September 16, 2011: Fueled by a desire for a better life for their children, poor families in southern Nepal are selling boys and girls as young as five years old to Indian circuses for 1,000 rupees, or $13. But parents usually never receive the wages promised.

Instead, the children, mostly girls, are whisked across the porous Nepal-India border to live in slave-like conditions, never to see their parents again. Forced to stay within circus grounds, they are beaten and often sexually abused while forced to learn risky circus tricks.

According to Al Jazeera, this form of child trafficking was exposed in 2002 by the Esther Benjamins Memorial Foundation, a Nepalese charity that runs a children's refuge in Kathmandu. With the police, the group has rescued more than 300 Nepalese children. But most Indian circuses are unregulated, and some of the larger ones are tied to criminal businesses that receive local protection, making rescues dangerous.

Backed up by an April 2011 amendment to India’s Juvenile Justice Act, which makes it illegal for children under 18 to work or train with circuses, more rescue raids are planned.

An SOS girl is studying at the Hermann Gmeiner School in Nepal

Destitute parents all over the world fall prey to traffickers with false promises to provide their children with regular wages and comfortable lives that turn out to be anything but. SOS Children’s Villages works across the globe to prevent such tragedies by enabling fragile families to care for their children.

Through nine Children’s Villages in Nepal and forty in India, SOS not only raises at-risk children, keeping them fed, clothed, healthy, and safe. SOS Children’s Villages also operates an extensive network of Family Strengthening Programs. These target impoverished households living near SOS Children’s Villages with the goal of keeping families intact so that parents won’t take desperate steps, like selling children to the circus.

The SOS Family Strengthening Programs provide counseling on parenting skills, disease prevention, and, importantly, small-business skills. SOS also gives parents small subsidies for food and income-generating activities. Modest amounts of support can often mean the difference between keeping children or giving them away.   

An estimated 1,000 to 2,000 Nepalese children are working for circuses in India, but many thousands more in the region, including India, suffer deeply because of the poverty into which they were born.