Why Child Labor and Trafficking Matter in Pakistan

From the Daily Times
VIEW: Child labour: a threat to the future —Mashal Sahir

If poverty justifies child labour, then it should also justify burglary, prostitution, kidnapping, smuggling and all other crimes. Child labour is a much more serious crime compared to others, because unlike other crimes that affect individuals, child labour affects an entire generation

Child labour is work that is unacceptable because the children involved are either too young or because, even though they have attained the minimum age to take up employment, the work that they do is unsuitable for a person below the age of 18. Child labour is a violation of fundamental human rights and has been shown to hinder children’s development. According to the last available statistics, Pakistan has a total population of 158 million, which includes a total of 40 million children, out of which 3.8 million are the victims of child labour. Many children are victims of the worst forms of child labour, such as bonded labour and slavery, and are easily exploited and abused on account of their vulnerability. It was found that of the total population of child labourers, seven percent suffered from illness or injuries frequently and 28 percent occasionally.

Child labour is not an isolated phenomenon. It is the outcome of a multitude of socio-economic factors and poverty is among its most prominent aspects. In Pakistan, around 30 percent of the people are living below the poverty line. Due to the unfair distribution of income, unemployment and inflation, poor parents are forced to send their children to work for economic reasons. In many cases, poverty has also led to the bonded labour of children. There are specific cases of children being pledged or bonded in return for loans to their parent(s) or guardian, notably in the carpet industry and in agriculture. The way children are absorbed and obliged to work varies but, as a matter of routine, the children of bonded families start working as soon as they reach school age, if not before. According to these parents, their actions are completely justified on account of their poverty. However, if poverty justifies child labour, then it should also justify burglary, prostitution, kidnapping, smuggling and all other crimes. Child labour is a much more serious crime compared to others, because unlike other crimes that affect individuals, child labour affects an entire generation. . .

Natural calamities and crises also play a huge role in giving rise to child labour. The recent floods that hit Pakistan can be seen as a major threat to the future of thousands of children. Once the families that have been displaced by the floods return to their homes, they will encourage their children to go to work and help restore the family. Media reports have indicated that children from the flood-hit regions are being promised lucrative jobs, taken away from their families and then being used for sex work. An increase in child labour was noted after the previous natural calamity — the 2005 earthquake. There are fears that this pattern could be repeated.

The gap between the law and its implementation is a serious problem in Pakistan. According to the Child Labour Law in Pakistan, a child cannot be employed before the age of 15, under any circumstances. Moreover, bonded labour, or ‘debt bondage’ is a practice condemned by the UN as being similar to slavery and consequently a violation of Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is considered by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to constitute forced labour and to be a violation of the ILO’s Convention no 29 on forced labour. However, the government has not put its laws into practice to stop child labour and these laws are universally ignored in Pakistan where children aged four to fourteen keep the country’s factories operating, often working in brutal and squalid conditions. . .

The future of Pakistan depends on whether the government chooses to use this recent crisis as a further excuse for spending cuts in key social areas, or whether it seizes the opportunity and mobilises the necessary political will to prioritise the elimination of child labour as a wise investment in future development.

Read the full article here.


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This is a really interesting opinion piece which identifies the reasons why child labor and child trafficking matters in Pakistan (and really everywhere). Child labor in Pakistan largely exists due to poverty but the author also notes the connections between child labor and over-population, quality of education, natural disasters, and problems with law enforcement. In order to fight child labor and trafficking the author suggests the government needs to ensure there is access to quality education, and that there are social protections for poor families.

Perhaps most importantly the author recognizes the connection between healthy, well educated children and the success of a country. When children are unable to attend quality schools they are also unable to learn the skills that would be necessary for improving their family's lives and possibly bringing their family out of poverty. This puts future generations of children at risk for forced and abuse labor.

Ultimately the issue of child labor and trafficking is an issue not only of child psychological and social development, but also of the future economic development and stability of the communities where they live. By turning a blind eye to child labor now, we put future generations at risk for exploitation. At the same time though, without the proper social protections for the poor, many families simply cannot afford to loose the income their children make, however small. This is the conundrum that Pakistan and many developing countries and communities face.

Determinants of Trafficking: Understanding the problem and the actors

The starting point for understanding the problem of trafficking and finding a solution is to figure out what we think and know about the problem. So this is where I started.

