Stepping up the fight against child labour

Press release | 11 June 2012

GENEVA (ILO News) – A large gap remains between the ratification of Conventions on child labour and the actions countries take to deal with the problem, the International Labour Organization (ILO) said in a report marking the tenth anniversary of the annual World Day Against Child Labour.

“There is no room for complacency when 215 million children are still labouring to survive and more than half of these are exposed to the worst forms of child labour, including slavery and involvement in armed conflict. We cannot allow the eradication of child labour to slip down the development agenda – all countries should be striving to achieve this target, individually and collectively,” said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia.

New estimates released on 1 June showed that some 5 million children are caught in forced labour, which includes conditions such as commercial sexual exploitation and debt bondage – and this is thought to be an underestimate.

The ILO’s child labour Conventions 138 concerning the Minimum Age for Admission to Employment and 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour are among the most widely ratified of all the ILO Conventions. Of the ILO’s 185 member States, 88 per cent have ratified the first and 95.1 per cent the latter. The goal is universal ratification by 2015.

There is no room for complacency when 215 million children are still labouring to survive (...)” Juan Somavia

However, according to a new report entitled, Tackling child labour: From commitment to action, progress in reducing child labour has often been outweighed by a failure to translate commitments into practice.

The largest gap between commitment and action is in the informal economy, where the majority of violations of fundamental labour rights occur, the report says. Children in rural and agricultural areas, as well as children of migrant workers and indigenous peoples, are most vulnerable to being caught in child labour.

The ILO also indicates that relatively few cases against child labour reach national courts of law. Sanctions for violations are often too weak to be effective deterrents against the exploitation of children. This means national judicial and law enforcement institutions along with victim protection programmes need to be strengthened.

While much more needs to be done, the ILO paper recognizes the important progress being made in a number of countries to improve law and practice. This includes:

• A growing list of countries establishing national plans to tackle child labour.
• Many new legislative prohibitions that aim identify and prevent hazardous work by children.
• More legislation being adopted against child prostitution and child pornography.
• A marked increase in international cooperation and mutual assistance among member States, particularly on issues concerning trafficking.

“We should also build on national policies and programmes that are in place and learn from them to ensure effective action against child labour in all parts of the world,” said the ILO Director-General. He added: “Decent work for parents, and education for children are indispensable elements of strategies for the elimination of child labour. Let us redouble our efforts and move forward with the Roadmap adopted in The Hague in 2010 to eliminate the worst forms of child labour by 2016.”

The ILO’s Conventions seek to protect children from exposure to child labour. Together with other international instruments relating to children’s, workers’ and human rights they provide an important framework for legislation, policies and actions against child labour.

source http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/press-and-media-centre/news/WCMS_182508/lang--en/index.htm

ONLINE ADS - PROSTITUTION & TRAFFICKING - BACKPAGE.COM

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

March 17, 2012 - I went on a walk in Manhattan the other day with a young woman who once had to work these streets, hired out by eight pimps while she was just 16 and 17. She pointed out a McDonald’s where pimps sit while monitoring the girls outside, and a building where she had repeatedly been ordered online as if she were a pizza.

Alissa, her street name, escaped that life and is now a 24-year-old college senior planning to become a lawyer — but she will always have a scar on her cheek where a pimp gouged her with a potato peeler as a warning not to escape. “Like cattle owners brand their cattle,” she said, fingering her cheek, “he wanted to brand me in a way that I would never forget.”

After Alissa testified against her pimps, six of them went to prison for up to 25 years. Yet these days, she reserves her greatest anger not at pimps but at companies that enable them. She is particularly scathing about Backpage.com, a classified advertising Web site that is used to sell auto parts, furniture, boats — and girls. Alissa says pimps routinely peddled her on Backpage.

“You can’t buy a child at Wal-Mart, can you?” she asked me. “No, but you can go to Backpage and buy me on Backpage.”

