This is my entry for the Unicef/CHNI initiative
“Have you patted on the head of an orphan!!?.”
The second humanitarian initiative 2019.
Among all the weird things happening, by examining and seeking the abnormal a cartoonist gets somewhat customized to it. Despite the often gruesome consequences you get always an inner smile, when finished a piece on the lustful selftrashing United Kingdom or an American President once again successfully fighting reality. But when it comes to children it gets hard to cope with, and there is no such inner smile. Just pain.
As far as I´ve seen by now In this contest most of my colleagues struggled, too. So they decided to show the dreams or depicted broken children. I chose intentionally to deal with the horror of the normality.
And the normal is this: globally millions of children are sold by their parents to slavery or find themselves lost by famine or war and are quickly trapped in the sex trafficking business. It is a business with an estimated volume of 91 billion dollars per year, and the price, the age and the chance of survival of the children consumed by this exploitation industry is constantly dropping. And it is not a third world phenomenon – it happens in the USA, in England, in Germany, in France, it happens everywhere, it happens in your neighborhood. It happens because people look the other way, because it is money, because at some point people keep it with a shrug as normal and none of their business.