Recently, I read a report which said, half the districts in India are affected by human trafficking. I have read similar reports on different countries across the globe, and each report claims the problem exists because people know either nothing or very little about trafficking. While this may be true, what confused me is the fact that even though there are people or groups who know more than others, it is not always easy to figure out what those people or groups precisely think about the problem.

As I read more, I want to know what everyone thinks of the problem. To keep this exercise structured, I have broken down the study into multiple parts. Today's post is an attempt to understand the factors that influence activities of victims, exploiters, and buyers.

PART I: Determinants of Trafficking: Understanding the problem and the actors

It is crucial to understand all the actors involved in human trafficking as well as the dynamics between the actors and between the actors and the environment.

There have been many articles written on human trafficking, but there is no consensus on what the necessary conditions are to create and maintain human trafficking, i.e. what causes human trafficking and what keeps it going? The answers of course range from political factors such as war and conflict to social factors such as gender discrimination. Perhaps we can never have a uniform answer to these questions. It seems that only now we're beginning to agree on a definition of trafficking so it is hard to believe we will be able to find a set of common determinants of trafficking so soon. Hence, I am very interested in learning what everyone thinks about the questions below and where we differ in our ideas - I hope this exercise will help us see the problem from different perspectives. The goal of this post is to start a discussion on determinants of trafficking and to learn from others' views.

1. What conditions are necessary for trafficking to occur? What (plausible) assumptions can we make about the type of factors that influence trafficking and what makes these assumptions plausible?
• For example, in terms of economic drivers, we know poverty and high level of unemployment are some of the (essential) conditions traffickers look for in recruitment areas , but they may not be causes of trafficking, but rather conditions for it. There may be poor communities which may not be be suitable for 'recruitment' because those communities, for example, may not have well connected criminal networks.
  Categories:
1. Personal: literacy, communication channels, home environment, etc.
   
2. Economic: debt, high levels of unemployment, etc. :
   
• For example, we've read globalization may have created conditions that make it easy for criminal networks to flourish and hence for trafficking to occur. In this case, we would attempt to understand precisely how globalization creates these conditions.
  
3. Political: war, conflicts, exclusion by caste or some other group, etc.
   
4. Social: gender discrimination, marital status, etc.
   
5. Geographic: forced migration due to scarcity of water, etc.
2. How are the necessary conditions for trafficking (from question 1) created and maintained?
3. Who can we classify as exploiters (trafficker, pimps, etc) ? What assumptions can we make about the exploiters?
   
4. What assumptions can we make about the buyers? Who (and what process) creates the demand?
• We've read that trafficking enables "commodification" of humans. We also know that the demand for any commodity is much more complex than just the need of the buyer. Hence, what are these other variables that make understanding this demand and the buyers so difficult and complex?
5. Are we missing something? Who else plays a role and how important is it?

Input from everyone would be extremely helpful and I look forward to a discussion about the questions in this post.

Sex Slaves: A Darker Side Of The Russian Economic Boom

When rescue is not the end, but a beginning

Excerpts from an article on Ghanian child victims of trafficking in the July 2008 IOM Migration Magazine:

“The money I get from my parents to buy food at school is not enough and I am hungry,” pipes up an older boy.

Of all the refrains, this is the most often repeated.

The gathering on the beach is a weekly mentoring session for a group of former child victims of trafficking in Cape Coast in Ghana’s Central Region and an opportunity for the children to unburden their woes, get some advice, and some tutoring help with their schoolwork. Organized by Ghana’s Education Service, the mentoring is part of a package of services being provided by IOM, various government ministries and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) to help Ghanaian child trafficking victims recover from their trauma and reintegrate into families and communities.

Since 2003, with funding from the US State Department’s Bureau of Population, Migration and Refugees (PRM), IOM has rescued nearly 650 children in Ghana knowingly or unknowingly trafficked by parents to work in fishing communities on Lake Volta in the belief they would be fed, educated and taught a useful trade.

The reality is often different. Forced to work painfully long hours doing heavy and dangerous work because owners or ‘masters’ can’t afford to pay adults to do their jobs, the children are also severely underfed and often abused physically and verbally.

Food- the Main Issue

Food, Mavis Narh says, is the issue in the counselling sessions with trafficked children. “If we could feed these children properly, we would see significant results in just a few short months.”

