* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
World Day Against Child Labour should be a wake-up for the aid and development sector to prioritise ending child slavery
Aidan McQuade is an expert on modern slavery and forced labour and former director of Anti-Slavery International.
Combatting child labour is hampered by the fact that any discussion of it can be complicated by the meanings of words. In English “labour” and “work” both mean much the same thing. Working on the subject with the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe Presence in Albania I discovered that in Albanian the same word is used for both “labour” and “work”.
This is important to know because in international law, reflecting the experiences of the approximately 218 million children in employment, there is a very important distinction between acceptable “child work” and unacceptable “child labour.”
The International Labour Organization estimates that worldwide there are 152 million victims of child labour, that is children engaged in work that harms their welfare and education and prevents their development and future living standards.
The potential confusing of meanings between “child labour” and “child work” can lead to a trivialization of the issue. For example, on many occasions I have been asked by senior people involved in anti-poverty policy and practice whether children doing the dishes or having a paper round amounts to child labour.
Perhaps the most egregious form of child labour is child slavery, which is defined in international law as the transfer of a child by a parent or guardian to a third party for the purposes of exploitation.
Child slavery is, of course, a deeply gendered issue. In Albania OSCE Presence found that trafficking for forced begging and criminal activity is a principle trafficking risk for boys. In other parts of the world boys are often trafficked into agriculture, fisheries or mining. But while there is often significant diversity in the sectors in which boys are exploited, for girls trafficking for sexual exploitation, sometimes under the guise of domestic work, remains a considerable risk.
In 2005 the ILO estimated that there were 5.5 million children in slavery. In their 2012 estimates of forced labour this number remained the same. Finally, in the 2017 estimates, a change was reported: it had risen to 10 million, or one in four of all those currently enslaved in the world. The principle reason for this change is that the 2017 estimates recognised that forced child marriage is a form of slavery and hence is now included in the estimates on top of the 5.5 million children who continue to labour in slavery.
It is possible that the number of children in slavery is higher still. For example, the Myanmar Union Ministry of Labour estimate that there are 1.2 million children working in the country and as many as half of them are engaged in hazardous occupations. But it is noticeable, for example in the tea houses and restaurants that employ so many of them, that many of these working children have been separated from their families. That is, they have been trafficked into child slavery: sold by poor families as cheap labour in an effort to ameliorate the poverty of the rest of the family.
But the deeper lesson of these child slavery estimates is an indictment of national and international efforts against child slavery. The numbers remain so stubbornly high because there has been inadequate response to effectively address the causes and consequences of these forms of child abuse.
OSCE Presence in Albania recommendations for the strengthening of child protection systems to provide better coordinated responses to child trafficking will be relevant for many countries which wish to obtain meaningful reductions in the numbers of children enslaved within their borders.
Obtaining meaningful reductions in child labour and child slavery also depend on addressing their underlying causes. These include the poverty and indebtedness of marginalised families in poor communities, inadequate educational and vocational educational provisions for children, and increased respect for children’s rights.
But, perhaps most fundamentally, reductions in child labour and child slavery require the serious engagement of national and international policy makers and anti-poverty practitioners. Elimination of child labour and child slavery must become a priority in development and humanitarian practice. And any leader of development and humanitarian policy and practice who feels too lazy or busy to engage with the complex challenges that these issues pose should seek alternative employment.
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