Robbed off their childhood!

I secretly recorded these pictures at a car wash at the back of a restaurant. Shall I make a report? Although the children were not being bullied, they did looked unhappy. Also we have laws against child labour! They were washing the plates,pots and pans non-stop. Both were not wearing gloves. The elder one was wearing a pair of rubber boots, the younger one was barefooted!

Of Zimbabwe's 1.3 million orphans, some 100,000 are living on their own in child-headed households!

Photo credit to http://aaron9902.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/topic3-child-labor-poster/

Photo credit to http://riteshmin2.blogspot.com/2011/08/child-labor-prohibition-and-regulation.html

According to a 2010 UNICEF report, 13% of Zimbabwean children are engaged in child labour (which the International Labour Organization (ILO) defines as work that is mentally, physically, socially or morally harmful to children and that interferes with their schooling). In the capital, Harare, the figure is closer to 20%.

A study of child labour in Zimbabwe conducted by the Ministry of Labour together with international and local partners including ILO and UNICEF, released in June 2011 concluded that "the prevalence of the worst forms of child labour is on the rise and cause for concern." The report identified poverty as the main driver of children being employed, along with "the breakdown of the family unit due to HIV and AIDS, as well as the inadequacy of the social services delivery system."

According to UNICEF, of Zimbabwe's 1.3 million orphans, some 100,000 are living on their own in child-headed households. Many such children are forced to leave school and find work as street vendors or labourers on tobacco farms, tea and sugar plantations, and in mines in order to support younger siblings.

PLEASE READ FULL ARTICLE ZIMBABWE: Child labour on the rise

One million children work with mercury everyday!

Mercury, the silvery liquid metal, known to many from old thermometers, is one of the most toxic substances on earth. Inhaling even small doses of its vapor is dangerous. There is no known safe level of exposure.

Yet the one million children around the world engaged in artisanal gold mining work with it every day.

Please read full article: Take mercury out of children's hands

Image credit to http://photo.net

Children forced to do hard labour, abused and are usually not paid

The Topeka Center for Peace and Justice showed a documentary, called " The Dark Side of Chocolate", exposing child labor and human trafficking in cocoa plantations.

The documentary brought to light the issue of child labor and human trafficking on the cocoa plantations of Africa. These plantations grow and harvest the cocoa beans for big name chocolate companies such as Nestlé.

The film starts with its two film makers doing their own investigation by journeying to the western coast of Africa to the country of Mali. This is where children were rumored to be smuggled from and transported to the Ivory Coast.

Their detective work led them to find that Mali was trafficking children at bus stations, by bribing them with work and money or simply kidnapping them from villages. They are then taken to towns near the border such as Zegoua, where another trafficker transports the children over the border on a dirt-bike via back-roads, where they are left with a third trafficker who then sells the children to plantations. Ranging from age 10 to 15, these children are forced to do hard labor, physically and sexually abused and are usually never paid. Most of them stay with the plantation until they die, never seeing their family again.

The chocolate industry is marred with child slavery!

Please read full article: The dark side of chocolate

Picture credited to http://www.treehuggers.com/

One in six children in the world engaged in child labour!

source: http://www.fotosearch.com/


How many of us know the significance of 12 June? International Labour Organization (ILO) has declared 12 June as the World Day against Child Labour. Yet, that the day is not recognized to the extent of less meaningful days like Valentine's Day.

According to UNICEF, one in six children in the world are engaged in child labor, i.e. an estimated 158 million children. According to UNICEF, millions of children are engaged in hazardous situations or conditions, such as working in mines, working with chemicals and pesticides in agriculture or working with dangerous machinery. They are everywhere, but invisible, toiling as domestic servants in homes, laboring behind the walls of workshops, hidden from view on plantations.

The worst place in this respect is sub-Saharan Africa, in which one in three children is engaged in child labor, representing 69 million children. In South Asia, another 44 million are engaged in child labor.

Their lost childhood

Picture credit: http://www.bigpicture.in/

Picture credit: http://www.lightstalkers.org/

Picture credit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/

In the normal lives of families with steady and adequate incomes, parents go to work every day and children are left to play with friends and go to school. However, such is not the case for the 218 million child labourers the world over who daily find themselves working long hours under harsh, dangerous and exploitative conditions.

• Globally, 218 million children are child labourers
• 126 million of these children are engaged in hazardous work
• 73 million working children are less than 10 years old
• Every year, 22,000 children die in work-related accidents
• The largest number of working children-122 million-are in the Asia-Pacific region

-quoted from http://www.freethechildren.com/

Child labourer found chained in Delhi eatery, rescued

A child labourer, who was trafficked from his home in Bihar to Delhi, was found chained and working in a roadside restaurant. He was later rescued by the Labour department and a child rights NGO.

The rescued boy said: "I was working in this dhaba for the last three months. One day the dhaba owner accused me of stealing Rs.50,000 from his home and started torturing me physically.

