Unraveling the Causes of Child Labor

No parent dreams of their children growing up on a sugar plantation or spinning yards and yards of thread or wielding a machete to harvest cocoa. Yet 218 million children worldwide as young as 5 years old are in some sort of child labor situation.1 The International Labour Organization has defined child labor as “work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development.”2 So, if no parent intends for their child to be deprived or harmed in this way, how does this happen? Let’s unravel the complex causes of child labor.

The first thread to follow in the causes of child labor is poverty.

The World Bank has set the worldwide poverty line at $1.90 per day, meaning that is the amount a person lives on per day. The World Bank estimated that 689 million people were at or below this level in 2017. With the COVID-19 pandemic reversing many gains that organizations and governments have made in the past decade regarding poverty levels, that number has increased dramatically since then.3

There is no easy path out of the poverty cycle when a family lives at this level of destitution. If a person has grown up at or below this level, they typically lack any means of advancement in skills and commonly have poor health due to malnutrition. Survival is the only thing they can focus on. The options before them are few. If you go long enough without food or water or warmth, you will likely make decisions you once thought impossible, such as sending your child to work in hazardous conditions.

Child labor in relation to poverty cannot be ignored. This is the place of vulnerability that many impoverished parents face. They may be working all day, every day as hard as they can and still not be able to provide for even their families’ most basic needs. If an unscrupulous plantation owner or other employer sees this situation, that employer might encourage them to have their children also work. These children are also vulnerable to traffickers, who offer false promises of a better life.

The second thread to follow in the causes of child labor is consumer demand.

Certain industries employ more child labor than others. How much child labor in the world continues can be partially linked to the market demand for items from such industries. For instance, fashion, chocolate and cobalt are three areas where market demand has contributed to the inclusion of children in production.4 5 6

Knowing this information, consumers can commit to being more aware of where their products come from and hold companies accountable for their business practices through advocacy and where they choose to spend their money. As Francis Bacon famously said, “Knowledge is power.”7 That includes the power of choosing where your dollars go as it relates to how many people are in child labor in the world.

The third thread to follow in the cause of child labor is sex trafficking.

“Around the world, an influx in sex tourism, the insatiable demand for child pornography and greed play key roles in the prevalence of child sex slavery and trafficking,” reports End Slavery Now. “In addition to strangers, family and close friends have been known to sell children off to individuals, businesses and groups involved in the sex industry.”8

This demand has created one of the most heinous forms of child slavery and labor, which has far-reaching effects on the individuals who suffer at the hands of traffickers.


Click here, to read more about this article.

Click here, to read more blogs in Gospel for Asia.Org

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Is the Poverty Cycle?

Image
The question, “What is the poverty cycle, or cycle of poverty?” is one that must be answered to address and end poverty across the globe. Put simply, the term refers to the trend where the vicious effects of poverty and deprivation pass from one generation to the next, with no seeming way out. [1] Someone born into poverty has fewer opportunities than their wealthier peers. They must focus on survival above all, leaving little room for anything else. One illness can wipe out a family’s savings, but the unclean water sources and lack of protection available to them invite sickness. Walking to retrieve water can be time-consuming yet must be a daily priority, and many children must work alongside their parents for the family to afford food. Thus, school is often a far-off dream. Having had few opportunities to acquire skills, the kids grow up to repeat the cycle of poverty with their own children. This story was all too familiar for Nalah. His father worked in the tea fields, trying to e...
Read more

Where Can I Learn How to Break the Cycle of Poverty?

Image
There are many methods for how to break the cycle of poverty which one can learn about. From education assistance to income-generating gifts like sewing machines or farm animals, there is hope for families who have been poor for generations. GFA World works in communities in all these ways through sponsorships and gift distributions, and one by one, we see lives changed as families escape poverty. Raina’s life had been dominated by poverty. She was part of a highly underprivileged people group that faced discrimination and deprivation from others in the region. Despite that, Raina had been able to attend school up until tenth grade, but she discontinued her education when it became too much for her parents to afford. Rather than receiving her certificates of completion, she had to join her parents in the field to earn money to put food on the table. After she married Ander, Raina continued to work in the fields to supplement his income with her own. In search of better job opportunitie...
Read more

Poverty Mindset

Image
Poverty is often viewed as a set of circumstances, but the poverty mindset is a huge part of poverty. The generational poverty mindset is described as a hopelessness that comes from the cycle of poverty. If your grandparents grew up in poverty, followed by your parents, and now you are also living in poverty, there is often a poverty mentality which believes that you cannot escape the hardship that surrounds you. Without hope, the blinders are set and it is difficult to remove them without a change in mindset. For many, generation after generation have been trapped within this cycle. It’s all they have known. So the pertinent questions are these: How to break the cycle of poverty and change the course of a life? At GFA, we have learned that these are the most effective keys to breaking this poverty mindset: Child Sponsorship Child sponsorship through our GFA World tells a child how important he or she is. Children understand that someone across the world is investing in them, sending...
Read more