CHILD TRAFFICKING ,CHILD LABOURERS AND THE PLAQUE OF MODERN SLAVERY.MORE THAN 165 MILLION CHILDREN ARE ENGAGED IN CHILD LABOUR ALL OVER THE WORLD.
Thousands
of children found working in India brick kiln in Nepal, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.Girls as young as seven found
carrying bricks on their head.Some of the children were as young as
four.Many children end up working alongside their parents because of a
lack of schools and teachers.Local officials said they would investigate
why the rescued children had not been enrolled in a nearby primary
school.
History
books tell the 400-year story of one of the most unfathomable practices
ever engaged in by mankind of humans being bought, sold and traded as
commodities, and of men and women shackled together on slave ships
destined towards a life of captivity.
This is indicative of the radical transformation of the international
community in its attitude towards an inhumane practice that should have
never been allowed to occur.In the world of work,
over 165 million children aged 5 to 14 years are going to work. Of
these, 74 million are engaged in work that could be dangerous to health.
Compared with other continents, child labour is more in Asian
countries. Despite the fact that
over the past six years the number of minors who work here fell by
nearly 5 million people, yet 122 million children and adolescents aged 5
to 14 years engaged in commercial activities or in the workplace. Among
all countries, child labour is more in Nepal, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.Every
week, thousands of people move from their traditional communities to
find work in large cities. In border towns like Siliguri in India,
children are at risk of harm, exploitation and abuse. Away from the
support of their extended families and communities,
children are easy targets for traffickers, who transport them across
India or into other countries. World Vision is working to protect,
empower and educate children in Siliguri. Learn more about our work in
child protection.Modern forms of slavery can include debt bondage, where a person is
forced to work for free to pay off a debt, child slavery, forced
marriage, domestic servitude and forced labour, where victims are made
to work through violence and intimidation.Child
labour in Pakistan has increased in last two decades. The main causes
of child labour are large family size, and unemployment. People with low
wages or earnings and too many children cannot afford in quality life.
They can’t even fill the stomach of
their children , rather they could send them to school. So the children
in such families are sent to learn some skills and earn while learn.
People with too many dependents are unable to groom themselves. They
find no resources to improve them personality. Thus, they have to lose
all opportunities in life. They are being replaced by quality workers,
so they lose their employment. To get rid of their miserable condition,
they send the children to find work. Children under age are hired at
extrem low salaries and most by are abused by their employers and adult
co-workers. There should be proper law for child-labour. The children
working at young age need to be protected by adults of our society.Considerable
differences exist between the many kinds of work children do. Some are
difficult and demanding, others are more hazardous and even morally
reprehensible. Children carry out a very wide range of tasks and
activities when they work.Not all work done by children should be
classified as child labour that is to be targeted for elimination.
Children’s or adolescents’ participation in work that does not affect
their health and personal development or interfere with their schooling,
is generally regarded as being something positive. This includes
activities such as helping their parents around the home, assisting in a
family business or earning pocket money outside school hours and during
school holidays. These kinds of activities contribute to children’s
development and to the welfare of their families; they provide them with
skills and experience, and help to prepare them to be productive
members of society during their adult life.The term “child labour” is
often defined as work that deprives children of their childhood, their
potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental
development.In its most extreme forms, child labour involves children
being enslaved, separated from their families, exposed to serious
hazards and illnesses and/or left to fend for themselves on the streets
of large cities often at a very early age. Whether or not particular
forms of “work” can be called “child labour” depends on the child’s age,
the type and hours of work performed, the conditions under which it is
performed and the objectives pursued by individual countries. The answer
varies from country to country, as well as among sectors within
countries. All forms of slavery or
practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of
children, debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labour,
including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed
conflict.The use, procuring or offering of a child for prostitution, for
the production of pornography or for pornographic performances. The
use, procuring or offering of a child for illicit activities, in
particular for the production and trafficking of drugs as defined in the
relevant international treaties.Work which, by its nature or the
circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health,
safety or morals of children.Labour that jeopardises the physical,
mental or moral well-being of a child, either because of its nature or
because of the conditions in which it is carried out, is known as
“hazardous work”.In
order to appreciate the trafficking bill, some understanding of the
history of international and domestic anti-trafficking law is essential.
