WRANGLER SURGICAL CSR – Child Labour: Understanding The Issue
When children are forced to labour, it may cause physical injury or prevent them from going to school. Growing income disparities have resulted in millions of children choosing between attending school and supporting their families. According to the ILO, 215 million children aged five to seventeen are now employed in either unlawful, dangerous, or exploitative situations. Children as young as 14 are legally allowed to work in a variety of occupations due to the dire financial straits of their families. Numerous kids are employed in commercial farming, fishing, processing, mining, and housekeeping industries. Some kids do nasty things like sell drugs, get involved in prostitution, or join the military.
Child Labour: Identifying the characteristics
It is disconcerting that child labour prevents kids from getting an education, which is a significant setback for their personal growth and development. Since time is limited, the relationship between a child’s occupation and academic performance varies according to the kind of occupation and the number of hours spent on it. Those who work for extended periods are more likely to not attend school. Here are some characteristics of child labour:
- Breaking a country’s legal age
- Danger to children’s health (whether physical, psychological, or behavioural).
- Severe forms of mistreatment, such as those seen in child slavery, exploitation, debt bonding, slave labour, and criminal activity
- It discourages kids from going to school.
- Making use of children to subvert labour norms
Child Labour: Are Schooling And Labour Causally Related?
The link between work and schooling is instructive about the effect of children’s employment on education, but it is not adequate to demonstrate causation; various economic and cultural variables concurrently affect both schooling and work choices, and the direction of the associations is unclear. Does school absence lead to employment, or does this labour lead to school absence among youth?
Several academic studies have attempted to establish causality by isolating a factor (an “instrumental variable”) that affects whether a child works but has no effect on parents’ relative importance of other activities in their children’s lives. While the objective elements used in these studies have been called into question, researchers do seem to agree that there is a stronger connection between child labour and schooling than the numbers indicate.
Child labour: Where does it occur?
Asia is home to approximately 114 million (or 53%) of the world’s 215 million child labourers. In comparison, Latin America is home to around 14 million (or 7%), and sub-Saharan Africa is home to approximately 65 million (30%).
Children And Child Labour: The Role They Play In Different Industries
The following are a few roles:
Role in agriculture.
Children are often hired to work in commercial agriculture, even though this puts them in dangerous situations like heat and pesticide exposure, pays them low wages, and leaves them without basic amenities like clean water and good sanitation. Child labour accounts for 60% of all agriculture, mining, and forestry labour. The following child labour is reported:
- The Ivory Coast’s cocoa
- Egyptian and Beninese cotton
- Flower cutting in Colombia
- Brazil’s oranges
- Ethiopian tea and Bangladeshi tea
Role in manufacturing.
Children ages 5 to 14 are expected to work directly in the manufacturing sector in a variety of ways, including but not limited to the following:
- Pakistani-made medical instruments
- Indian, Pakistani, and Egyptian carpets
- Bangladeshi clothes, India, and the Philippines’ footwear
- Pakistan’s soccer balls
Role in mining and quarrying.
Child labourers in mines, quarries, and open pits have significant sickness and injury rates. 6 to 7-year-olds crush rocks, wash, sift, and transport ore. Explosives are placed, and loads are carried by nine-year-olds working in a tunnel system. Among the many mining tasks that children do, we may name:
- Mongolia’s coal
- Charcoal from Brazil and El Salvador
- Côte d’Ivoire diamonds
- Colombian gold
- Zimbabwe’s chrome
- Emeritus in Colombia
Role in domestic service
Many children, particularly girls, start working as young as five or six, sometimes in domestic service. Child trafficking is connected to this specific kind of child labour. Domestic child workers can be hurt in many ways, including physically, emotionally, and even sexually.
Role in the hospitality, foodservice, and retail industries.
Young people’s participation in this industry is controversial since some of their lawful employment is threatened, yet there are signs of widespread abuse. Children’s hotel and restaurant labour is related to prostitution in tourist locations. At least once, young people who worked in hotels were paid so little that they had to borrow money from their bosses. Their bosses’ strict rules about loan repayment often led to debt bondage.
Role in prostitution.
There are millions of children completing tasks that should, under no circumstances, be carried out by children. These tasks include selling child prostitution into indentured servitude, wage slavery, and slave labour. These tasks are deemed inappropriate for children. Forced child recruitment into armed conflict, sexual exploitation for profit, and other illegal activities like drug production and trafficking are all part of this problem. More than five million kids were in servitude or slavery in 2005.
