Child Slavery Today

The Slave Market -- By Gustave Boulanger (1824-1888)
CHILD SLAVERY TODAY

Most boys and girls are lucky. They live with their mothers and fathers and their brothers and sisters. They go to school. They have time to play.

Many other boys and girls are not so lucky. Every year thousands of boys and girls are taken away from their mothers and fathers and their brothers and sisters.

They are taken by gangsters. The gangsters take them from school. They take them while they are playing football. They take them when they are playing. Many never see their mother and father or brothers and sisters again! Their fathers come looking for them but they rarely ever find them. If they do find them, the big boss of the gangsters sends his men to beat up or kill the child's father.

What does the big boss and his men do to the boy or girl?

They start a lifetime of hard labor in the factories, fields and dingy workshops of Asia, Africa and South America. These children are the most vulnerable to cruel, harsh and systematic exploitation. It grinds down their hope. It denies them their childhood.

Many of today's slaves are children. Their lack of physical strength and naiveté make them easy to manipulate. They have no one willing to speak up, or act, on their behalf against unscrupulous employers. UNICEF estimates that, world-wide, there are 100 million children working in conditions harmful to their health, overall development and well-being. Children are particularly vulnerable if they are handed over by their parents for the exploitation of their labor, or if they are made to work to repay loans. Such practices lead to conditions of slavery.

Most working children are found in the agriculture sector. In less industrialized countries, 60% or more of the population live in rural areas.

Poor families need their children to work. Some start as young as 4 or 5 years, either on the family's small holding or on a landowner's estate. This could prevent them from attending school. Often there are not enough schools and they may be far away and poorly equipped. Girls, being less valued than boys, are most likely to drop out.

Families usually have too little land to support themselves and can be forced to borrow from a landlord or money lender. Their children could have to work to repay the loan. Many products we buy — tea, coffee, fruits, sugar, chocolate — have been grown on estates using child labor. These children risk injury from using tools and machinery and can suffer permanent damage to their health from spraying pesticides without protective clothing.

As countries industrialize, rural poverty causes a growing migration to the cities in the hope of work and a better future. Businesses seek to employ labor from among the rural poor, and children are cheap. They work in stone-breaking quarries, on construction sites, in brickworks and chemical factories, in chalk and glassworks, on carpet looms, in workshops making brassware, fireworks, locks, shoes and textiles, in transport, mining, ceramics — and in many other sectors.

Ill-treatment and disease often mark them for life. Lungs are damaged by dust and fumes, backs are malformed through crouching or carrying heavy loads, eyesight ruined by working in poor light. In some cases, organized gangs or recruiting 'agents' use economic pressure, trickery and advances on wages to persuade often desperate parents to hand over their children. The children are taken, sometimes as bonded labor, to distant towns, and are made to work long hours for little or no pay. Their lives are not their own.

Child domestic servants. Children as young as 6 are sent to work as domestic servants in the homes of richer families. More girls than boys work in this way. Isolation in their employer's home, and working long hours, they are often poorly fed and denied education and vulnerable to mental and physical abuse.

AT WORK IN THE WEST

Work can help develop a sense of independence and responsibility. However, overworking can affect education and create risks to health. It can also be exploited. In the USA, as well as in other countries, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, there are laws to protect working children under 16. These state that no children should be employed:

* under a certain age (usually 13 years of age)
* during school hours
* outside certain hours (usually before 7.00 am or after 7.00 pm)
* for more than so many hours on a school day or on a Sunday
* for lifting or carrying anything heavy enough to cause injury
* in any industrial concern.

We in the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand do not have totally unblemished records in the use of child labor, particularly in the use of the children of female outworkers (usually poor migrant female workers from Asia), who assist their mothers in the production of garments in sweatshop conditions. One disturbing fact about piecework in the USA and Australia is the incidence of children working. While it is rare to find children directly employed by contractors, children work long hours alongside their parents or other siblings, working on industrial sewing machines after school, until late at night and during school holidays.

WHAT IS CHILD LABOR?

Children in our countries deliver newspapers or work in McDonalds. Not all working children are child laborers. Child labor is different from the employment of young people. Delivering newspapers or working in McDonalds is all right as long as these do not interfere with your education and development.

Child labor, on the other hand, is different. This is the world of child street-sellers, children working as miners in diamond mines and brass factories.

RECENT HISTORY OF CHILD LABOR

Children have always been exploited for their labor. The idea of children having specific rights has only emerged relatively recently. In Victorian England and 19th century USA, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, children were commonly used as cheap labor in mills, factories, mines, workshops and wealthy homes.

Campaigning by social reform movements led to the Factory Act 1883, the Mine Act 1842 and the Factory Act 1867, which regulated working hours, protected young children and improved working conditions. Compulsory education, introduced by the Education Act 1870, further limited child exploitation.

Similar laws were passed in most States of the USA, New Zealand and in the Canadian and Australian colonies. In 20th Century, growing awareness world-wide led to the International Labour Organization (an agency of the United Nations) to develop standards for the protection of child labor, culminating in the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention 1999.

Almost all countries have now have laws which set a minimum age for working. These laws are not always enforced, and so the exploitation of millions of children continues.

THESE ARE YOUR RIGHTS

The Convention on the Rights of the Child was formally adopted by the United Nations in 1989. Most countries have now ratified the Convention. As a child you have the right:

* to sufficient food, clean water, health care, and an adequate standard of living
* to be with their family, or in the best caring environment to ensure protection from all physical, mental and sexual abuse
* to education, and the special care or training necessary for any disability or handicap
* to play Every child has a right to play.

Children have a right "to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child." That right is enshrined in Article 31(1) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Unfortunately, many children do not play. Indeed, some children make toys they do never play with.

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