The Weight of Silence; Invisible Children of India

¿Weight of Silence makes visible children who remain invisible to the rest of the world and reminds us of each child's right to dream out loud and in color.¿ ¿Geralyn Dreyfous, Executive Producer, Born Into Brothels ¿The stories told in this book do not belong to me. They were given to me as a gift, often because I was the only person who had ever asked.¿ -Shelley Seale Amidst the growing prosperity of India, there is an entire generation of parentless children growing up. They are everywhere. They fill the streets, railway stations, shanty villages. Some scrounge through trash for anything they can sell. Others, often as young as two, beg. Many are homeless, overflowing orphanages and institutional homes to live on the streets where they are extremely vulnerable to being trafficked into child labor if they¿re lucky, brothels if they¿re not. They are invisible children; their plight goes virtually unnoticed, their voices silenced. Little did the author know how much they would change her life. Shelley Seale¿s narrative non-fiction book follows the lives of just such children as those brought to life in the movie Slumdog Millionaire. The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India depicts Seale¿s journey into orphanages and through the streets and slums of India where millions of innocent children live without families. During her three years of writing The Weight of Silence, Seale has befriended and told the stories of many such children ¿ and has born witness to their struggles first hand.

Shelley Seale has written for National Geographic’s GeoTourism guides, Andrew Harper Traveler Magazine, the Seattle Times, Austin Woman, Washington Magazine, The International Ecotourism Society, and is the sustainable travel columnist at the Examiner. She lives in Austin, Texas. Joan Collins is a Golden Globe–winning actress, bestselling author, accomplished producer, and an honorary founding member of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.