Little Slaves, Big Slavery

Child labourers are the product of poverty. They go mostly unnoticed in countries where the people are poor and, because the children are working instead of getting an education, the cycle continues. Asia has the largest problem, followed by Africa and Latin America.

It is a problem driven by economic factors. While most child labourers work in agriculture, about five percent work in factories or on plantations producing goods to be exported to the first world. The wages are often substandard, and the conditions often dangerous. The children are working to feed and cloth themselves and their families. They are often working alongside other family members. Their choices are limited and those who would exploit them numerous. That exploitation is not limited to those who hire them directly, but ultimately those who benefit from their labours, including the end consumer. These child labourers are the result of an economic system gone mad.

According to Human Rights Watch report on Ecuadoran banana plantations, child labourers were “...exposed to pesticides, using sharp tools, hauling heavy loads of bananas from the fields to the packing plants, lacking potable water and rest room facilities, and experiencing sexual harassment.” This sort of treatment is not limited to the children, adults suffer it too, but limiting the exploitation of the children would do much to break the cycle.

The end result of this suffering ends up in supermarkets in North America and Western Europe. “In 2000, roughly 31 percent of Dole's export bananas, 13 percent of Del Monte's, and 7 percent of Chiquita's were supplied by Ecuadorian plantations,” Human Rights Watch Reports.

Child Soldiers are another part of the child labour force. Children as young as eight are forced to fight for guerilla groups or government-backed paramilitaries. They are forced to take part in atrocities and sometimes given drugs to encourage them to do so, or to keep fighting afterwards. Girls forced to become child soldiers are at increased risk of sexual abuse. Children seeking to escape are often beaten or killed.

The lasting psychological scars suffered by child soldiers and the lack of proper treatment and reintegration available often lead to further abuse of others, again creating a cycle that can go on for generations.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child lists fifteen as the minimum age at which a child can be recruited for armed conflict. Attempts to raise the minimum age to eighteen have been opposed by countries that seek to protect their current recruitment practices.

Those who join the military before their eighteenth birthdays in the US are a far cry from child soldiers being press-ganged into service in the developing world. They can actually use their service to obtain an education not otherwise available to them, to build a career in the military, or prepare themselves for a non-military career. That is not the case for the vast majority of child soldiers but the US, with the backing of great Britain and the Netherlands, fought attempts to ban all recruitment of soldiers under the age of eighteen. Such actions are unconscionable, and cause untold harm to child soldiers all over the world.

In India the use of child labour continues despite promises to begin enforcing laws against the practice. “Human Rights Watch World Report 2003: India” stated that, “In 2002, at least fifteen million children, most of them Dalits, worked as bonded laborers in conditions of forced servitude. Most worked in agriculture; others picked rags, rolled beedi cigarettes, packaged firecrackers, cleaned hotels, or wove silk saris and carpets. Human Rights Watch investigations in 2002 revealed that in the silk industry, bonded children worked twelve or more hours a day, six-and-a half or seven days a week, producing silk thread and helping weave silk handloom fabric. Both boys and girls suffered injuries and disease from fumes, machinery, sharp threads, boiling water, or handling dead worms, as well as verbal and physical abuse from their owners.”

Some improvements were made, mostly attempts by state governments and non-governmental organisations to provide rehabilitative education for child labourers, but enforcement of laws remains lax and progress varies greatly depending on the region. India’s class structure remains a major problem in efforts to curb the use of child labour.

The forced labour of children is a major problem in many parts of Asia. Children are sent to work, mostly in agriculture, but often in factories to produce goods for western retailers. The shoe industry is possibly the most notorious for using child labour. Often the labour is forced, with the children being sold as indentured servants to pay off a families debt. Other times the children are simply sent to work because the family requires the income. The work is often dangerous and work days of twelve hours or longer are not unusual.

Much more disturbing than the use of child workers in factory and agricultural settings is the still burgeoning child sex industry. Although some inroads have been made to reduce this practice, it is still rampant in many parts of Asia. Children, usually girls, very often pre-pubescent, end up working in brothels in some of the most horrendous conditions imaginable. They are often offered as chattel by their parents who desperately need money. Other times they are lured in with the promise of great sums of money or led to believe that they are taking on a regular job. It is not unusual for them to be kidnapped from their villages.

Once they have worked as prostitutes they are considered social pariahs, so it is very difficult for them to find another place in society. Many of them do not ever get the chance to try. Many die extremely young due to HIV/AIDS and other diseases, very often with little or no medical care. Many die due to the violence so prevalent in their situations.

Much of the child labour performed is to feed the appetites of wealthy nations. It is people from developed countries that expect fresh bananas at the supermarket; silk clothing at the upscale boutiques; oil and minerals from countries in perpetual civil war; and even the ability to take “sex holidays” to developing nations. It is very often the actions of the governments and trans-national corporations of the first world that support the power structure in developing nations that resists real change when it comes to the rights of children.

Education is, of course, the key. Child labourers do not get one. A primary education is second on the list of the United Nations’ millennium goals. Education, as we’ve seen so clearly in the developed world, raises the lot in life of so many. The effects spread so that not only are individuals likely to do better in life, but whole countries can raise themselves up. Child labour is a major obstruction to children getting even the most basic of educations. While much of the world is on-track to meet the UN Millennium Goal by 2015, sub-Saharan Africa and southern and western Asia are not. These are some of the same regions where child labour is so prevalent.

The need for education goes far beyond the children though. To educate the children we must educate those who rule them, to educate those rulers we must first educate ourselves.

Related links: Amnesty.org
HRW.org (PDF)
UN Link
Stop Child Labour
HRW.org


Note: Amnesty.org HRW.org (PDF) UN Link Stop Child Labour HRW.org