When children are born, they are supposed to get the love and affection of their parents and every basic facility for their education and living. For e.g. a house, clothes, food, education etc. But as we all know, not every child on this earth is lucky to have those basic needs of survival. Children in the third world countries are suffering from hunger and poverty. They even don’t have clothes on their bodies. They die of hunger and malnutrition. They walk across many miles just to fetch water for themselves, their family and siblings so that they could survive. Yes, this is how life is for them. Those poor children don’t enjoy their lives like the children who are raised up in the elites or families with high-income social status in the society.
Are you also thinking the same that I am thinking?
I know, Questions like this might be arising in your mind and brain.
Then what do these poor children get from their life? Something or nothing?
How to their parents manage to survive with their whole family?
How is life for them? Is it like us? Is it like every normal people who enjoy their life having all basic necessities of life or maybe having more than that? Right?
Let me tell you, these unfortunate children are bound to work because of their very low-income families who are not at all in a position to support them financially. These children from an early age get involved into being a child labor leading a miserable life, working like adults without even realizing their pain. These children realize and know that how poor their families are and that they have to work and earn for survival of their family, no matter if they work voluntarily or are being coerced.
For example in this video you can see the children pulling handcarts, picking litter and trying to collect sand from Karachi slums and they are being the represented as the only “bread winners” in their family, the only ones who earn in their family. These children are so young that they don’t even realize the pain of that punishing work and are still having fun working in group with their workforce. I originally belong to Pakistan and I myself have seen, poor pathan and afghani children doing similar works in streets. How painful is it just to watch? How must it be for them we can’t even imagine? One of the fundamental causes of child labor could be the social welfare program in one’s country, which is not at all set in Pakistan until this date. As the reporter said that Pakistan’s employment laws set a minimum age of 14 for factory works unlike other high-income nations.
In clip 1 and clip 2 you can see the children of Malawi and other South African countries who are working in the tobacco fields. There are millions of children in African countries who are also known as tobacco child laborers who work in agriculture and this is the only means of their earning. They get injured and affected by the tobacco leaves, which can be proved fatal for them in the near future. As I said, these issues arise depending upon the economic growth of that particular country. If it’s a low-income nation then the employment policies will differ from other developed countries.
There are other kinds of unfortunate children too who are being sold by their own parents to the agents and owners of some multinational companies who pay them an average amount of money which is sufficient for their poor parents. These situations mostly occur in cases of “bonded labor” where the parents are already poor and leading their lives as slaves. They have a huge loan due on them and when they feel that they cannot repay the loan, they sell their children to the agency and get paid because they might not have any other option.
Bonded labor or Debt bondage is a form of slavery in which a person pledges him or herself against a loan. Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation.
You might be wondering, but what happens to those poor children? Yes, they get trapped into these agencies that supports the division of child labor and they have thousands of children like this who have been working day and night continuously like machines or robots for 14 or more hours. They hardly get to sleep or eat and they become a part of “human trafficking”.
Human trafficking is an illegal trade of human beings for the purposes of reproductive slavery, commercial sexual exploitation, forced labor or a modern form of slavery.
Some of the children are being kidnapped and imprisoned by the agents.
Here in the following videos you can see the examples of these kinds of children.
In my research I found out that we mostly see these cases of “illegal child labor” in the third world African and Asian countries.
These are the statistics for countries that have high rate of child labor
The question still remains the same, Why do these matters of slavery, forced labor and human trafficking occur in some societies? One possible answer to this might be that such situations occur due to the Abnormal forms of Division of Labor. The division of labor itself does not always function as it could in modern society.
1-) Anomic Division of labor
2-) Forced or coerced Division of labor
Anomic division of labour is a kind of labor without law or we can even say that its an illegal division of labor, which shows the lack of social norms in that particular society. It depends upon a country's economic welfare and employment policy.
Forced division of labor is a kind of labor in which an individual is been forced by his family, or an agent or an organization. Its a kind of slavery.