Against this backdrop it will soon become clear that the proposed law
will do little to alleviate India’s shame of harbouring the highest
number of the world’s ‘modern slaves’. It also seems to be a shallow
attempt to ape a highly carceral, western approach to a juridically
constructed problem of ‘trafficking’ undertaken in perfect amnesia of a
richer, more systemic, and indigenous legal approach to the exploitation
that has long afflicted vulnerable sections of India’s work force.
Herein lies the irony of poorly thought out laws meant to act as
band-aids on the long festering problem of severely unequal wealth and
resource distribution.
How we can fight child labour in the tobacco industry.Many of them complained of suffering nausea, vomiting,
headaches, and dizziness while they worked all symptoms consistent
with acute nicotine poisoning, or green tobacco sickness, from nicotine
being absorbed through the skin while handling tobacco.
Worldwide,
60 per cent of all child labour in the age group five to 17 years work
in agriculture, including farming, fishing, aquaculture, forestry, and
livestock. The majority of child labour are unpaid family members. One
component of providing access
to education is the School Infrastructure Development programme which
focuses on improving school facilities, including sanitation, potable
water, sports facilities and classroom equipment.An
After School Programme seeks to prevent children from dropping out of
school by providing them meals and engaging them in post-school
activities, particularly during peak agriculture season, when the need
for working hands is higher. “Our programme has been implemented in more
than 50 schools in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Over the years, we
have seen a significant change in the school-going patterns of children.“Students,
supported by parents, prefer to go to schools which now have good
facilities and infrastructure. We are pleased at the way in which local
communities have joined hands with us in spreading awareness against
child labour and encouraging students to attend schools“Trafficking
in persons” shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer,
harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force
or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of
the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or
receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person
having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.
Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the
prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced
labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude
or the removal of organs: The consent of a victim of trafficking in
persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagraph of this
article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in
subparagraph have been used.Another
layer of complexity comes from trafficking’s long history of
association with prostitution. Historically, and more recently,
trafficking was conflated with trafficking for sex work and, indeed,
with sex work itself. When the US government then started ranking
governments annually in the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons
Reports in terms of their actions to prevent trafficking and prosecute
traffickers, and then withholding “nonhumanitarian, non-trade-related”
aid from the worst offenders, governments scrambled to amend their
anti-sex work laws in order to be placed higher up in the TIP rankings.
Regions of the world like south Asia, meanwhile, became playgrounds of
sexual humanitarianism, as religious evangelicals and liberals alike
sought to rescue third world sex workers and purchase their ‘freedom’.Competing legal traditions and government inaction.It
is in the context of these international developments that we need to
assess the Indian trafficking bill. Like most countries around the
world, India has a growing architecture of anti-trafficking law, put
into place at different points in time to address varied manifestations
of extreme labour exploitation. Yet the Indian Penal Code does not
define the terms slavery, bondage, forced labour, or begary (where a
person has been forced to work against his will and without payment).
