The cowards of Haiti: Women and children raped and ignored and the cameras are gone.

Last night "60 Minutes" ran an in-depth story regarding the situation of the orphans in Haiti.

It's a heartbreaking fact that we once had every camera in the world pointed at this island while it was still shuddering with aftershocks.

However, now that the shaking's finally stopped we no longer seem to be able to look at what's really left: An island of the damned. A place where women and children are left like animals to be starved, raped and worse.

Actually, animals fare better than these poor kids left there to fend for themselves, starving and alone.

Children are routinely raped. End of story.

What's wrong with this picture? Everything. For me this is where the story starts, not ends.

Sure, it might be their island, or their country, but this is our civilization. It's right under our noses.

And, like the cowards that we all are, we are simply not doing nearly enough to stop the inhumanity now taking place there.

I'm so sick of hearing about the abuse of women and children in this world. Globally we have to come together to end this kind of mysogynistic torture.

John and Yoko were right. "Women are the niggers of the world," not that I don't cringe typing those lyrics. But, they were right. It's true. And given that a civilization is only as strong as it's weakest link, let's fix that.

We need go to all the places that routinely treat women worse than livestock and end the way we view our citizens. I'm waiting for this to be more important to all of us. Children are being raped and killed and it no longer consistently makes the evening news.

Nope. That the thing about child rape. It's yucky and sad and we want to really know what was so hot about Jesse James's tattooed Amish freak that he'd be tempted to throw Sandra Bullock out of bed for a chick with "Pray for us Sinners" tatooed ON HER FOREHEAD.

See? Even I digressed, and it's precisely just this kind of imbalance of our attentions which is the root of our moral cancer. It is a sickening defense mechanism simply because we are lazy and don't like discomfort.

I was hoping people might care to read a bit from last night's "60 Minutes" story and/or watch a video clip about this matter.

It's time for the global rules for our collective civilization to change. We have to find a way to end treating people like this. From Darfur to the Congo, in Haiti, and probably right under our noses if we were better at paying attention to this subject.

"In Haiti, Global Orphan was already caring for more than 2,000 children before the quake. Now they were taking on more.

We met 13-year-old Renise in the camp. Rescue workers had picked her up from the quake-ravaged streets. It's hard to believe, but the quake was, to her, a blessing: it ended a nightmare of a childhood. Months before the quake, Renise was raped and became pregnant.

But there was more: she was also the victim of something almost unimaginable in this day and time. Renise had been given away as a child to become a household slave for another family.

"There were moments when I would just stop and cry. I cried because they made me work like a donkey. Their daughter never picked up one bucket when I was there. Not once," Renise told Pelley.

She said the family didn't treat her like their daughter. "I used to sleep on the floor."

"The daughter slept in the bed and you slept on the floor, is that right?" Pelley asked.

"Yes," Renise replied,

Child slaves in Haiti are called "restaveks," which in Creole means "stays with" - as in one who stays with the family but isn't part of the family.

It's a grotesque tradition, especially for a country born out of a slave rebellion. But it is not illegal. The U.N. estimates that there are about 175,000 restaveks. That may sound like a huge number, but others believe there are many more."

For the rest of this CBS News story in print, click here.

For some reason when I try to post a link here right from the CBS website, I get an annoying "gadget guys" story - so I'm going to post this in parts off of Youtube.

Part One 60 Minutes Children of Haiti