Backpage accounts for about 70 percent of prostitution advertising among five Web sites that carry such ads in the United States, earning more than $22 million annually from prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a media research and consulting company. It is now the premier Web site for human trafficking in the United States, according to the National Association of Attorneys General. And it’s not a fly-by-night operation. Backpage is owned by Village Voice Media, which also owns the estimable Village Voice newspaper.

Attorneys general from 48 states have written a joint letter to Village Voice Media, pleading with it to get out of the flesh trade. An online petition at Change.org has gathered 94,000 signatures asking Village Voice Media to stop taking prostitution advertising. Instead, the company has used The Village Voice to mock its critics. Alissa thought about using her real name for this article but decided not to for fear that Village Voice would retaliate.

Court records and public officials back Alissa’s account, and there is plenty of evidence that under-age girls are marketed on Backpage. Arrests in such cases have been reported in at least 22 states.

Just this month, prosecutors in New York City filed charges in a case involving a gang that allegedly locked a 15-year-old Long Island girl in an empty house, drugged her, tied her up, raped her, and advertised her on Backpage. After a week of being sold for sex, prosecutors in Queens said, the girl escaped.

Liz McDougall, general counsel of Village Voice Media, told me that it is “shortsighted, ill-informed and counterproductive” to focus on Backpage when many other Web sites are also involved, particularly because Backpage tries to screen out ads for minors and reports possible trafficking cases to the authorities. McDougall denied that Backpage dominates the field and said that the Long Island girl was marketed on 13 other Web sites as well. But if street pimps go to jail for profiteering on under-age girls, should their media partners like Village Voice Media really get a pass?

Paradoxically, Village Voice began as an alternative newspaper to speak truth to power. It publishes some superb journalism. So it’s sad to see it accept business from pimps in the greediest and most depraved kind of exploitation.

True, many prostitution ads on Backpage are placed by adult women acting on their own without coercion; they’re not my concern. Other ads are placed by pimps: the Brooklyn district attorney’s office says that the great majority of the sex trafficking cases it prosecutes involve girls marketed on Backpage.

Alissa, who grew up in a troubled household in Boston, has a story that is fairly typical. She says that one night when she was 16 — and this matches the account she gave federal prosecutors — a young man approached her and told her she was attractive. She thought that he was a rapper, and she was flattered. He told her that he wanted her to be his girlfriend, she recalls wistfully.

Within a few weeks, he was prostituting her — even as she continued to study as a high school sophomore. Alissa didn’t run away partly because of a feeling that there was a romantic bond, partly because of Stockholm syndrome, and partly because of raw fear. She says violence was common if she tried connecting to the outside world or if she didn’t meet her daily quota for cash.

“He would get aggressive and strangle me and physically assault me and threaten to sell me to someone that was more violent than him, which he eventually did,” Alissa recalled. She said she was sold from one pimp to another several times, for roughly $10,000 each time.

She was sold to johns seven days a week, 365 days a year. After a couple of years, she fled, but a pimp tracked her down and — with the women he controlled — beat and stomped Alissa, breaking her jaw and several ribs, she said. That led her to cooperate with the police.

There are no simple solutions to end sex trafficking, but it would help to have public pressure on Village Voice Media to stop carrying prostitution advertising. The Film Forum has already announced that it will stop buying ads in The Village Voice. About 100 advertisers have dropped Rush Limbaugh’s radio show because of his demeaning remarks about women. Isn’t it infinitely more insulting to provide a forum for the sale of women and girls?

Let’s be honest: Backpage’s exit from prostitution advertising wouldn’t solve the problem, for smaller Web sites would take on some of the ads. But it would be a setback for pimps to lose a major online marketplace. When Craigslist stopped taking such ads in 2010, many did not migrate to new sites: online prostitution advertising plummeted by more than 50 percent, according to AIM Group.