Many of the labour-related provisions in the IPC were a product of
colonial rule, and thus they reflected the realities of that time. They
also often furthered the colonial government’s interests in extracting
compulsory labour from the natives.Meanwhile,
the Indian Constitution, as a self-styled radical legal document
reflecting postcolonial aspirations for modern nationhood, is concerned
with indigenous forms of servitude. Under Part III, which deals with
fundamental rights, Article 23 prohibits the traffic in human beings,
begary, and other similar forms of forced labour, making the
contravention of this provision an offence punishable in accordance with
law.The
Indian government needs to pause and dig deep into its own long and
complex legal history, as well as its unique vision of dealing with
extreme forms of exploitation that today travel under the conceptual
banner of ‘trafficking’.In
the 1970s, India, keen to live up to the aspirations of the Indian
Constitution, passed several social legislations. These were the Bonded
Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976, as amended by the Bonded Labour
System (Abolition) Amendment Act, 1985 (BLSAA); the Contract Labour
(Regulation & Abolition) Act, 1970, as amended by the Contract
Labour (Regulation & Abolition) Amendment Act No.14 of 1986 (CLRAA);
and the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act (Regulation of Employment and
Conditions of Service) Act, 1979 (ISMWA).All
of these laws counter extreme forms of labour exploitation that are now
commonly included under the term trafficking. Their intervention models
are comprehensive, multi-pronged, community-based, and aimed at
systemic reform – several notches above any simplistic attempts at
rescue and rehabilitation. The BLSAA, for instance, not only prohibits
and penalises existing and future bonded labour; all bonded labourers
are set free and, by law, their obligation to repay the debt is
extinguished.The
BLSAA has several elaborate provisions rendering existing and future
legal action arising from the debt void. Creditors accepting any
repayment for an extinguished debt can face imprisonment and fines.
Local district magistrates have to ensure the act’s implementation, the
eradication of bonded labour, and the rehabilitation of bonded labourers
so as to prevent their becoming bonded again. Vigilance committees with
representatives of the state, the affected community, social workers,
rural development institutions, and credit institutions are to assist
the executive in this, while also defending suits against freed bonded
labourers. The CLRAA and ISMWA, meanwhile, address chronic exploitation
by intermediaries and sub-contractors by imposing on them the
obligations of the employer. Consider the case of India! Globalization
has helped the Indian economy to stand on its own in due time but has
also catapulted the need of cheap unskilled labour. Unfortunately,
millions of children are included in this huge domain of unskilled
labourers. Not only they are deprived of their childhood, but also they
are stripped of their fundamental rights.Not
to talk about their meagre wages what they receive, India is one of the
countries in South East Asia where human trafficking has become a
menace. The migration of children from rural areas to urban domain has
always been a common feature in Indian society. The meteoric rise of
urban Indian culture has necessitated huge real estate growth where
millions of children are engaged in physically intensive work which is
detrimental to their natural growth and development. Let’s not forget
the plight of the domestic helps in India, where it has become a norm to
keep little children as domestic helps. The condition of girls in the
child labour sector is pathetic to say the least. Minimal education,
malnutrition, early marriage, societal exploitation and even
prostitution have become common in this arena.It
is indeed very sad to say that last year, the central government of
India amended child labour laws to allow children below 14 to work in
family businesses and the entertainment industry (excluding circuses). In
India 33 million children are employed in various forms of child
labour. There is no denying the fact that education is the only solution
to abolish child labour in a developing country like India. Migration
and debt trap have always been culprits in the rural economy and thus
awareness programmes are indeed necessary.
Child labourers are vulnerable to abuse, and their families are often
trapped in a cycle of poverty. In extreme cases, children are forced to
work under threat of violence or death. Children can fall ill and get
injured injuries have been as severe as loss of body parts.When children are of an appropriate age for the task, receive
appropriate pay and work in safe environments, they can be considered
“willing participants in work.” These children can balance work with
school and play, and they develop the necessary skills to transition
into adulthood.
Lack
of financial institutions for the extreme poor can push them towards
unregulated money-lenders who charge high interest rates or insist on
large loans that leave the poor vulnerable to debt bondage.Poverty can
trap people in debt bondage, because interest
may add to the debt burden as fast as the person in debt can pay it
off, Money-lenders may deliberately structure credit arrangements to
trap people into long term debt bondage.Poverty can make it impossible
for the poor to move to an area where they can get employed as free
worker.Poverty may make it impossible for a worker to challenge an
'illegal' labour situation.When
children, especially young ones are exposed to long hours of work in
harsh and dangerous environments, which threatens their lives and limbs
as well as jeopardize their normal physical, mental, emotional and moral
development, it is termed child labour.
