondage.

As repugnant as selling their children is, the parents should not be criminalized. What is criminal is that there are economies where the only source of income is sex trafficking, where individuals have no opportunities to earn incomes to make lives for themselves. Instead, they are forced to sell themselves and their children in every miserable form of human bondage there is.

The answer isn’t shaming their parents. The answer isn’t to further criminalize what is already criminal. It requires more: Removing the yoke of bondage, fostered by corrupt state and police, and letting people work for themselves, to make better lives for themselves.

The shame belongs to “journalists” focusing on the sensational–parents selling children–and overlooking the real problem, a dead economy that entraps generations in debt. Society does not willing sell their children to be raped, they only do so to survive.