"A fortnight ago, he decided to chain me. I could move in the radius of one metre only and worked for more than 15 hours a day with hardly any protection from the cold. Police personnel kept coming to the dhaba, but did nothing to rescue me. Even people saw me like this everyday but nobody did anything," he added.

For more information, please read http://sify.com/news/child-labourer-found-chained-in-delhi-eatery-rescued-news-national-kbht6eieehj.html

Child labor is a human rights issue of immense sensitivity. Child labor is considered exploitative by the United Nations and International Labor Organization. “States recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.” - quoted from http://www.childlabor.in/

Child soldiers: victims or assailants?

The United Nations for the first time named the military forces and rebel groups that are the most persistent violators of children in armed conflicts, identifying groups in Asia, Africa and Latin America which continue to recruit child soldiers and use them to wage wars.

The persistent violators include Abu Sayyaf, the New People’s Army and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), three insurgent groups that are active in the Philippines; Myanmar’s national army, known as Tatmadaw Kyi, and the rebel Karenni Army and Karen National Liberation Army; The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN); in Congo, the national army (known as the FARDC) and the rebel Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), Nationalist and Integrationalist Front (FNI), the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and various militias that are known as the Mai-Mai; in Sudan, pro-Government militias in Darfur and the southern-based Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA); in Somalia, the Transitional Federal Government (TFG); the Afghan National Police; the rebel Convention of Patriots for Justice and Peace in the Central African Republic (CAR) and Somalia’s Hizbul Islam militia.

Please read full article : http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1005/S00397.htm: UN identifies most persistent users of child soldiers in armed conflicts

Child Soldiers - Victims or Assailants?

The answer is both. Their childhood is snatched away, separated from the love of their families, away from school, away from friends, turned into a killing machine. Brainwashed, at times drugs are freely distributed, under the influence alcohol, the mind confused reality distorted, threatened with loss of life, loss of his family unless he or she performs as ordered. Life becomes living hell and the child begins to not only fight in combat, but kill in ways that were unimaginable a few months earlier. Child Soldiers - are both Victim and Assailant.

Quoted from http://kabiza.com/Childsoldiers.htm

Images credit to digitaljournal.com

218 million children involved in child labour world wide!

Photo credit to newshopper.sulekha.com

Photo credit to stolenchildhood.com

Photo credit to National Geographic

Pohoto credit to National Geographic

Globally, 1 in 6 children work
218 million children aged 5 - 17 are involved in child labor world wide
126 million children work in hazardous conditions
The highest numbers of child laborers are in the Asia/Pacific region, where there are 122 million working children
The highest proportion of child laborers is in Sub Saharan Africa, where 26% of children (49 million) are involved in work.

An estimated 218 million children are involved in work around the world!

DO YOU KNOW?

An estimated 218 million children are involved in work around the world.
126 million work under the worst forms of child labour.
More than one million children are employed in the cocoa farming sector in West Africa.
Between 200,000 and 800,000 children under the age of 18 are trafficked each year in West Africa alone.

From: http://www.frenchbuyers.com/tackling-child-labour-in-the-chocolate-industry-what-role-can-fairtrade-play

Images from various sources.

The hazardous nature of child labour!

In 2008 a rapid assessment of child labour in non-traditional mining was carried out by the Mining Sector Diversification Programme (funded by the European Commission) in partnership with the ILO’s Time Bound Programme Support for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour Project for Zambia (funded by the U.S. Department of Labor).

The assessment found that child labour continues to exist in mining and that children are involved in all aspects of the production chain as well as in informal sector stone crushing (quarrying). Children, some as young as seven years, carry out support functions in the mining areas such as fetching water, preparing and selling food, and, in some instances, in the actual mining operation. It provides clear evidence of the hazardous nature of many of the children's tasks; their exposure to toxic substances and extreme heat, lifting heavy loads, working long hours and working at night.

Full article at https://webdev.ilo.org/pls/apex/f?p=109:51:844024720561387::::P51_CONTENT_ID:18275:

If you think you are deprived...

If you think you are deprived and miserable...please look at these pictures!

Hands of 8 year old Munna working in a rickshaw parts factory! He works 10 hours a day and gets USD8 equivalent a month! Picture from http://www.zoriah.net/blog/

13 year old Islam in a silver pot making factory. He has been working here for 2 years, under very hazardous conditions! Picture from http://www.zoriah.net/blog/

Children at a brick crushing factory. Picture from http://www.zoriah.net/blog/

An 11 year old in a silver pot making factory in Dhaka. He had been working in this factory for 3 years, getting the equivalent of USD10 a month. Picture from http://www.zoriah.net/blog/

A young labourer making metal components in a factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh . Picture from http://www.zoriah.net/blog/

7 year old Jasmine collecting rubblish from a rubbish heap on a cold winter morning in Kajla to support her family! Picture from http://www.zoriah.net/blog/

Child selling balloons in the streets of New Delhi. Picture from http://www.sadashivan.com/

Although numerous international treaties and organizations work tirelessly to improve conditions for children, there are still 320 million children under the age of sixteen working around the world—150 million of those in the most harmful industries.

