Children at Risk--Arms of Love Conference

Read below some segments taken from our time in Anaheim for a valuable conference. It is amazing information!

Members of the Global Support team visited Anaheim, California on March 9-10 for a conference about “Children at Risk.” It was sponsored by Arms of Love Internattional (www.armsoflove.org) . What a phenomenal conference it was. The quality of the presenters, the workshops, those attendees as well, were probably about as high a caliber of people and organizations as you could ever ask for in the area of being on the ground helping children all over the globe who are the most at risk.

This issue of Children at Risk both domestically and globally, we are discovering is a Global Crisis, greater than we could ever have imagined. It reaches to the far corners of the earth and every continent is deeply affected by it.

Here are a few quotes from Keynote speakers:
Bryant Myers, Fuller Seminary professor of transformational development and previously Vice President at World Vision.

The well being of children is an indicator of the well being of society…The well being of children is under attack perhaps like no other time in human history. If society is taking care of their children, then everything else will fall into alignment.

Two Hundred and eleven (211) million children are in labor. Half of them are working ten, twelve, and fourteen hour days. Seventy percent are working in hazardous conditions and are expendable. Some of them by twelve years of age are so injured from their job they can no longer work and are left out in the streets. Almost two million (1.8) are in prostitution and pornography. Six million children are slaves. Ten million are refugees and thriteen million are Internally Displaced People and in the IDP camps. One Hundred and fifty million are disabled.

Children by the millions are abused, brutalized, left alone, seduced, deceived, killed, lives and families destroyed.

Os Guinness, world renowned author, speaker and scholar, spoke of how the internet and modern society has fostered the anonymity of people, which has brought on the rise of deviancy such as the world has never seen before. Morality throughout history is often accountability thru visibility. The internet and how we separate ourselves from each other by our modern social structures, has given rise to a tremendous amount of evil against the most vulnerable, children. The largest money maker on the internet is pornography. It out weighs all other trading on that medium. When the tsunami hit Aceh in Indonesia, and the relief workers poured in, the pornographers moved in right with them, finding a vulnerable population on whom to prey.

He said the Human Trafficking makes the mafia look like a kids party.

Olara Otunnu, president of LBL Foundation for Children and the UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict (1997-2005), said “When adults wage war, children pay the highest price”.

Displaced children from war are the most vulnerable to prey from others. Girls are particularly exposed and taken advantage of. The scourge of war is destroying the present and is destroying the future of entire populations. He said N. Uganda is the worst place on the planet today for children to live.

Wow! We could hardly hold all this information!

As participants to this conference, we were so blown away by the atrocities against children it was difficult to even comprehend and hold in our psyche. I feel like my eyes were opened and my ears were unstopped. I personally, and all of us at Global Support, feel stronger than ever that we have a mandate to do what we can for children who are subject to abject poverty, seduction onto the streets into pornography and slave trade and human trafficking, and to those engulfed and violated by adults who make war.

Leigh Buchan