Welcome to my blog!

Welcome to my blog!

What is child labour?

A child is defined as anyone under the age of 18 under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is the most ratified convention in the world detailing 54 provisions of international standards of child care (UNCRC, 1989). Child labour can be when children are forced to work for people who they sometimes call their masters, they are taken advantage of by the people who keep them, to work long hours, with no breaks or very few. It can be them being held and treated like a prisoner by being locked to their working station and not given privacy, anywhere to wash, or even go to the bathroom. It can involve children becoming malnourished by their masters giving them insufficient amounts of food so that they stay small to get more work out of them (D’Adamo, 2003). It also involves children not getting paid a fair amount or anything at all, the work that is done by children is also sometimes some of the most dangerous where they are in severe risk of injury and physical harm (Kielburger, 2008).
The State of the World’s Children document states that 150 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are involved in child labour around the world (UNICEF, 2009). The children that are involved in the labour are boys and girls of all ages, some children begin working alongside their parents as soon as they can walk, and others are loaned, kidnapped, or sold for little money. The children that are involved are those who are usually extremely poor and whose families cannot afford to do anything to help them or take care of them. Child labour tends to be more prevalent in developing countries where although there may still be laws against it, they are not always as readily enforced (UNICEF, 2009). Some places where child labour is more known for happening is places in Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, and India,  but it happens in many other countries all around the world and even in parts of North America, as child labour can incorporate such a wide variety of things. Children can also get involved in the labour because they think that they are gaining skills that it will help them in their future, or that they are helping support their family and that that is part of their responsibility within their household (Kielburger, 2008).
Child labour is an ongoing issue as children everywhere need to be seen as citizens with equal human rights no matter where they live or who they are, all children deserve to have the same things in life such as going to school and having time to rest (Kielburger, 2008). Child labour does go against many laws and provisions in many countries but it tends to be overlooked by people involved in flawed justice systems. We also believe that in Westernized societies we have nothing to do with child labour as we don’t have a large number of incidences of it, yet it exists around the globe and is influenced by globalization, as the trafficking of cheap goods around the world is what drives cheap child labour.