As a result, they cannot imagine bettering something. I think though
Bangladesh is a developed country, so most of the lower level of peoples
is involving in service-oriented sectors to earned money. Most of the
children they are doing domestic very little business. As a result, they
do not get educationally facilities.Child
domestic service is a widespread practice in Bangladesh. The Rapid
Assessment of Child Labour Situation in Bangladesh estimated that in the
city of Dhaka alone there were about 120,000 child domestics.
Especially in Dhaka, city employers in the urban areas usually recruit
children from their village homes through family, friends or contacts.
Most of the child domestic workers come from the most vulnerable
families, many of them being orphans or abandoned children. The majority
of child domestics tend to be between 12 and 16years old, but children
as young as 5 or 6 years old can also be found working. A survey of
child domestic workers found that 38 percent were 11 to 13 years old and
nearly 24 percent were 5 to 1years old. Their employers usually take
care of their daily necessities like clothes, oil, soap, comb, towel,
bedding and sleeping materials. The child domestic workers are often the
least paid in the society, their remuneration ranging from 8taka to
40taka per month. In most of the cases, they hand over all their
earnings to their parents, leaving nothing for themselves.Currently,
child labor in Bangladesh is a critical issue. Day by day child labor
is growing in different sectors. I think scarcity of one’s income to
maintain his/her family and high density of population are the two main
causes of child labor in our country. Different children are involved in
difference activities to earn. Some children are involved with their
traditional family jobs like clay modelling. Clay modeling was a
tradition of our country earlier. Now this sector is in a destroyed
position in Bangladesh. However, till now parents are sending their
little children at hard work to save their family tradition with
encourage. However, they do not get minimum facilities from the
government and any private organization. As a result, unemployment and
illiteracy rate is continuously increasing in Bangladesh.Child
is any person who is yet to compete fourteen years of age’’. Bangladesh
has the largest number of child workers in the world. They are employed
in many industries and trades, including garments, footwear, brick
kilns, stainless steel, hotels, textile shops and bus contractor etc. A
dense population, limited resources, and frequent natural calamities
complicate the poverty situation in Bangladesh and children are the
worst victims. Although child labour is not illegal in Bangladesh but
government or private organization have not take any positive steps to
reduce the child labour. Among them large number of child is working by
Bus helper or bus contractors to early age. As a result child labour is
increasing day by day in Bangladesh.This
has produced a vast pool of people in need of work.International
anti-slavery law is not effectively enforced.There is a lack of
institutions and procedures to enforce it.Some countries don't
effectively enforce anti-slavery laws.This may not always be done for
completely unethical reasons - if the alternative is wholesale
starvation, then a government may choose not to enforce the law against
slavery.
Children
mining cobalt for batteries in the Congo,investigation has found child
labor being used in the dangerous mining of cobalt in the Democratic
Republic of Congo. The mineral cobalt is used in virtually all batteries
in common devices, including cellphones, laptops and even electric
vehicles.The work is hard enough for an adult man, but it is unthinkable
for a child. Yet tens of thousands of Congolese kids are involved in
every stage of mining for cobalt.But for the Chinese middlemen who buy
the cobalt, there were no such constraints; they have free access.
Global
number of children in child labour has declined by one third since
2000, from 246 million to 168 million children. More than half of them,
85 million, are in hazardous work (down from 171 million in 2000).There
are 13 million
(8.8%) of children in child labour in Latin America and the Caribbean
and in the Middle East and North Africa there are 9.2 million
(8.4%).Agriculture remains by far the most important sector where child
labourers can be found (98 million, or 59%), but the problems are not
negligible in services (54 million) and industry (12 million) mostly in
the informal economy.African children have worked
in farms and at home over a long history. This is not unique to Africa;
large number of children have worked in agriculture and domestic
situations in America, Europe and every other human society, throughout
history, prior to 1950s. Scholars suggest that this work, specially in
rural areas, was a form of schooling and vocational education, where
children learned the arts and skills from their parents, and as adults
continued to work in the same hereditary occupation. Bass claims this is
particularly true in the African contex.Africa
is a highly diverse and culturally developed clan. In parts of this
clan, farming societies are a system of patrilineal clans and lineages.
