* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“’It is good when it happens,' say the children, 'that we die before our time.’" So starts an article on factory conditions by Charles Dickens with the rather grisly title: Ground in the Mill.
When the article was published in the 1850s, the chattering classes of Victorian Britain were starting to face up to the reality of child labour in their midst: in the burgeoning factories, on the impoverished working class streets and in the homes burdened by a relentless industrial revolution.
Literary interest in child labour has mostly grown ever since, mirroring social and political interest. This trend is aptly illustrated in a Google ngram graph of "child labour" from 1850 onwards. (the Google ngrams technology, graphically displays the frequency of a term appearing in over five million books that Google has indexed).
A quick observation of this nifty online tool shows that the graphical curve for "child labour" is perhaps predictable in its 1800s slow ascent, thereby reflecting a growing Victorian interest. We also note a sharper incline a hundred years later in the 1980s and 1990s as investigations into child sweat shops and the like led to large public campaigns on the issue.
However, what is far and away most notable about the graph is not the increase in references, but rather the sharp decrease, after around 2002 (or at least until 2008 which is the last year Google indexed the ngrams. The same decrease is evident when searching for the American equivalent "child labor".) It is by no means a scientific study of public interest but the dip in relative literary interest reflects what many working on child labour suspect to have occurred more generally in public consciousness.
It seems too much of a coincidence that the peak in interest on child labour came at around the time that the International Labour Organization (ILO) was passing Convention 182 on the "worst forms of child labour". The Convention in many ways represents the high water mark for political action on child labour, and it is almost as if we collectively breathed a sigh of relief at that point, thought that the issue was on its way to being solved, and then moved on to other things.
Still among us
So given declining interest, is child labour really on its way to "being solved"? The Rana Plaza tragedy, two years ago on 24 April 2013, indicates otherwise.
While there is a dispute over how many child workers were crushed to death that day when the building around them collapsed, what we can be sure of is that children continue to be employed in the manufacturing industry in Bangladesh and elsewhere, in often deplorable conditions, producing clothes potentially destined for the British high street.
The numbers of child labourers worldwide are mind boggling. It is estimated by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) that there are as many child labourers as there are people in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Portugal and Norway combined. That is over 160 million children.
It was partly the image of children working in slavery-type conditions that led to the UK Parliament including a "supply chains" clause into the Modern Slavery Bill that passed into British law last month. The Law will require large British companies to report annually on the existence of any form of modern slavery in their supply chains.
However, as laudable as such legislation is, the reality is that it can only ever address a fraction of child labour cases, particularly as the majority of child labourers are employed in agriculture and not manufacturing. While numbers have come down over the past decade, population growth will ensure that this problem cannot be overcome without a serious and sustained intervention.
Solutions
It is also worth reinforcing that these aren’t kids doing paper rounds or after school jobs that are legal, age appropriate and can help to aid a child's development. Rather the type of labour these children do is largely detrimental to their well-being, harms their welfare and curtails their education. Most worryingly, such conditions threaten to entrap the youngsters in a permanent cycle of poverty.
While child labour is not easy to tackle, the alternative is scandalous: millions of lives "ground in the mill" and economic consequences that go well beyond the concerned children and their families, affecting economic development of communities and entire nations.
A recent World Vision UK report entitled “Work in progress: Effective approaches to end child labour” notes that delivering better education to children, ensuring closer communication between governments, NGOs and the private sector galvanizes political will and promotes governmental accountability in the most affected communities. We see this working in all the communities we engage around the world and are convinced it’s a good pointer towards the right direction in avoiding another Rana Plaza and ensuring that work is done by the adults who ought to do it, and not by 160 million children whose future we all have a stake in.
Matt Jones is Senior Child Rights Policy Adviser at World Vision UK