Child labour is simply the single most important source of child abuse in the world

• Child labour remains a serious problem in the world today.
• According to estimates by ILO, the number of working children between the ages of 5 and 14 is at least 120 million.
• The majority of the children are in developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But pockets of child labour also exist in many industrialized countries.
• Numerous children work in occupations and industries which are plainly dangerous and hazardous.
• Working children suffer significant growth deficits compared with children in school: they grow up shorter and lighter, and their body size continues to be smaller even in adulthood
• Many working children are exposed to hazardous conditions which expose them to chemical and biological hazards.
• Large numbers of working children work under conditions which expose them to substances with long latency periods -- for example, asbestos -- which increases the risk of contracting chronic occupational diseases such as asbestosis or lung cancer in young adulthood.
• Children in certain occupations are especially vulnerable to particular types of abuse. For example, many studies confirm that child domestic workers are victims of verbal and sexual abuse, beating or punishment by starvation.
• Child labour is simply the single most important source of child exploitation and child abuse in the world today.

Information above from http://nird.ap.nic.in/clic/Rrdl12.html

Pictures from flickr.com, bized.co.uk, news.everyclick.com. instablogs.com

More on child labour

The recent death of a 10-year-old Irula tribal boy in a brick kiln in Namakkal district in Tamil Nadu, India under mysterious circumstances has prompted rights’ groups to urge the district administration to carry out a detailed inspection in its brick kilns to verify whether child labour is prevalent.

The members of Evidence’s fact-finding team said they found 30 children working in such kilns in the village.

For more detailed information please read Child labour prevalent in Namakkal brick kilns: rights group

More than 200 million children in the world today are involved in child labour, doing work that is damaging to his or her mental, physical and emotional development. Children work because their survival and that of their families depend on it. Child labour persists even where it has been declared illegal, and is frequently surrounded by a wall of silence, indifference, and apathy.-ILO

The recruitment of child soldiers still widely practised by the Burmese army

Htun Htun Oo 16, a Burmese child soldier, escaped from the Burmese Light Infantry Battalion (LIB) 341 in Papun District in northern Karen State in July, making his way through the forest eastwards, even though he was not sure whether he would be killed when he reached KNLA-controlled territory.

“Whether I lived or died didn’t matter anymore,” Htun Htun Oo said, “All I wanted to do was escape. I was ready for anything so long as I didn’t have to stay another day in that battalion.”

Htun Htun Oo was seized by the Burmese army at a railway station in June 2007 while he was on his way to visit his uncle, who was a policeman in Rangoon.

Htun Htun Oo’s case is not untypical. The recruitment of child soldiers in Burma is still widely practiced by the Burmese army, according to Aye Myint, a leader of Guiding Star, a Burma-based social and labor rights group.

Pic above: A Burmese child soldier, not Htun Htun Oo

For the full story please read: http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=16620

One in six children in the world are engaged in child labour!

Pictures above from stolenchildhood.net

These pictures break my heart!

An estimated 158 million children aged 5-14 are engaged in child labour - one in six children in the world. Millions of children are engaged in hazardous situations or conditions, such as working in mines, working with chemicals and pesticides in agriculture or working with dangerous machinery. They are everywhere but invisible, toiling as domestic servants in homes, labouring behind the walls of workshops, hidden from view in plantations. - UNICEF

Domestic Child Labour in Africa

You will cry with me if you read this...

When my master brought me from the village, he said that I will show that I deserved to go to school by proving my hard work at home. I was bent on going to school so I put my heart into everything I was commanded to do. I Swept, cleaned, washed, mopped, ironed, and fetched water from a public tap, two streets away, to fill the drums and basins in our house.

In-between these chores I had to go out and hawk sachets water in traffic and in the streets of the ghetto. I slept last and woke up first. I didn’t eat with my master, his wife and his children at table, I ate a small portion of food on the floor at the back yard, after they had all eaten. Sometimes I could not work because I was always hungry, but I had to work otherwise knocks and the Koboko cane will descend on me.’ An 8 year old Togolese househelp narrated.

‘After 3 years, my master registered me in a community school down the street. It was more like a place where street children passed time, the teachers hardly came to class. My chores and task were still a problem but I managed to deliver, so as to avoid any problem with my master or his wife. I liked school, I wanted to learn but I hardy had time to review my school work or do assignments and when I did poorly, my master or his wife would beat me like a thief. Sometimes I thought of running away, but to where? I wanted to go back to my mother, but how do I tell my uncle that, when the last time I asked about my mother, I was given the beating of my life, called an ingrate and denied food for two days. I wasn’t doing well at school, I wasn’t happy at home, I missed my mother, but I couldn’t do anything about it. All my mother knew was that her son was in the city and was in school, and will be a big shot.’

Read the complete article: http://en.afrik.com/article14712.html