Using the kids.

‘Hiring an obedient 8-year old, fresh from India’s rural heartland, is a simple matter’.

www.Indianchild.com.

‘Few places in India are as colourful, charismatic or spiritual as the bathing ghats lining the River Ganges in Varanasi.  The city of Shiva is one of the holiest places in India, where Hindu pilgrims come to wash away a lifetime of sins in the Ganges (see photos) or to cremate their loved ones along the banks of the sacred river.  Varanasi has always been an auspicious place to die since expiring here offers moksha – liberation from the cycle of birth and death’.  So says The Lonely Planet Guide to East India.  As well as its holy men, Varanasi is also famous for its terxtiles, its carpets, its embroidered saris.

It is also the world capital of enslaved child labour.

More than 200,000 children under 14 are in bonded labour.  UNICEF says that thousands of children in the carpet industry are ‘kidnapped or lured away or pledged by their parents for paltry sums of money...made to crouch on their toes, from dawn to dusk every day, severely stunting their growth…..because of strong Mafia-like control…’. The city’s silk industry is just as dangerous: Zama Coursen-Neff’s researchers, in Small Change: Bonded Labour in India’s Silk Industry, UNICEF, found ‘a 9-year old chained to his loom…. everywhere they saw young boys covered in burn scars from the dangerous work of boiling silk worms’. Of course, most tourists would not know anything about this:  the guide books don’t list the sweat-shops as places of interest on the visitors’ intineraries.  Nor do the labels on these exquisite artifacts describe the precise employment details.

There are 218 million children world-wide aged between 5 and 17 who work (ILO report, but these figures exclude domestic labour). Fifty million children work in Africa, and 122 million in Asia. Over half of them work in hazardous industries and many of the rest are in agriculture. For most children in poor countries, working is merely part of life:  it is inconceivable for children living in peasant communities not to work.

Then there is forced labour.  Anti-Slavery International (ASI) bundles together children who are in slavery, or have been trafficked,  are in debt bondage or other kinds of forced labour, including armed conflict, prostitution, pornography and other illicit activities. We don’t really know how many children get bought and sold each year, since most of this trade is carried out away from public view.  The UN claims a million children get traded every day (The Guardian 15 March 2008). Added to this number are the children living on the streets, hustling wherever they can in order to survive.  In Dhaka, Bangladesh, apart from the 750,000 children who work full-time, there are 300,000 street children, living (and dying) on their own; some selling cigarette butts or whatever else they can find.

Johann Hari (The Guardian March 2008) writes:  ‘Mohammed with his small gang of friends is a 14-year-old with a grubby denim shirt and a ragged mop-head of hair. He looks about 10, with a bony, under-developed frame. He has been with his posse ever since he arrived in Dhaka, hoping he would somehow spot his mother. I ask - do you miss your family? He offers a little shrug. “I miss my brothers and sisters. I wish I could still play with them.. But no. I don’t miss anyone.” The gang wash in the black, stinking river, which might explain the infected lumps of scabies he is scratching on his arm incessantly’…. “I know I’ve ruined my life,” he says. “I know I’m a bad person, and I’ll never get out of here. There’s no future, for me”. Each of the gang has two fears: being captured and sent to a  government vagrancy centres. Mohammed says, “It’s the worst place. You have to work all the time. If you ever stop, they beat you really hard. I don’t want to ever go there again. They hate us.”  But their greater fear is the traffickers’.  Mohammed tells me about a little girl called Muni.  One day, when she was just nine-and-a-half a man approached her and told her she could have a nice job if she went with him.  She refused but he snatched her away.  The other kids told the police but they just laughed.  Her body was found three days later, allegedly raped and strangled’.

All this occurs despite the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified (except for Somalia and the US) in 1990.  It lists forty rights of children, but these are merely paper rights since there is no policing to ensure children get them. Some experts argue that these rights don’t take account of the reality facing children from extremely poor families.

Secrecy reigns supreme:

By far the largest sector of urban child labour is domestic service. No one knows how many children are employed in the industry since, in the home, they can be well hidden from prying eyes. In fact, children in many poor countries can easily get bought and sold or disappear with hardly anyone taking notice. In Sri Lanka, one in three middle income households has a child under 14 years old as a domestic worker, according to a 2004 Human Rights Watch report.

Amelia Gentleman of The International Herald Tribune (Feb 19, 2007) tells of eight year old Jasmina Khatoom. She rises before dawn to fetch water for the household where she works as a maid. She washes, sweeps and hauls until about 11 at night, when she lies down to sleep on the floor by the bathroom door. Her employers have little patience for her exhaustion.   "I get tired and forget things, so they hit me," Jasmina said. "They want the shoes polished. If I don't do it fast enough they hit me with a cooking spoon. They want to go to the toilet. If I don't get the water fast enough I get a beating."  Jasmina gets paid 100 rupees, or $2.25 a month. 