The young train with the adults. The family and kinsfolk provide a
cultural routine that help children learn
useful practical skills and enables these societies to provide for
itself in the next generation. Historically, there were no formal
schools, instead, children were informally schooled by working
informally with their family and kin from a very early age. Child labor
in Africa, as in other parts of the world, was also viewed as a way to
instill a sense of responsibility and a way of life in children
particularly in rural, subsistence agricultural communities. In rural
Pare people of northern Tanzania, for example, five year olds would
assist adults in tending crops, nine year olds help carry fodder for
animals and responsibilities scaled with age.In northern parts of
sub-Saharan Africa, Islam is a major influence. Begging and child labour
was considered as a service in exchange for quranic education, and in
some cases continues to this day. These children aged 7–13, for example,
were called almudos in Gambia, or talibés in Senegal. The parents
placed their children with marabout or serin, a cleric or quranic
teacher. Here, they would split their time between begging and studying
the Quran. This practice fit with one of the five pillars of Islam, the
responsibility to engage in zakat, or almsgiving.The
growth of colonial rule in Africa, from 1650 to 1950, by powers such as
Britain, France, Belgium, Germany and Netherlands encouraged and
continued the practice of child labour. Colonial administrators
preferred Africa's traditional kin-ordered modes of production, that is
hiring a household for work not just the adults. Millions of children
worked in colonial agricultural plantations, mines and domestic service
industries.Children in these colonies between the ages of 5-14 were
hired as apprentice without pay in exchange for learning a craft.
Colonial British laws, for example, offered the native people ownership
to some of the native land in exchange for making labor of wife and
children available to colonial government's needs such as in farms and
as picannins.Fast-fashion
retailers such as H&M, New Look, and Sports Direct’s Lonsdale label
were all found to have worked with factories which employed 14 year old
children in Myanmar, according to the new report “The Myanmar Dilemma”
from the Amsterdam-based organisation
the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (also known as
Somo). Some interviewed over 400 workers in 12 factories which supplied
garments for international fashion brands and found workers were being
paid half of the full legal minimum wage, in addition to a number of
children workers as young as 14 working over-time.If
a supplier doesn't live up to our standards or national legislation we -
in accordance with our routines - demand that the supplier immediately
establishes an action plan, which has been done also in this case. One
of the measures concerning the twosuppliers in question is improved recruitment routines, which has resulted in improved handling of ID-cards."H&M said the Bangladesh Fire and Safety Accord was extremely important to the company."Although being behind the projected schedule, we are experiencing good progress. This
‘race to the bottom’ led by fashion retailers forever in search for the
lowest production hub causes unhealthy competition between garment
producing countries in the region, argues Some in the report. “The rule
of law in Myanmar is not adequately upheld.
The army still has a lot of influence. The garment industry’s
operations go largely unchecked. The question is justified if the time
is ripe for foreign companies to invest in Myanmar. Garment brands
should think twice before they start production in Myanmar. The risk of
labour rights violations is very high. Companies should make a thorough
analysis of all potential problems. They must ensure that they, together
with their suppliers, identify and tackle these risks before placing
any orders.It in not the first time H&M has been accused of working with factories that employ workers as young as 14 in Myanmar.
Primark
axes suppliers for using child labour .Fashion chain Primark has axed
three longstanding suppliers in southern India for using child labour
after being alerted to the practice .The three suppliers - from the
Tirapur region of the Tamil Nadu province - were sub-contracting embroidery work on dresses to child home workers. Almost its entire range is sourced from low-cost suppliers in Asia.