Faustina Amegashie-Aheto, head of a clinical unit in a district in the Volta region where 90 per cent of the children rescued by IOM live, would agree. A health assessment of 178 children a year after their rescue revealed that 38 per cent of the children were still suffering from stunted growth while 62 per cent were underweight. Although de-worming and improved food intake meant that these figures were a vast improvement on those just gleaned after the children’s rescue, they highlight the enormous work ahead to improve the children’s health.

Challenge of Finishing School

Julia Damalie of the Ghana Education Service and in charge of girl and child education in his district recognises the difficulties older trafficked children face when going back to school. “We may need to consider allowing the children to jump years if they have the ability. We know that some children would much rather not go to school any more because of this age difference issue and instead learn a trade but there is no such facility to provide this at the moment,” she explains.

“At the moment, the retention rate is over 90 per cent but that is because of our sponsorship. The reality is that if 50 per cent of these children actually go on and finish their schooling, the programme would be successful. But we won’t know this for several years,” says Jo Rispoli of IOM in Ghana.

There are also other emerging long-term issues that will bear on the outcome...

“We’ve made a great deal of progress but many challenges remain. The key is to secure enough funding to ensure that the future holds a promise for all the children,” adds Rispoli.

To contribute or to sponsor a child through IOM’s rescue and reintegration programme, please click here.

Illegal Immigrants Face Threat of No College

From USA Today:

By Mary Beth Marklein

USA- Some states are making it harder for illegal immigrants to attend college by denying in-state tuition benefits or banning undocumented students.

In the past two years, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and Oklahoma have refused in-state tuition benefits to students who entered the USA illegally with their parents but grew up and went to school in the state. That represents a reversal from earlier this decade, when 10 states passed laws allowing in-state rates for such students.

This summer, South Carolina became the first state to bar undocumented students from all public colleges and universities. North Carolina's community colleges in May ordered its 58 campuses to stop enrolling undocumented students after the state attorney general said admitting them may violate federal law.

"The new trend is to kick illegal aliens out of college altogether," says William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee, which opposes taxpayer subsidies for undocumented immigrants.

Opponents say students shouldn't be penalized for their parents' actions. Helping them is "the right thing to do even if it's unpopular," says North Carolina state Rep. Pricey Harrison, a Democrat who introduced a bill that would prevent state institutions from asking about students' immigration status.

Read the full article

Should illegal immigrants be able to attend college?

Education Chips Away at Human Trafficking

From ZENIT:

By Mirko Testa

ROME, JULY 10, 2008- The education of would-be victims is one of the keys to putting an end to human trafficking, affirm religious women working against this crime in Thailand.

Thailand is again at the Tier 2 level in this year's U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, released last month. Tier 2 is assigned to those governments that are "making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance" with the minimum requirements to eliminate human trafficking.

The Southeast Asian nation passed a tougher law against the practice this year -- though enforcing it despite corruption problems among the police is expected to continue to be a problem.

ZENIT spoke with three religious women who are chipping away at the issue from a different side: preventing would-be victims from falling into this modern form of slavery.

They say the key is education.

Sister Anurak Chaiyaphuek, of the Religious of the Good Shepherd, said that women religious in Thailand "have been making untiring efforts to prevent […] children from falling into an abyss of abuse by carrying out our mission among them."

"What we have done so far is founding schools based on national compulsory education in remote areas or up high on the mountains and opening centers for small children and students who have accomplished compulsory education to pave ways for their further studies in the government's public schools in the cities," she explained. "It is our hope that our children will have opportunities to acquire more knowledge and be adorned with spiritual and cultural formation."

Sister Chaiyaphuek spoke of how the religious live with the youngsters, "penetrating their culture and understanding their backgrounds and conditions, helping them in words and in deeds."

"We teach curriculum of life, which we consider rare and invaluable," she said. "Above all, it is a blessing for us."

Self-reliant
Traffickers based in Thailand lure people in from poor, neighboring countries, such as Myanmar. It is also a hub for these modern-day slaves to be transported to other destination countries. Trafficked human beings are forced to work in a variety of often-dangerous jobs, or exploited sexually.

Sister Kanlaya Trisopa of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Bangkok told ZENIT about a school founded after 15 girls almost ended up locked in the trafficking trade.

