The young child in the photograph sits on a walkway in Jakarta, Indonesia, a victim of trafficking for the purpose of begging. Trafficking of women and girls for prostitution has been a well-known phenomenon in Southeast Asia, but trafficking for begging on the streets is a more recent trend. Children of poor, often rural, families are being captured at the borders, or parents are deceived into thinking their children will receive opportunities in the cities.

Children caught begging illegally by police in Bangkok, Thailand, are returned to Cambodia, some to waiting parents, others to charities or local government agencies. Others find their way back to urban streets. In the worst cases, children are mutilated so as to elicit sympathy. Officials note that children trafficked to a foreign country are even more vulnerable due to language and customs differences, as well as increased discrimination. They are even less likely than indigenous children to know how to seek help.

The chart reveals International Labour Organization (ILO), International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), and UNICEF data for the year 2000 on trafficking of over a million children annually, and some 250,000 for the Asia Pacific region. Efforts to combat child trafficking include improving law enforcement and border controls, but perhaps the most effective work is at the community level.

Krishna is known in the stories of the Bhagavata-Purana as the eighth incarnation, or avatar, of the god Vishnu. He is a very popular deity, a divine hero who personifies superhuman powers as well as human hopes and failings. According to the narrative, he comes into the world as the son of Vasudeva and Devaki to destroy the foes of human beings and is threatened by many tyrants and monsters, beginning with the cruel King Kans, who tried to kill him based on an omen. Krishna's mother and father were thus imprisoned, but my miraculous intervention Krishna was saved, carried across the river Yamuna and placed with foster-parents, Nand and Yashoda. Stories of Krishna's childhood with his loving foster-mother Yashoda are much beloved in this village of cow-herders. Representations have been illustrated in courtly artistic paintings and sculptures and in contemporary popular media, such as calendars, posters, and statuettes. A combination of super-human powers and child-like behavior endears Krishna to the characters in the narrative, and are what makes him an especially popular figure. One of Krishna's most famous pranks as a child was to find any possible way to steal sweet butter and curds from the storage jars that were suspended from the ceiling with ropes. Lighting his way in the dark room by the jewels he wore, climbing on mortars or on the backs of his playmates, or enlisting the help of agile monkeys, he gave vent to the irresistible urge to eat the butter and feed it to his partners in crime.

The holiday of Krishna's birthday is called Janmashtami in northern India and is celebrated as Sri Krishnajanmashtami, Janmashtami or Gokulashtami in southern India. In celebration, devotees fast, bathe, perform prayers and rites, and re-enact parts of the story of Krishna's birth and rescue from King Kansa. In this photograph, a young child is adorned with jewelry, eye-liner and a headdress, and prompted to re-enact the prank of stealing butter. Sweets made with butter, honey, and other delicacies are also part of the celebration, which falls in late summer or early autumn.

Yellamma Gangadhar is a young woman who relies on a wheelchair for mobility. Her film tells the story of abandonment by her parents at a bus station in Bangalore, India, subsequent help from the Leonard Cheshire home in the city, and the college education she acquired with great difficulty. The struggle featured in the film is access discrimination. She describes the necessity of climbing 25 stairs with paralyzed legs every day for three years to gain access to higher education because classes were held only on the second floor of the building.

Yellamma is a filmmaker in the Young Voices project of the Leonard Cheshire Disability Global Alliance. The Alliance was founded after World War II by a highly decorated British bomber pilot who devoted his later life to charity. Young Voices uses mass media to raise awareness of the needs of disabled persons globally and to encourage member nations to adopt, ratify, and implement the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Young Voices stories include children and youth with many forms of disability in rural and urban settings around the world. The first-person accounts relate problems of social exclusion, lack of knowledge, and access discrimination in transportation, public buildings, education, and employment.

The hand-modeled, terracotta, wheeled figurine of a bird with a ram's head was excavated from an archaeological site in the Indus Valley called Mohenjo-daro, a city that flourished between 2600 and 1900 BCE. Museum curators added the wooden axle attaching the wheels to the body as the original had not been preserved. Excavations from sites in the Indus Valley included many figurines made from terracotta, some of which were clearly for entertainment, including whistles shaped like birds, small animals with moveable heads, and toy carts. Such figurines are about 2.5 inches (ca. 5 cm) in length.