Alissa, who now balances her college study with part-time work at a restaurant and at Fair Girls, an antitrafficking organization, deserves the last word. “For a Web site like Backpage to make $22 million off our backs,” she said, “it’s like going back to slave times.”

Bartered

This is the tale of a young girl,

Whose name, I was told, was White Pearl, 

The young one’s life story begins

At a time when her father gave into sins.

He deserted his family,

Listening to no homily.

And the mother, the Queen Bee of the Hive,

Was left to manage her brood of five,

A leaky house and an aged mother,

She had no help, not one or another.

And then came an idea,

To sell her daughter to Cambodia.

So the mother called this institute

That reared many a prostitute,

And made an ugly deal,

Just for a future day’s meal.

The girl was sent away,

And she had no say.

The girl was forced into a brothel,

A sure-shot living hell.

She refused to serve anyone,

And was deprived of food- even if just one bun!

But she refused to budge,

So big was her grudge.

The owner of the brothel, the madam,

Called the girl’s mother, the Diadem.

Your daughter does not cooperate,

She refuses to move past her hate.

The mother ordered the girl,

Obey her well, Bright White Pearl.

But the girl did believe,

That her mother would not deceive.

She felt a lot of fright,

To tell her mother what was right.

So she said not a thing,

About the coercing,

She said not a thing,

About the prostituting.

She just cried and cried,

Her eyes never dried.

I don’t want that kind of work,

They harm me and they smirk.

Be good, said the mother,

Or they’ll tie you with a tether.

I promised you a phone by Easter,

If you work, it will come faster.

The girl believed her mother ignorant,

To the decency in this trade being truant.

So she began the task,

And donned a mask.

A steely armour,

She did not clamour.

But help came soon,

It was a boon.

The police rained down,

And told the town,

Of the sordid tales of the filthy trade,

Of the money the unscrupulous madam made,

Of the thousands of little girls she harmed,

Of the filthy unscrupulous men she charmed.

Even then, the little girl did not believe,

That her mother did deceive

Her by knowing all along,

That she sold her girl for a wrong.

But the police caught her too,

And the girl’s faith was through.

Then the girl was then sent to a home,

Where there were loving people, a family, a garden with a gnome.

I Will Toil For You???

CHILD LABOR.Time and again the call to address the issue on child labor has been raised by many individuals and various cause-oriented groups. Child labor persists in both developed and developing countries.It can be synonymous to child trafficking,the two being thinly differentiated by the degree or intensity of the “services rendered.” More often than not, child labor results to child trafficking, slavery and prostitution.

(Child labourers, Macon, Georgia, 1909 via Wikipedia)

One doesn’t need to minutely dissect the causes of child labor to determine that one of its major cause is POVERTY. Child labor is cheap. These children can be easily exploited and be the least paid workers. Some may not even be paid at all. In many cases, they work as laborers to help augment the family income since the parents themselves are unemployed or uneducated and cannot financially support the family. Others are sold or traded like animals so the family can pay off their debts.       

In an investigative report on child labor on a sardine factory some years back, the rescued children recounted how they were made to work until past midnight, made to sleep on cold concrete floors without mats, and woken up at 3am to start work for the day.Some said they were unpaid.This is a scenario common in places where children are forced into labor. They are made to live and work under inhumane conditions.

Child labor currently accounts for 22% of the workforce in Asia, 32% in Africa, 17% in Latin America, 1% in US, Canada, Europe and other wealthy nations.The recent series of news that came out about big companies like Apple and Victoria’s Secret whose suppliers employ child laborers sparked renewed attention to seriously address the problem on Child Labor.This is nothing new.

In 2009, H&M and Zara were accused of using suppliers of cotton in Bangladesh or raw materials from Uzbekistan,who both employed child laborers.

(Young girl working on a loom in
 AïtBenhaddou, Morocco in May 2008 via Wikipedia)

In 2007, GAP Inc, pulled out their kids’ blouses from the shops after admitting that these were made by child laborers in India.  

