Child Labor 2

Around the world, many are involved in unreasonable hours of family-based responsibility. We met children who had never been to school, because they were required to watch the family’s small herd of goats for over twelve hours per day, every day. Or girls of eight or nine who had sole responsibility to care for a baby sibling all day, every day, while both parents worked.

At least 126 million find themselves in the worst forms of child labor: slavery, trafficking, debt bondage, and other forced labor. Some experience highly hazardous situations, such as working in mines, with chemicals and pesticides or with dangerous machinery. Girls from northern India have been sold to families from the Middle East as home slaves. Many children are unseen, laboring behind the walls of workshops, hidden from view in plantations. They might pick cocoa beans all day long, but never taste chocolate themselves.

In some parts of northern India, children are sold to pay off debts, their parents believing they are being sent to work in good jobs in other parts of the world. In fact, they are being sent into the trafficking industry to work as bonded slaves.

The most distressing and demeaning form of child labor is sexual exploitation. Over 1.8 million children are trapped in the sex trades: prostitution, pornography and other illicit activities. [UNICEF, Annual Report 2007.] The sexual exploitation of women and children is the third largest illicit industry on the planet (just behind the sale of illegal arms and drugs). [United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime, “Briefing Note 8: Statistics on Human Trafficking in South Asia,” UN-GIFT – Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking, www.giftasia.in (accessed August 11, 2008).] It’s lucrative for some. Life-shattering for others. [Pages 87, 88]

Source: Sylvia Foth, Daddy Are We There Yet? (A global check-in on the world of mission and kids), Kidzana Ministries, Mukilteo, 2009