The image shows the reverse of a Thai 100-baht banknote, with engravings of of King Chulalongkorn and King Vajiravudha statues. The banknote's background theme is education. The detail on the right illustrates Thailand's traditional education system, showing a monk instructing boys in the courtyard of a temple. Until the 20th century, the village temple was a place where most young boys from peasant families received a basic education. Such temples typically received small boys to serve in the temple as dek wat, or "children of the temple," from the age of eight years old. The dek wat carried out minor housekeeping chores in exchange for instruction in reading and writing. They also memorized scriptural passages appropriate for important rituals. The dek wat served for four years or more, after which they could be ordained as novice monks (samana or samanen) for one or two years. At the age of 20, the novice could advance to higher ordination. Parents often sponsor a child as novice, who still spends time at home, but donations from other villagers help to provide for novices' robes, alms bowls, and other needs.

The detail of the banknote on the left represents modern mass education in Thailand, with boys and girls in uniform exiting a modern school building flying the national flag. In 1921, the Compulsory Primary Education Act was proclaimed, and in 1960, compulsory schooling was extended to seven years. At that time, the government made a series of five-year plans that resulted in widespread construction of wooden village primary schools and concrete-block secondary schools. Universal public education has largely replaced temple and monastery for imparting basic literacy, but some villages still rely on the dek wat system for boys' religious training. While it is no longer the only path toward higher education, a temporary period of ordination as a Buddhist monk is still a valued rite of passage for boys before they marry and start familes. Young men who have served as monks for a few months or years are viewed as better marriage partners and more suitable candidates for village leadership positions. Young men who remain monks for a longer period of education learn traditional scripts and gain the knowledge to officiate at religious ceremonies in the village and surrounding area.

The young boy in the photograph is placing a krathong, or "leaf cup," into the water to celebrate "Loy Krathong," a festival on the night of the full moon in November, the traditional celebration described in the text as a custom of long standing in Thailand (formerly called Siam). As the author describes, it is an agricultural festival related to water, rice cultivation, and the cycles of the seasons, but it probably also has ancient roots in India, and may be related to Buddhism as well. As the author describes, the custom has changed with the country's modernization and urbanization. Nowadays Loy Krathong is more than just a quaint celebration for villagers and families. It is now a tourist event in Bangkok, complete with parades, fireworks, and beauty pageants. Ironically, the placement of thousands of krathongs on the rivers and canals has become a pollution problem in itself, especially after the natural materials like banana leaves and flowers were replaced with white styrofoam bases. As an environmentally more responsible solution, therefore, merchants have begun selling krathongs made of bread in fanciful shapes and colors. The bread breaks up in the water and becomes food for fish and other river creatures. Authorities also warn parents to watch their children, since there have been increased incidents of drownings as the children swim out to find coins floating in the krathongs.

The boy in the photograph is a resident of Father Ray Children's Home, an orphanage at Pattaya, Thailand. The text describing the custom is from the 1968 book by Phya Anuman Rajadhon (1888-1969) Essays on Thai Folklore. The author is a prolific and well regarded literary figure and university professor. Although he did not receive formal academic training in anthropology, his writings have constituted a major source for anthropologists and others on customs from Siam, the traditional name for Thailand.

The custom described in the text by Phya Anuman Rajadhon is presented as it was traditionally practiced in Central Siam. The head of an infant was shaven as part of the khwan ceremony celebrating its survival and welcoming into the family. Some of the hair over the soft part of the infant's skull was left to grow into a topknot, to be cut in another ceremony when the child came of age. The author associates the custom with Indian cultural influence in the distant past, and documents its relationship to Buddhist practice. The second text and the photographs from the author's family collection documents the continuation of the practice among modern, urban families, but also shows its modification in modern times. The author reports that it has become much less common among contemporary families, amounting to a tiny percentage of the children in the author’s primary school. In addition, the topknot was cut at a much earlier stage in the child’s life, at the age of about 6-7 years, assuming that some of the children still wore it in the primary school.

