My Research About Child Labor

This is one of my subtopics from my capstone paper. This subtopic is about why child labor is dangerous.

There are dangerous effects caused by child labor, happening to children across the world. There are many stories like this all around the world in places overflowing with poverty, like this one;

My sister is 10 years old. Every morning at 7:00 she goes to the bonded-labor man, and every night at 9:00 she comes home. He treats her badly. He hits her if he thinks she is working slowly, or if she talks to the other children, he yells at her. He comes looking for her if she is sick and cannot go to work. I feel this is very difficult for her. I don’t care about school or playing. I don’t care about any of that. All I want is to bring my sister home from the bonded-labor man. For 600 rupees I can bring her home. That is our only chance to get her back (Gutheil).

This shows that children often get drawn into forced labor, needing to obtain money to provide their families with what they need to live, and can get stuck into situations that make it hard to regain their childhood. 218 million children are employed in all sorts of labor globally, at the youngest age of 5, getting stuck in hazardous working conditions. There are about 134 million children enslaved in forced labor in Africa and the region of Asia. Those regions are fraught with the rates of forced labor. Many people have perceived child labor as a good thing, because in some cases small tasks that they do help with their development and gain skills, but this is not child labor. According to the International Labor Organization, "Child labor is labor that jeopardizes the physical, mental or moral well-being of a child, either because of its nature or because of the conditions in which it is carried out, known as ‘hazardous work’" (Gutheil). Children of all ages are being held against their will, or stuck in a situation when needing to make money to provide for themselves and their families. This leads to them being stuck in a dangerous situation, forced to work against their will, or doing work that damages their childhood and way of learning.

There are different levels of child labor, and they can be very different from eachother. The first description of child labor is, “The unconditional worst forms of child labor… defined as slavery, trafficking, debt bondage and other forms of forced labor, forced recruitment of children for use in armed conflict, prostitution and pornography, and illicit activities"(“Child Labor”). This is defined as the worst category, because it falls under forced labor which means children are contrived to do an action against their will. The next category is “Labor performed by a child who is under the minimum age specified for that kind of work (as defined by national legislation, in accordance with accepted international standards), and that is thus likely to impede the child’s education and full development" (“Child Labor”). This description includes how forms of child labor take away childhood, and damage their education and pathway of growing up. The last category is, “Labor that jeopardizes the physical, mental or moral well-being of a child, either because of its nature or because of the conditions in which it is carried out, known as ‘hazardous work" (“Child Labor”). This category defines the harmful and damaging physical effects children receive when being put to work. All forms of forced labor takes away childhood from the children impacted by this. There are many ways on how child labor is making a big mark on children's lives and how they are dangerously effected by these working hazards. Human trafficking is one of these marks, and it is making a big impact on children worldwide.