THE term ‘Child Labour’ is defined by Inter Parliamentary Union/International Labour Office 2002 as work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development.
It refers to work that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children and interferes with their schooling by depriving them of the opportunity to attend school by forcing them to leave school prematurely or by requiring them to combine school attendance in excessively long and heavy work.
In the most extreme form, child labour involves children being enslaved, separated from their families, exposed to serious hazardous and illness and/or left to fend for themselves on the streets of large cities often at a very early age and trafficking by intermediators.
While most children continue to be trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation within and aboard, a number of recent studies by the International Labour Office indicate that children are trafficked for domestic service, agriculture and factory work.
The trafficking of children is a result of trying to meet demand for cheap, malleable labour in general and some specific instances, a demand for young children, especially girls, such as in the fast growing commercial sex sector.
Children are an attractive source of labour because they are easy to be abuse, are less assertive and less able to claim their rights than adults.
Apparently children are working longer hours with less food, poorer accommodation and no benefit at all.
A problem of child labour is becoming rampant and very stubborn, even if it is overcome by certain places or sectors, it sometimes reappears in new and often anticipated ways.
In order to combat child labour in most successful instances, a member of key players like Government institutions, international organisations such as the ILO, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (Unicef), the World Bank and others must collaborate together in designing or carry out sustained long term and comprehensive approaches to combating the child labour problem.
Source & Credit: https://www.thenational.com.pg/combine-effort-needed-to-address-child-labour by Tony Sam Kambi, March 29, 2022