By Elizabeth Willoughby on
Demi Moore just returned from a visit to earthquake ravaged Haiti, and seems to have found inspiration in the rubble.
Moore and Ashton Kutcher's new charity, the DNA Foundation, is focused on the sex slave trade, and tends to use public awareness in its efforts to eventually bring the trade to an end. DNA is not about cleaning up after natural disasters. In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper last week, Moore explained why she went to Haiti and what she found there.
“[Ashton and I] became aware of the Restavek system, which is about 300,000 children who are enslaved to do all the work, who sleep on the floor and in most cases it’s the young girls who are sexually exploited.”
Slavery in Haiti is not a new practice, and is not necessarily a rich man’s practice, either. In many cases a child may be given away by her own family to become a slave in another family that is only slightly less poor, and in some cases a child can become enslaved within his own family in his own home, by a new stepmother, for example.
Moore sees the rebuilding of Haiti’s demolished cities as an opportunity to address this slavery issue.
“To really take in the scope of the devastation, it’s kind of beyond any of the pictures you can see,” Moore said in the interview. “I feel extremely conflicted because I think it’s overwhelming. …How is organization going to be possible even if there’s a lot of money? How are they actually going to get in there physically with equipment? I saw one crane among streets that were just leveled. … [But] I feel that who [the Haitians] are as people has so much enormous potential, and with just a little opportunity to empower them, I think that they would rebuild a better Haiti. And what I hope is that that will include the banning of this Restavek system because I think it’s absolutely possible.”
You can watch the full interview on CNN.
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