"They were luckily saved because the job agents were [put] under arrest," Sister Trisopa said. "We were contacted by the police to take care of those girls, otherwise, they would be sent back to their parents.

"Realizing their fate and knowing that they would soon be victimized again, we didn't hesitate to lend them a hand. We discussed with the girls and their parents and offered our assistance. Some chose to return home with their parents, while others decided to stay with us.

"We pledged to give them vocational training with the hope that they would be self-reliant and able to support their family."

The sisters implemented a curriculum of sewing and handcrafts and a small school was born.

"We felt relieved and happy that they didn't have to seek jobs in the cities and risk potential dangers of human trafficking," Sister Trisopa said.

Read the full article

Education Push Yields Little for India’s Poor

From the New York Times:

LAHTORA, India — With the dew just rising from the fields, dozens of children streamed into the two-room school in this small, poor village, tucking used rice sacks under their arms to use as makeshift chairs. So many children streamed in that the newly appointed head teacher, Rashid Hassan, pored through attendance books for the first two hours of class and complained bitterly. He had no idea who belonged in which grade. There was no way he could teach.

Another teacher arrived 90 minutes late. A third did not show up. The most senior teacher, the only one with a teaching degree, was believed to be on official government duty preparing voter registration cards. No one could quite recall when he had last taught.

“When they get older, they’ll curse their teachers,” said Arnab Ghosh, 26, a social worker trying to help the government improve its schools, as he stared at clusters of children sitting on the grass outside. “They’ll say, ‘We came every day and we learned nothing.’ ”



Sixty years after independence, with 40 percent of its population under 18, India is now confronting the perils of its failure to educate its citizens, notably the poor. More Indian children are in school than ever before, but the quality of public schools like this one has sunk to spectacularly low levels, as government schools have become reserves of children at the very bottom of India’s social ladder.

The children in this school come from the poorest of families — those who cannot afford to send away their young to private schools elsewhere, as do most Indian families with any means.

India has long had a legacy of weak schooling for its young, even as it has promoted high-quality government-financed universities. But if in the past a largely poor and agrarian nation could afford to leave millions of its people illiterate, that is no longer the case. Not only has the roaring economy run into a shortage of skilled labor, but also the nation’s many new roads, phones and television sets have fueled new ambitions for economic advancement among its people — and new expectations for schools to help them achieve it.



That they remain ill equipped to do so is clearly illustrated by an annual survey, conducted by Pratham, the organization for which Mr. Ghosh works. The latest survey, conducted across 16,000 villages in 2007 and released Wednesday, found that while many more children were sitting in class, vast numbers of them could not read, write or perform basic arithmetic, to say nothing of those who were not in school at all.

Among children in fifth grade, 4 out of 10 could not read text at the second grade level, and 7 out of 10 could not subtract. The results reflected a slight improvement in reading from 2006 and a slight decline in arithmetic; together they underscored one of the most worrying gaps in India’s prospects for continued growth.

Education experts debate the reasons for failure. Some point out that children of illiterate parents are less likely to get help at home; the Pratham survey shows that the child of a literate woman performs better at school. Others blame longstanding neglect, insufficient public financing and accountability, and a lack of motivation among some teachers to pay special attention to poor children from lower castes.

“Education is a long-term investment,” said Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and the government’s top policy czar. “We have neglected it, in my view quite criminally, for an enormously long period of time.”

Looking for a Way Up

Education in the new India has become a crucial marker of inequality. Among the poorest 20 percent of Indian men, half are illiterate, and barely 2 percent graduate from high school, according to government data. By contrast, among the richest 20 percent of Indian men, nearly half are high school graduates and only 2 percent are illiterate.

Just as important, at a time when only one in 10 college-age Indians actually go to college, higher education has become the most effective way to scale the golden ladder of the new economy. A recent study by two economists based in Delhi found that between 1993-94 and 2004-5, college graduates enjoyed pay raises of 11 percent every year, and illiterates saw their pay rise by roughly 8.5 percent, though from a miserably low base; here in Bihar State, for instance, a day laborer makes barely more than $1 a day.

“The link between getting your children prepared and being part of this big, changing India is certainly there in everyone’s minds,” said Rukmini Banerji, the research director of Pratham. “The question is: What’s the best way to get there, how much to do, what to do? As a country, I think we are trying to figure this out.”

She added, “If we wait another 5 or 10 years, you are going to lose millions of children.”

