1 - The problem of child labour

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents the main facts about child labour. It starts by defining child labour, outlines its current forms, explores the statistics on child labourers worldwide and examines the causes of child labour. It concludes by developing possible strategies for combating child labour, taking into account the factors causing child labour.

DEFINING CHILD LABOUR

Introduction

It is part of the problem of child labour that to treat all work done by children as equally unacceptable means to confuse and trivialise the issue. Children do a variety of work in widely divergent conditions. But age limits differ from activity to activity and from country to country. Many societies, especially poor rural ones, do not necessarily view child work as ‘bad’, even at an age of eight or nine years. This is partly due to the fact that, in many societies, an apprentice of eight or nine years is not considered as a child. As Veerman puts it, ideas concerning the rights of children are dependent on the prevailing image of childhood, and when that image changes, the ideas about the rights of the child also change. Therefore, to understand the problem of combating child labour one has to become aware of the relativity of the notions of ‘childhood’ and ‘child labour’, although the complete analysis of the complex relationships between the social and cultural context and children's rights in different backgrounds is beyond the scope of this work.