The text describing the custom is from the 1968 book by Phya Anuman Rajadhon (1888-1969) Essays on Thai Folklore. The author is a prolific and well regarded literary figure and university professor. Although he did not receive formal academic training in anthropology, his writings have constituted a major source for anthropologists and others on customs from Siam, the traditional name for Thailand. The second text and photographs are from the baby photo album on a website by Thailand’s most prominent teenage blogger, Panrit "Gor" Daoruang (1986- ), who began an online diary at the age of twelve, and chronicled his own life and aspects of Thai culture and contemporary life. The site also teaches both English and Thai language through stories, quizzes, and audio files. The site attracted the attention of the Office of the National Culture Commission for its value in promoting Thailand’s image to a worldwide audience.

The photographs show children during the mid-Autumn Harvest Festival, or Tet Trung Thu in Vietnam, a children's festival associated with the full moon. Tet Trung Thu follows the harvest in the eighth lunar month, falling usually during September or October, and is associated with the ascendancy of the moon over the sun in winter, the bounty of life, and prayers for the return of the sun's warmth and light. According to some accounts, it is a time especially devoted to children after the work of farming and the busy harvest time. During the Tet Trung Thu holiday, children bang on drums and wear masks like a lion or tiger to frighten Ra Hu, the mythological creature responsible for the moon's phases and eclipses, to prevent him from gobbling up the full moon. Traditional Vietnamese handcrafted lanterns are an important part of the ceremony, as shown in the photograph of a shop displaying a wide variety of the toys. Traditional lantern shapes include: a five-star lantern to represent the sun, a frog-shape to represent the moon, and a spinning lantern to represent the earth's seasons. Another spinning lantern propelled by the heat of a candle burning inside is a symbol of the earth's seasonal revolution around the sun. The photograph from around 1900 shows a boy playing with a lantern in the shape of a rabbit. In recent years, commentators have been lamenting the fact that imported plastic toys from China are displacing the Vietnamese handicraft toys, threatening extinction of Vietnamese skills and design traditions.

The full moon appears reddish in color and larger when it rises in the fall, and this festival is also associated with folk tales about the moon. Among them is the story of Cá hóa Rông, a carp who strove hard to become a dragon and succeeded. Another story is about Trang Yi, The Lady in the Moon who took an immortality potion intended for her husband. She began to rise into the sky and became the Goddess of the Moon who appears in mid-Autumn to receive offerings. The celebration is believed to date back thousands of years to the beginning of settled agriculture in Southeast Asia, and is popular to the present day in Vietnam and among Vietnamese living overseas. Tet Trung Thu is associated with holiday foods. Moon cakes (pastries with nuts and bean paste) sometimes include egg yolk on the inside, which is meant to symbolize the full moon. The moon cakes are given to friends, neighbors, and business associates as gifts. Evening visits to pagodas and temples, with prayers, incense, and fruit and flower offerings, complete the celebrations.

The photograph shows the School-on-Wheels, a project of the Doorstep School in Mumbai, or Bombay, India, which has been functioning since 1998. The School-on-Wheels is a converted bus fitted with cabinets filled with stationery supplies, books, toys, and chalkboards, decorated with curtains and children’s art, and staffed by a teacher and roving supervisor. The project serves the unmet need of children who live in the slums of Mumbai, child laborers and street children who otherwise do not have access to education. By coming to where the children live, work, or beg, such as Fashion Street and the World Trade Center, bus depots and railroad platforms, the bus brings regular educational experiences to marginalized children in hopes they will continue and enroll in a regular school. School-on-Wheels strives to impart basic literacy skills to groups of children who have no settled residence or live where there are no schools, or their parents cannot get them to school regularly. The mobility of the bus, and its ability to attract children wherever they are found, is an advantage. Lessons are not the only option for children who climb into the bus. They can play with toys, read or be read to from audiotapes, and practice basic skills in a supportive but non-formal environment with other children. In the cities of Mumbai and Pune, about 50-70 children attend at any one time. Social skills and problem solving unique to this population are among the services provided, and the bus is also the scene of basic hygiene and street safely skills sessions. On occasion, the bus takes children on field trips to museums, the zoo, to a bank, a hospital and a police station, hoping to dispel fears among children who may have had negative experiences with law enforcement, and also in order to teach students about their rights. Similar projects to reach children with insufficient access to schooling include neighborhood mobile classrooms targeting girls in the slum neighborhoods who may not be permitted to walk any distance to school. These are held on rooftops, at girls’ homes, and in temple courtyards, for example. According to the organization, it serves 8,000 children in about 100 projects related to schooling for underserved populations, with international NGO and private donor support.