Money From the State


India has lately begun investing in education. Public spending on schools has steadily increased over the last few years, and the government now proposes to triple its financial commitment over the next five years. At present, education spending is about 4 percent of the gross domestic product. Every village with more than 1,000 residents has a primary school. There is money for free lunch every day.

Even in a state like Bihar, which had an estimated population of 83 million in 2001 and where schools are in particularly bad shape, the scale of the effort is staggering. In the last year or so, 100,000 new teachers have been hired. Unemployed villagers are paid to recruit children who have never been to school. A village education committee has been created, in theory to keep the school and its principal accountable to the community. And buckets of money have been thrown at education, to buy swings and benches, to paint classrooms, even to put up fences around the campus to keep children from running away.

And yet, as Lahtora shows, good intentions can become terribly complicated on the ground.

At the moment, the village was not lacking for money for its school. The state had committed $15,000 to construct a new school building, $900 for a new kitchen and $400 for new school benches. But only some of the money had arrived, so no construction had started, and the school committee chairman said he was not sure how much local officials might demand in bribes. The chairman’s friend from a neighboring village said $750 had been demanded of his village committee in exchange for building permits.

The chairman here also happens to be the head teacher’s uncle, making the idea of accountability additionally complicated. One parent told Mr. Ghosh that their complaints fell on deaf ears: the teachers were connected to powerful people in the community.

It is a common refrain in a country where teaching jobs are a powerful instrument of political patronage.

The school’s drinking-water tap had stopped working long ago, like 30 percent of schools nationwide, according to the Pratham survey. Despite the extra money, the toilet was broken, as was the case in nearly half of all schools nationwide.

From Development As Freedom by Amartya Sen:

For a variety of historical reasons, including a focus on basic education and basic health care, and early completion of effective land reforms, widespread economic participation was easier to achieve in many of the East Asian and Southeast Asian economies in a way it has not been possible in, say, Brazil or India or Pakistan, where the creation of social opportunities has been much slower and that slowness has acted as a barrier to economic development.

A poor economy may have less money to spend on health care and education, but it also needs less money to spend to provide the same services, which would cost much more in the richer countries. Relative prices and costs are important parameters in determining what a country can afford. Given an appropriate social commitment, the need to take note of the variability of relative costs is particularly important for social services in health and education.

The Different Paths of India & China
Beijing, China

The contrast between India and China has some illustrative importance in this context. The governments of both China and India have been making efforts for some time now (China from 1979 and India from 1991) to move toward a more open, internationally active, market-oriented economy.

While Indian efforts have slowly met with some success, the kind of massive results that China has seen has failed to occur in India. An important factor in this contrast lies in the fact that from the standpoint of social preparedness, China is a great deal ahead of India in being able to make use of the market economy. While pre-reform China was deeply skeptical of markets, it was not skeptical of basic education and widely shared health care. When China turned to marketization in 1979, it already had a highly literate people, especially the young, with good schooling facilities across the bulk of the country.



In contrast, India had a half-illiterate adult population when it turned to marketization in 1991, and the situation is not much improved today. The social backwardness of India, with its elitist concentration on higher education and massive negligence of school education, and its substantial neglect of basic health care, left that country poorly prepared for a widely shared economic expansion.

*During my research in the Philippines I repeatedly came face to face with the vulnerability created by low education and unemployment. While the majority of higher education is privatized in the Philippines, and therefore inaccessible to all but the wealthy, there exists an under funded, yet functioning lower, middle and secondary school system.

The reality for a young child, however, is that rather than attending school, he/she will seek a job to help their family, which then creates a large population of young people with no skills desperate for jobs who are vulnerable to trafficking. One of the common frustrations of the NGOs I worked with was the inability to help trafficking victims once they were rescued, rehabilitated and finally reintegrated back into their home communities. What often ends up happening once they arrive home is they will go and apply for another job and take the risk of being trafficked all over again because the economic need is so great.

At the end of the day the lesson is simple economics- school is not an option when there is no food on the table. At the same time, an educated population is one of the cornerstones of development that will ultimately lead to increased jobs, higher quality of life, and decreased susceptibility to trafficking.

More
Read “Cooking Up Profit” for more about the relationship between development and trafficking.

Read “International Labor Migration & Human Trafficking” for more on how education can help stimulate development and decrease vulnerability to trafficking.