Derrick Jensen - from The Culture of Make Believe (not for the faint of heart)

It really isn't possible to talk about hate without talking about children as objects of hatred. I know that age isn't a protected class under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, but bear with me.

Each year an estimated 20,000 Mexican children disappear, many for use as mules, to transport drugs inside their bodies, others taken for the harvest of their organs, to be transplanted into children in the United States. This is according to a study performed by the Institute for Law Research at the Autonomous National University of Mexico and presented at a conference on "International Traffic in Children."

Worldwide, entire economies have been founded specifically on the sexual trade in children. One hundred to eight hundred thousand Thai girls and boys work as prostitutes (A brochure distributed in England advertising a Thai resort reads, "If you can suck it, use it, eat it, feel it, taste it, abuse it or see it, then it's available in this resort that truly never sleeps"). Nearly all of them are enslaved or indentured. A good portion have received death sentences from HIV. There are 1.5 to 2 million child prostitutes in India (those in Bombay, for example, are often held in cages; fifty cents buys half an hour of of sex with a twelve-year-old.) Five hundred thousand child prostitutes work in Brazil (a child of thirty-five pounds is considered a prime size in many mining towns). There are 200,000 child prostitutes in or from Nepal (most of these girls are kidnapped, sold for between forty and a thousand dollars, "broken in" through a process of rapes and beatings, and then rented out up to thirty-five times a night for one to two dollars per man). Between 100,000 and 300,000 children work the sex trade in the United States (one study of U.S. survivors of prostitution found that 78 percent were victims of rape by pimps and buyers an average of forty-nine times per year; 84 percent were the victims of aggravated assault; 49 percent had been kidnapped and transported across state lines; 53 percent were victims of sexual abuse and torture; and 27 percent had been mutilated). On average, a child prostitute serves more than 2,000 men per year. At least a million new girls per year are forced into prostitution.

Kids are not, of course, injured only through sexual exploitation. A half-million children die every year from starvation or other direct results of so-called debt payment from Third World countries--from the colonies--to those countries which lend them money while holding their resources and infrastructures as collateral--colonialism in the twenty-first century--and eleven million children die annually from easily treatable diseases. This latter has been called by the World Health Organization director-general 'a silent genocide.'

This is not counting the children who are simply beaten. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, in 1993, 614,000 American children were physically abused, 300,000 were sexually abused, 532,000 were emotionally abused, 507,000 were physically neglected, and 585,000 were emotionally neglected. 565,000 of these children were killed or seriously injured. That's just in the United States.

So here's the question: Do all these numbers--or, more precisely, the reality behind these numbers--imply that we hate children? Perhaps the answer would be more evident if we simply invert the question: "Do we value children?"

The answer, of course, is yes. One to two dollars per fuck, unless we happen to be in the Philippines, in which case it will cost us six dollars to have sex with a six-year-old.

So let me put the question another way: Was slavery in the United States based on hatred of the Africans, or was it based on economics? Is hate even the right word?

The problem we have in answering (or even asking) these questions comes from the fact that hatred, felt long enough and deeply enough, no longer feels like hatred. It feels like economics, or religion, or tradition, or simply the way things are. Rape is not a hate crime because our hatred of women is transparent. Child prostitution is not a hate crime for the same reason that beating a child is not a hate crime, because our hatred of children is transparent. The economic murder of children (or creating the economic conditions for their slavery as prostitutes) is not a hate crime because we've held this hatred long enough to enshrine it into our macroeconomic policies.

If we did not hate children, we would not cause or even allow them to be destroyed by any of these means. And if we do not love even our children, what, precisely, can we truly say we love?