The Rescue List

Some 20,000 children are enslaved to fishermen on Ghana’s vast Lake Volta, many of them sold to traffickers by their families. By interviewing those who are rescued, social workers at the Challenging Heights Rehabilitation Center compile lists of others awaiting rescue. Perhaps nobody testifies more to the center’s success than Kwame, who was an enslaved child himself, and is now devoted to rescuing others. But for a child to be reunited with a parent who sold him into slavery is fraught, even though the crime of “re-trafficking” can net a 15-year prison sentence. In The Rescue List, the distinctions between the exigencies of survival, child abuse, child labor and child trafficking can be difficult to discern.