CHILD LABOUR

Child Labour and Children Rights: 21st century looks

Child Labour and Children Rights

Definition of Child Labour and the worst forms of child labour

Child Labour

In the world today, approximately 215 million children work, often full-time. They do not go to school and have little or no time to play. They often do not receive food or care they choose. It deprives them of their childhood. Over half of these children are exposed to the worst forms of child labor, unsafe working conditions, slavery, or other forms of forced labor, illegal activities including drug trafficking and prostitution; recruitment into armed conflict. They are between 44 and 110 million working children in Asia. The figure on which NGOs agree today is 60 million. These figures do not take into account the situation of China.  They will beg to live, but will be especially sexually abused by foreign tourists in exchange for a few rupees. Pedophilia is not a crime in Nepal, the number of tourists having a sexual attraction to children is increasing in this country. That is why most children wandering the streets of Delhi, Calcutta and Bombay are turning to prostitution. 

In Nepal, girls are torn from their families by child traffickers. Some of them even go with a stranger who promises them the moon. Others are sold by their parents. This year, there were 10 000 in India. These girls are sometimes only 7 years, find themselves in brothels. According to UNICEF, there are 200 000 girls who prostitute themselves in the larger Indian cities, 20% of them do not reach the age of 16. These include poverty, weak implementation of child labour prevention laws, lack of alternative small-scale loans for poor people in the rural and urban areas, absence of a concerted social welfare scheme to safeguard against hunger and illness, and an imbalanced educational system especially in the rural regions. Further, fewer employment opportunities, corruption and apathy of government officials, caste-based discrimination, and indifference of the society forces the children to start working at an early age.

Child Labour in Western Societies: Development and Change

The economic globalization creates links between different national economies, thus the incidence of child labor in the South is most evident in the industrialized countries. At the same time, the process of globalization that allows the North to be aware of child labor that occurs in the South also put pressure on the economies and structures of social South, thus intensifying the problem of child labor. (Teerink, 2005, PP: 235-266)

There is clearly a relationship between child labor and poverty, since children are almost exclusively working poor. But poverty is not the cause of child labor, the fact that the proportion of child labor varies dramatically between countries with similar levels of economic development is shown. In China, for example, has been very little child labor in recent decades, as sources of U.S. diplomatic, because they took the decision policy of sending children to school. The same has happened in the state of Kerala in India, which has virtually abolished. From these two examples show that child labor can ...