Child labour under harsh conditions goes on everywhere.  In West Africa, it occurs in the chocolate making industry. In 2001 a British TV documentary, Slavery: A global investigation, claimed that 90% of the Ivory Coast cocoa plantations use forced labor. An ILO report in 2004 looked at 1,500 farms across the cocoa-producing region and found that children were involved in using machetes to clear fields, applying pesticides, harvesting cocoa pods and slicing them open to remove the cocoa beans. More than a quarter of a million children were involved, and two thirds of them were under 14 and many were working a 12-hour day. Some of them had been sold into working on the farms, effectively as child slaves. Again, none of the chocolate products in the West have this on their labels.

Urban Dumping Grounds:

Poor people arrive in cities, not because they can get jobs.  They can no longer survive in the harsh conditions of rural life:  falling prices, variable harvests, droughts and floods, the lack of any safety nets, and the vicious Structural Adjustment Policies of the IMF/World Bank, with its cuts in subsidies for small farmers, in the 1980s all mean that rural smallholders are pushed to sink or swim in the global markets. People move into cities without any notion of whether they will find work.  They have nowhere else to go. 

Children in poor countries grow up quickly.  From about the age of eight many of them will be learning to hustle or even work full time, to ensure their families survive. Pschai, a 30 year old Thai friend of mine, arrived in Bangkok as an eight year old, not able to read or write.  He was lucky to find work at a pavement food stall and the family looked out for him, helping him to survive. He now supports the rest of his family in north-east Thailand. And he still hasn’t learnt to read or write.

The UN report: The Challenge of Slums concludes:  “instead of becoming a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and trade”.

Johann Hari (The Guardian March 15, 2008) writes about ‘Sufia, from south-west Bangladesh. 

She grew up in a village near Khulna in a farming family; one of eight children. “My parents couldn’t afford to look after me,” she says. “We didn’t have enough money for food.”

And so came the lie. When Sufia was 14, a neighbour came to her parents and said she could find Sufia a job in Calcutta as a housemaid. She would live well andwould learn English. “I was so excited,” Sufia says. “But as soon as we arrived in Calcutta I knew something was wrong. I didn’t know what a brothel was, but I could see the house she took me to was a bad house. The women wore small clothes and lots of bad men were coming in and out.” The neighbour got paid  around £500 for Sufia, and told her to do as she was told. She then disappeared’.

Survival tactics:

Extremely poor households use a range of tactics in order to survive. Professor Robert Chambers, (Vulnerability, coping and policy; IDS Bulletin 20 1989) has a model about the processes smallholders go through to survive (which I have adapted to cover how extremely poor people survive). He describes a (simplified) series of stages:

1:  Stint:  Cut down the costs of food etc, or shift to cheaper foods, substituting wild foods for staples. Kemthong, a motor mechanic living in Bangkok whose family are in north-east Thailand, says that he often went out to find wild berries, catch small animals and grubs as well as fish to eat, when they had no other food. 

2:  Diversify:   Seek new sources of food and diversify work activities and sources of

income, especially in off-season.  But this is pie-in-the-sky for really poor people who may lack the money or know-how to diversify.

3:  Borrow:  Lending to neighbours and borrowing when times are hard is the only safety nets very poor people have, making claims on relatives, neighbours, patrons, even begging.  When all that fails, they turn to moneylenders but, as many people know, a formal loan is dangerous.  The interest rate may be exorbitant and they may well be worse off the following year.  As a farmer said to me:  “this will  take us a generation to repay”. But families get forced into this.  Pramuan took me to see his family in Surin, in Thailand.  They lost their land and their house to a local large landowner who lent them money in the bad years, and then took over their land to pay for the debt, offering to give it back to them ‘when they could afford it’ (at his price).  They now live unhappily with a daughter’s family and are obliged to work whenever they can for other smallholders.  A smallholder I know near Sisaket in north east Thailand rents back the land he lost from his creditor. That makes him a sharecropper and costs him fifty percent of each harvest. 

4:  Gamble:  Many shantytowns have all kinds of rackets for making money: from pyramid selling scams, lottery tickets, to just gambling games.  Thirty per cent of shantytown dwellers in Khlong Thoey, in Bangkok used gambling as a way of (hopefully) making money (Evers and Korff: Southeast Asian Urbanism). Believing in luck is also a way of holding on to the positives in life where everything is negative!

5:  Move house:   Disperse family members, livestock and assets, and/or migrate.  But where can they move to?

6:  Sell the land/house:  Many peasant farmers have no intention of losing their houses, their land and their livelihoods.  It is usually being immersed in rising debt that forces them into it. They get to a point where there are no other options.

Desperate measures:

In the rich West our lives are grounded in hope – for this week and next, for our future careers, finding partners, and for whatever pinnacles we intend to reach in our lives. Living with hope helps us to deal with challenges and solve problems. That kind of hope is a luxury for poor people.  When you are desperate, you will eventually do whatever you have to in order to survive. But a smallholder who has already sold any assets has very few survival options left. Only four options remain for families without any other ways of managing.

