In many parts of the world, child exploitation is an everyday activity that leads many children to be removed from their families and friends. Child exploitation occurs primarily in regions like Asia and Africa, but modern authors have described its horrors to readers on every continent. In the novel Sold by Patricia McCormick, a thirteen-year-old girl named Lakshmi was sold into prostitution in India due to her lack of knowledge of the outside world. In the memoir A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, Ishmael was a twelve-year-old child soldier in Sierra Leone who killed RUF rebels and pillaged villages. Both Ishmael and Lakshmi faced challenges that forced them to adapt to their violent and abusive situations in order to survive. Therefore, a theme that underlies both novels is that learning to adapt is necessary to survive in times of violence and abuse. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Lakshmi learns to adapt to prostitution during her periods of abuse because she wanted to survive; she prostitutes herself to pay her debt and has to sleep with a large number of men. When Lakshmi was washing herself with a bucket of water, she realized that "no matter how often I wash and scrub and scrub and scrub, I can't rinse the men from my body" (McCormick 129) . Lakshmi's body is filled with the smell of men and she realizes that she is slowly adapting to prostitution for her own survival. The theme also describes Lakshmi's adaptation to prostitution when she imagines her life as a television remote control. At the Happiness House, Lakshmi “pretends that what happens at night when the guests are here is not something that happens to me. I pretend it's a television show I'm watching from far, far away. I pretend to have a button that I press to make everything calm down” (McCormick 157). Lakshmi pretends that her life is shown from the perspective of a television in order to cope with the abuse she receives at the brothel. Lakshmi also adapted to Mumtaz's unsanitary brothel and cruel abuse. After living in the House of Happiness for a long time, Lakshmi “no longer noticed the smell of the indoor toilets. And I have long since ceased to feel Mumtaz’s strapping” (McCormick 153). Lakshmi's senses of smell and touch had already adapted to Mumtaz's abuse and the foul smell of the brothel because she wanted to survive in the brothel. Essentially, the theme of learning to adapt is necessary to survive in times of violence and abuse fits Lakshmi as she had to adapt to the abuse committed at the House of Happiness. Similarly, Ishmael Beah also had to learn to adapt to the violence and abuses of war because it was the only way for him to survive. Ishmael had used drugs to adapt to the harsh life of a child soldier. Ishmael “had taken turns at guard posts around the village, smoking marijuana and sniffing brown brown… They gave me a lot of energy” (Beah 121). In order to adapt to times of war violence and abuse, Ishmael took drugs that gave him a great abundance of energy and robbed him of his feelings, which allowed Ishmael to kill his enemies more easily. Ishmael also adapted to the rebel killings by imagining each rebel as the killer of his family. During the war, Ishmael viewed each rebel as “simply another rebel responsible for the death of my family, as I had sincerely come to believe” (Beah 125). Ishmaël adapts to times of violence by imagining each.