Economic crisis will fuel abusive child labour practices - Experts

The global economic crisis has left growing numbers of children at risk of abusive and hazardous jobs ranging from prostitution to fighting in adult wars, US officials warned.

“For the first time since 1930 we’re experiencing a global recession. Unemployment is surging, the prices for basic food staples are skyrocketing.

These dire circumstances provide a fertile breeding ground for the worst forms of child labor,” Senator Tom Harkin said at a conference in Washington.

“Desperate people resort to desperate and degrading measures to survive, including forcing children into abusive labor,” Harkin said at the conference convened by US Labor Secretary Hilda Solis to mark the World Day Against Child Labour.

The roundtable conference fell almost 10 years to the day that the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted a convention calling for urgent action to end the exploitation of children in abusive or hazardous work including slavery, fighting as combat soldiers, prostitution and in drug trafficking networks.

Solis said that labour laws tend to “fall by the wayside” in times of economic crisis and were at risk of doing so now as the world weathered the worst slump since the Great Depression.

“Across the globe when there are financial crises, you see the enormous stress placed on government and business and the tendency is to let labour laws fall by the wayside,” she told AFP.

“When that happens you see more abuses in the workplace and exploitation of children, and the aim of this conference is to highlight that and focus on that,” she said, calling the problem of child labour “systemic.”

Solis announced that the US Labour Department will provide more than 60 million dollars in funding for programs to educate children and give them vocational training, both key to breaking the cycle of child labour, while helping their parents find alternatives to sending their children out to work.

According to the UN labour agency, there are 218 million child labourers around the world. Nearly half are girls, and more than half of those girls do hazardous or abusive work: everything from mining to prostitution.

Child labour is, to a great extent, driven by poverty, the ILO says, and when poverty is worsened by a slumping economy, more children are pulled from school and sent out to work, often far from friends and family.

“Americans find it hard to understand that anyone could send their child far from home to work,” said Carol Smolenski, director of End Child Prostitution and Trafficking (ECPAT-USA).

“But what they don’t know is that in some of these countries, 50 percent of kids’ growth is stunted by malnutrition. Kids are literally starving to death. How can a parent not take the opportunity in circumstances like those to send their kid out to work?” she said.

The more vulnerable the child is to begin with, either through poverty or because they live in an abusive family, the more likely they are to fall into a bad work situation.

“Even in the United States, the kids who are involved in prostitution and there are many, many 12-, 13- and 14-year-old girls in the adult sex industry are vulnerable kids,” said Smolenski.

“They’re runaway kids, throw-away kids. Very often they were sexually abused kids. Pimps are actually looking for girls who have been sexually abused because, as they say, ‘These girls have been raped so many times, it’s my job to teach them they might as well get paid for it,’” she said.

Among the speakers at the conference was 27-year-old Gabriel Kou Solomon, who was kidnapped by rebel forces in southern Sudan at the age of six and held by them for four years.

They taught him and other children to “shoot guns and do reconnaissance,” priming them to be soldiers in Sudan’s long civil war.

“No child should ever go through what I did,” Solomon told AFP at the conference which gathered dozens of officials, business representatives, a filmmaker and members of non-governmental organizations, whom Solis called on to work together to beat child labour.

AFP