What do think of when someone says they are supporting child rights and child protection? My thoughts immediately go to certain abuses like: child soldiers, child labour, sexual abuse of young children (including child porn), denied access to education (most often gender based,) physical abuse, etc.
Today I heard another abuse that totally shocked me. Child sacrifice!! It took me while to comprehend what I was hearing. Apparently right in the area where I am writing this, child sacrifice is not uncommon and actually gaining acceptance. There are "fortune tellers" and "witch doctors" that regularly demand child sacrifice in order to bring good fortune to their "client". People are actually promised more wealth and better times if they just sacrifice one of their young children.
How do you respond to that? Is it ever ok to sacrifice a child for economic reasons? What can you say to the people in the community when this is going on where they are living? We have all heard the saying "desperate people do desperate things" but this goes way beyond desperate to just plain evil. How can man's heart and mind be so twisted? What worldview would ever support this type of thinking?
But then I asked myself, "what about me?" and "what about my culture?" How many of our children have been sacrificed because of convenience or because it didn't seem economically viable to let them live? Maybe our cultures and our society's worldviews are more similar than we even realise!
