© Arvind Ganesan/Human Rights Watch 1995
A young girl working as a bonded laborer in the silk reeling process in Karnataka, India.
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Children’s Rights Division - Home Page
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Introduction
The International Labor Organization (ILO) has estimated that 250 million children between the ages of five and fourteen work in developing countries—at least 120 million on a full time basis. Sixty-one percent of these were in Asia, 32 percent in Africa, and 7 percent in Latin America. Most working children in rural areas were found in agriculture; urban children worked in trade and services, with fewer in manufacturing, construction and domestic service.
Conditions of child labor range from that of four-year-olds tied to rug looms to keep them from running away, to seventeen-year-olds helping out on the family farm. In some cases, a child's work can be helpful to him or her and to the family; working and earning can be a positive experience in a child's growing up. This depends largely on the age of the child, the conditions in which the child works, and whether work prevents the child from going to school.
The Children's Rights Division at Human Rights Watch has largely focussed its efforts on forced and bonded child labor, which has a devastating impact on children. Children who work long hours, often in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, are exposed to lasting physical and psychological harm. Working at looms, for example, has left children disabled with eye damage, lung disease, stunted growth, and a susceptibility to arthritis as they grow older.
Denied an education and a normal childhood, some are confined and beaten, reduced to slavery. Some are denied freedom of movement—the right to leave the workplace and go home to their families. Some are even abducted and forced to work.
The human rights abuses in these practices are clear and acute. Our objectives in tackling these aspects of the complex and troubling child labor issue include drawing attention to the plight of bonded and forced child laborers, helping to end these appalling practices, and contributing to the debate on the rights dimension of the larger issue of children and work.
Bonded Child Labor
Bonded labor takes place when a family receives an advance payment (sometimes as little as U.S. $15) to hand a child—boy or girl—over to an employer. In most cases the child cannot work off the debt, nor can the family raise enough money to buy the child back. The workplace is often structured so that "expenses" and/or "interest" are deducted from a child's earnings in such amounts that it is almost impossible for a child to repay the debt. In some cases, the labor is generational—that is, a child's grandfather or great-grandfather was promised to an employer many years earlier, with the understanding that each generation would provide the employer with a new worker—often with no pay at all.
Bonded labor, normally debt bondage or peonage, is outlawed by the 1956 U.N. Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. See also International Legal Standards on Forced and Bonded Labor
Millions of children work as bonded child laborers in countries around the world, 15 million in India alone; the full extent of the problem has yet to be shown. Many are subjected to severe physical abuse, as in a case cited in the July 1995 Human Rights Watch report, Contemporary Forms of Slavery in Pakistan:
Two years ago at the age of seven, Anwar started weaving carpets in a village in Pakistan's province of Sindh. He was given some food, little free time, and no medical assistance. He was told repeatedly that he could not stop working until he earned enough money to pay an alleged family debt. He was never told who in his family had borrowed money nor how much he had borrowed. Any time he made an error with his work, he was fined and the debt increased. Once when his work was considered to be too slow, he was beaten with a stick. Once after a particularly painful beating, he tried to run away, only to be apprehended by the local police who forcibly returned him to the carpet looms.
On the advocacy front, we have met with children's and human rights groups, as well as representatives from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the International Labor Organization (ILO), the World Bank, and other organizations, to try to develop a holistic strategy to prevent children from losing their childhood, education, and opportunities by being entrapped in bonded labor. We have also worked to provide to children's organizations and international advocacy groups objective on-the-spot reporting to support efforts to effect change.
Trafficking
HRW Background Briefing:
International Trafficking of Women and Children
Promises Broken: Sexual Abuse and Exploitation
The International Labor Organization
HRW Background Briefing:
Child Soldiers and the Child Labor Convention
The World Bank
A Human Rights Watch investigation and 1996 report, The Small Hands of Slavery: Bonded Child Labor in India, revealed that the silk industry, which was heavily supported by the World Bank, employed many bonded child laborers. The World Bank, embarrassed by this disclosure, chose to include NGO monitoring of projects for child labor as a condition of support on future projects.
The bank has now acknowledged that child labor was used in its projects and, in cooperation with the government and nongovernmental organizations, has explored pilot programs that would remove children from the workplace, rehabilitate them, and provide them with education. In 1997, for the first time, the World Bank promulgated a child labor policy to be considered when making lending agreements to countries. In addition, in 1998, the Bank created a staff position specifically to deal with the issue of child labor in the course of bank lending.
The Swiss Development Corporation, which also funded sericulture projects in India, convened an NGO working group in 1996 to develop programs aimed at curbing the use of child labor in Swiss Development Corporation/World Bank funded programs. The working group met regularly to design approaches to alleviate the human rights abuses resulting from child labor in sericulture.
HRW Publications
Fingers to the Bone: United States Failure to Protect Child Farmworkers
Promises Broken: Child Labor
World Report 2000 Section on Children's Rights: Child Labor
Children of Sudan: Slaves, Street Children and Child Soldiers
Contemporary Forms of Slavery in Pakistan
The Small Hands of Slavery: Bonded Child Labor in India
A Modern Form of Slavery: Trafficking of Burmese Women and Girls into Brothels in Thailand
Rape for Profit: Trafficking of Nepali Girls and Women to India's Brothels
More HRW Publications
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