Child labour and punishment for child labour? The conventional wisdom (and it prevails on a humongous scale among the middle class) goes like this: But those children would go hungry if they didn’t work, wouldn’t they? By being employed as children, they are able to feed themselves and can also take care of their family’s needs. Often their families are dysfunctional due to alcoholism and unstable family atmosphere, they say.
Yes, the children probably would go hungry if they didn’t work. In fact the mothers of some of the children who were sexually abused by Freddy Peats also said something similar. They were saying that at least he brought up their children and provided them the food and shelter that they otherwise would not have. One cannot be judgmental about the mothers. What response can one give them? But when someone who seeks to gain by exploiting and oppressing the children says that, it is quite a different story. If they were so philanthropic and empathetic to the child’s conditions, they could be sponsoring a child. They didn’t have to employ the child and certainly they didn’t have to exploit and oppress the child. If one notices, child labour is employed as domestic help often by educated so called civilized, even professionals. Whither our education that it numbs our sensitivities?
And yes, by being employed as children, the children are able to feed themselves and can also take care of their family’s needs. But have our standards as a society stooped so low that we believe that employing children so that they and their families may live, is the way out? There is something rotten in the city if we are saying so. Cannot we insist that the parents of these children must get a living wage wherever they are working? Or that NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme) not be diluted as the attempts are today and that it reach the parents so they get some gainful employment? What kind of a society do we make up where we think it is normal for people to be displaced, sometimes even twice over, from the same locality and live on the fringes fighting between existence and life driving their children to labour?
And yes, some families are dysfunctional because of alcoholism, but many are dysfunctional because of poverty and other tragedies befalling their families. We assume that every dysfunctional family is a family whose member/s have fallen prey to alcohol or where parents are divorced. But that is a fallacy. The family rendered dysfunctional due to alcoholism becomes the bogeyman and the middle class and rich family hiding behind that mask of reaching out to children, does not get exposed because they get arrayed as philantropists. The system continues.
There are no doubt a number of families whose members have fallen prey to alcoholism. And certainly we need a properly lubricated temperance programme from the State rather than encouragement for lubrication of the liver through liberalizing promotional avenues for the liquor lobby.
Also not every family where the parents of children are divorced becomes dysfunctional. In fact, in a number of cases, the family becomes functional after the person who was the problem maker is at bay or forced to introspect on his or her life after the jolt of a divorce. For those families that have actually become dysfunctional because of a divorce, we may well ask: what social security systems exist for the children in these and other difficult circumstances. After all, the child is not only the responsibility of the particular parents whose child it is.
Child labour is something uncomfortable to talk about. You won’t find it figuring in any party conversations. Or elitist “intellectual” discussions. Or in political party conversations or bureaucrat conversations, for that matter. Except if it is to spite someone from the other side/ the enemy caught in the act. It is almost as if people consider it better to wish away or sweep under the carpet any discussions about this.
We end up nodding through child labour on all these pretexts and overlooking the larger picture that we need to address, when we justify child labour and actually participate by employing child labour. What happens about the child’s schooling or education? What happens when the child’s adverse condition of having had to give up her childhood to work is further exacerbated by exhaustion and malnutrition and malformation resulting from this kind of pressure to labour often under exploitative circumstances? After all, the reason people employ children is not out of any philanthropic concern, but because child labour is cheaper and easy to manipulate.
Can we continue to give our vote or support for the neo liberal policies that are responsible for sparking the global economic crisis that has resulted in a significant rise of children in child poverty? As per the UNICEF Report released in October 2014, the number of children living in poverty in the 41 richest countries of the world had upped to 76.5 million. One can well imagine the figures in developing countries like India that are aspiring to fall in line with such exploitative economic policies and to follow development policies that have profits and not people at their core.
When we make child labour seem inevitable, we in fact justify a political status quo and a political culture that will simply stay silent on these issues on the surface while it oversees the taking away/chipping away the rug of basic needs from under the feet of children. We cannot allow this to happen. It is on our conscience to push an unresponsive and corrupt political and bureaucratic system to change its tracks and act.
(Albertina Almeida is a lawyer and human rights activist)
