Dear Sir,

More than 200,000 children are exploited in India, working in harsh conditions.

Under labour exploitation, without access to education and without having covered their basic needs, these children suffer the consequences of a society that looks at them with indifference.

To publicise this unfair situation, the advertising agency McCann Erickson New Delhi has created the “Child in a Box” campaign, an initiative that aims to show this harsh reality to everyone.

These are boxes whose upper part presents a happy child but, at the moment when it opens, show the subhuman conditions of exploited children. They have been put up for sale in various parts of the country and the money raised will be used to improve the living conditions of these children.

This reality should lead us to an active participation in favour of others, since South Asia has the worst rates of child labour exploitation, with more than 100 million children who exist as beasts of burden.

In Guatemala, there are about one million children working in a precarious situation. The authorities have launched a campaign against child labour under the slogan “Do not wash your hands. Work is not childish.”

This spot has been awarded at the Cannes Advertising Festival.

In Spain, Anesvad, the non-profit and non-governmental organisation that supports health and social development projects in Asia, Latin America and Africa, has been periodically launching a campaign to recover slave girls to train them and to gain a decent job under the slogan: “Sex trafficking is a destination marked by misery for many girls in South-East Asia.”

This slavery of children is denounced by two American organisations; Human Rights Watch and Domestic Child, in separate reports. For these “creatures”, the money paid to them by their exploiters is limited to food and something to wear.

According to the report of the Pontifical Mission Societies, the numbers of child slaves is appalling: 14 million Aids orphans. Of the 600 million poor children in the world, 130 million do not attend school, 180 million suffer from malnutrition, 250 million suffer labour exploitation, and one million fall into sex trade networks.

CLEMENTE FERRER PhD

Madrid, Spain