1:  Sell the kids - adolescent children are one of the few assets that smallholders have. Children are usually fit, obedient, loyal, unorganized and without any power.  They may also be attractive or worth something in the market as a sexual plaything, (see Sanjay Jha:  Father tried to sell daughter, NowPublic May 4 2008). As the story of Sufia from Bangladesh above shows, there are ‘neighbours’ looking out for children who need to be sold.  There is a lot of money to be made out of poverty, especially from those who know exactly how the system works and can capitalise on these opportunities. Or maybe the parents tell these stories of being conned by neighbours because they can’t face the reality of what they had to do – to sell their offspring, knowing full well what would happen to the children.

2:  Sell your body - one of the advantages of getting your daughter 'into the entertainment/catering business' to sell her body in the big city is that it can be disguised with glamour:  the clothes, maybe the money and, of course, the possibility of finding a foreign husband willing to whisk her off to paradise. But it rarely happens like that.

3:  Sell your body organs – there is a surging world demand for human organs.  The market was created in the 1980s through advances in kidney transplant surgery. At the slum of Bharathi Nagar in Villivakkam, a suburb of Chennai, India is the hub of the kidney trade.  It gets called Kidney Nagar or Kidney-bakkam, according to Mike Davis, in his book on Global Slums.  He writes that one person per family has sold a kidney for local transplants or export to Malaysia. The desperate purchasers probably can't afford to think much about the donors!

4:  Commit suicide - According to the Economist - 150,000 farmers in India have taken their lives as a result of the liberalization of the Indian countryside over the last 10 years. Sanjay Hja (No let up in India farm suicides, NowPublic, May 6 2008) describes how the rate is increasing.

Sri Lanka has the world’s highest suicide rate (over 55 out of every 100,000 people kill themselves each year).  This is well above the average (10-25 per 100,000). G G Senaratna (World Socialist Web Site: 21 Nov 2005) writes about: Jayasinghe, 44, from Aralaganvila who  took his life on September 24. He was burdened with a 90,000 rupee loan ($US900) and could not redeem his one hectare paddy field, which had been mortgaged to a private money lender during the last two planting seasons. His wife Nalini told the WSWS he had been in mental agony over his financial situation. Jayasinghe had become a sharecropper on his own land. He now cultivated the land, but a big share of the crop went to the money lender. 

D.H. Sunil Rajapakse, 38, from the village of Boaththa at Welikanda, was a father of two who took his life on September 27. His wife Kanthi Thilaka Abeysinghe told the WSWS that her husband was heavily indebted. For this year’s season, beginning with the harvest in July, Rajapakse  borrowed 30,000 rupees from a bank and had to turn to a private money lender for another 15,000 rupees. His crop, which was badly damaged by flooding, brought in only 65,000 rupees. He received no government assistance and was 47,000 rupees in debt to the bank, the money lenders and local shops. His wife explained: “He was worrying for days while the money lenders came to the house to demand payment. He felt ashamed. He bought some poison by selling the last paddy bag he had stored for home consumption and took his life.

What can we do?

Agencies with an interest in tackling the serious exploitation of children may give harrowing accounts of what the child goes through (that is what they are paid to do). But they rarely tell us about the parents’ reasons for using their children in this way.  It is usually left to the reader to fill in the dots and draw a picture of the parents.  We should be wary of judging them. Parents are generally not so callous that they merely allow this to happen.

It is tempting for us in the West to focus on stopping the child exploitation in any way we can.  Refusing to buy articles made by child labour may salve liberal consciences but often brings about more destitution, even death to the children. The workplace may be an undesirable situation for a child in the long run. But stopping it is dangerous.

A UNICEF study found that 5,000 to 7,000 Nepalese children turned to prostitution after the United States banned that country's carpet exports in the 1990s. Also, after the Child Labor Deterrence Act was introduced in the US, an estimated 50,000 children were dismissed from their garment industry jobs in Bangladesh, leaving many to resort to jobs such as "stone-crushing, street hustling, and prostitution”; all of them, according to a UNICEF study quoted in Wikipedia, "more hazardous and exploitative than garment production". The study says that boycotts are "blunt instruments with long-term consequences  that can actually harm rather than help the children involved."

Focusing on the children may make us feel good if we don’t find out what happened next but it only tackles the symptons of extreme poverty.

There are many, complex reasons for this grinding poverty.  One reason for the decimation of many smallholdings is the highly subsidized agriculture that developing countries face from the West (including Japan).  For example, cotton, groundnuts and sugar produced in West Africa,as well as many other agricultural products worldwide have to compete with the highly subsidized and more costly crops grown in the US and Europe.  This is one reason to push our governments to resolve the hoo-ha over the Doha Free Trade negotiations about agricultural subsidies in favour of the developing world before the time limits run out. But that is really another story.