In November 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund filed a lawsuit against Firestone Tire and Rubber Company  on behalf of current child laborers and their parents who had also been child laborers at the metal plantation in Liberia On June 26, 2007,

In 1997, research indicated that the number of child laborers in the silk-weaving industry in the district of Kanchipuram in India exceeded 40,000. The continued child bondage over the years resulted in a major raid in Delhi in 2005 on over 100 illegal embroidery factories with child laborers.It was the biggest rescue of 480 child laborers.

Even as far back as the 1900s, children as young as 4 years old were employed in many countries as workers in factories. Though this has evolved  into not just working in factories but also selling on the streets or  markets, mining, quarrying or carrying heavy logs from illegal loggers, the state of child laborers remains the same...child laborers work  in dangerous conditions are and made to live in conditions not fit for humans.

Taking Action

Can something really be done? There are so many greedy people in the world who lust for money and power and will try to grab them by any means. With no food on the plates of millions of impoverished families, and uneducated parents unable to find jobs, many are driven to have their children toil in factories, mines or farms in unhealthy and even dangerous working environments.

Many raised their concern about boycotting products produced by child laborers as an option to stop child labor. Some were concerned that this may further force the children to turn to more dangerous work like prostitution, quarrying or mining. The UNICEFcited a case where after the Child Labor Deterrence Act was introduced in the US, an estimated 50,000 children were dismissed from their garment industry jobs in Bangladesh. Many resorted to more dangerous jobs such as "stone-crushing, street hustling, and prostitution."

Most countries have Child Labor laws that protect and define working conditions for children. Though they have been in existence for some time, implementing the law is difficult for authorities where poverty, lack of education and corruption exist. 

I’ve always believed in the Lao Tzu saying, "Give a Man a Fish, Feed Him For a Day. Teach a Man to Fish, Feed Him For a Lifetime."This best explains my reaction in the past at news that children were being fed to keep them from being hungry…period. I saw this as making the parents dependent on NGOs and agencies to feed their children which they as parents were responsible for. I silently reacted in the same way when my sister, a missionary, told me how the group her organization supports, would go around poor houses in their area every day and provide food to eat for the poor families. To me, it did not help the families become independent and earn a living on their own…they simply became dependent that someone would bring food on their table everyday.

It is of course different in places where there is famine or drought and there is no other recourse but to give aid by providing families food until their country recovers from the condition.   It is also different when the kids are fed in Learning Centers while being taught to keep them from being hungry and help them focus on their lessons. It is in fact, one way of keeping these children in school and educating them. This not only prevents the kids from being thrown into child labor conditions, it also gives their families hope that the children can one day reach higher education and grow up to be responsible citizens who can contribute to the economy. 

Action by governments to protect laborers and ensure correct wages and working hours are implemented can significantly contribute to the decline in child labor. It gives the family the opportunity to have more income for food and some savings that can provide for the education of their children.  As Thomas De Gregori, an economics professor at the University of Houston put it, "it is clear that technological and economic changes are vital ingredients in getting children out of the workplace and into schools. Then they can grow to become productive adults and live longer, healthier lives.”

As of October 2011, the International Labor Organization estimated that more than 215 million children aged 5 to 14 (compared to 1995 figures of 250 million) are in child labor worldwide, excluding child domestic labor.Bangladesh, Philippines and India, all developing countries where poverty is high,are said to have the worst forms of child labor.

If everyone, every government does his/its share to protect children from being forced into labor, provide education for them and their uneducated parents so they can learn to sustain themselves in their everyday lives, then we all will be a step closer to eliminating child labor…    

Sources and references:

Wikipedia: Child Labor

Weight of Silence: Child Labor and Trafficking: Child Labor and Trafficking

Manila Time. Net - child-labor-worst-in-india-bangladesh-philippines--us-report (Oct. 5, 2011)