The United Nations International Children’s Education Fund (UNICEF), which has been making consistent efforts in its commitment to build a rosy environment for the world’s children, has emphasized certain standards for children’s health, education and protection from exploitation. Protection from exploitation means prevention of child abuse, including among other things, child labour which has become the worst worry of almost all the countries in the world, but more seriously of the developing nations or the Third World.
In fact, child abuse includes forced labour or services, slavery or practice similar to slavery, forced prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation, servitude or the removal of organs, illicit national and international adoption, trafficking for early marriage, recruitment as child soldiers or beggars or for religious cults.
Today, an estimated 250 million children aged 5 to 14 years are engaged in hazardous work, prostitution and bonded labour, according to a ‘state of the world’s children’ report. Child labour is so grave an abuse of human rights that the world must regard it in the way it does slavery – something unjustifiable under any circumstances.
The UNICEF report points out that at least one child of every four, especially in the developing world, is toiling under conditions resembling slavery. It also said that hazardous child labour is a betrayal of every child’s right as a human being and is a grave offence against our civilization.
An International Labour Organization (ILO) document says that the 10-14 age group accounts for a substantial part of the estimated number of child labourers working in the world. The report notes that in Southern Europe, child labour has always been relatively large, ‘with children working for pay, in particular in seasonal activities, street trades, small workshops or in a home setting. The difficulties connected with transition from a centrally-planned to a market economy in central and eastern Europe have also caused a substantial increase in child labour. The same is also true of the United States where the growth of service sector, the rapid increase in supply of part-time jobs and the search for a more flexible workforce, have contributed to the child labour market.
The ILO document uses the term ‘child labour’ to cover all economic activities carried out by persons less than 15 years of age, regardless of their occupational status-wage earners, own account workers, unpaid family workers, etc. The ILO 1973 Minimum Age Convention (ratified by a large number of countries) authorizes the ratifying countries to set the minimum age for work – but requires that this should not be lower than the school-leaving age provided by law.
Attention on child labour at international level, the report notes, focuses on children employed in Third World countries in predominantly export industries – such as textiles, clothing, food processing, carpets and footwear. The ILO considers two elements are involved in forced labour: the work or service is exacted under the menace of a penalty; and it is undertaken involuntarily.
The forms of forced labour vary widely. In the past, slavery or bonded labour was common, and still persists in many countries, particularly in Asia. More modern forms are often linked to human trafficking, often involving children for commercial activities ranging from hazardous labour to drug peddling to begging to sexual exploitation.
These would suggest that using trade sanctions against exports products with child labour would not really solve the problem. The report brings out how threat of trade sanctions has in some places caused child labour to be eliminated overnight, with the children thrown on the streets and forced into prostitution.
The report says that children are likely to be employed in manufacturing industries, when their labor is less expensive or less troublesome than that of adults. Child workers face significant threats of health and safety – with the majority involved in farming where they are routinely exposed to harsh climate, sharpened tools and heavy loads as well as to toxic chemicals. Girls working as domestic servants away from home are also frequently subjected to mental, physical and sexual abuse.
Prostitution is another type of activity in which children, especially girls, are frequently found, says the ILO and blames the AIDS epidemic as a contributing factor. The demand for children is sex trade is growing with the increase in AIDS – the child is thought to be safe, and the younger the better. The ILO blames the laisser faire attitude of national and international tourism authorities for this particular evil.
The report also speaks of contemporary forms of child slavery in terms of a link between an adult’s work contract and the availability of child labour or exchange of a child for a sum of money often described as an advances on wages. The number of such child slaves, the ILO estimates, could range in the tens of millions – in agriculture, domestic help, sex industry, carpet and textile industries, quarrying and brick-making.
While poverty is the main cause of child labour, it is not the only one, and the problem cannot be resolved merely by economic growth and gradual elimination or reduction of poverty. To achieve lasting progress against the scourge of child labour, attitudes have to change among different social groups and the passivity or indifference must give way to understanding anger and the will to take action. But none of the actors in the fight against child labour can solve it alone, says the ILO, and calls for national efforts supported by international corporation and active involvement of NGOs as well as workers organizations.
According to ILO, the evil of child labour has to be combated on several fronts. The general public must be informed of the nature and gravity of the problem and the need to find urgent solutions so that pressure could be mounted on the authorities.
There should be legislation covering the types of work or activity in which children are most likely to be employed and exposed to economic exploitation or hazardous working conditions. The enforcement of national regulations must be strengthened.
In addition to immediate measures, long term measures are also needed to promote economic growth and the type of growth that would focus greater concern on disadvantage population groups, facilitating their access to productive and adequately remunerative employment as well as a minimum level of social protection.
(The writer is a freelance journalist)
