SECTION II :
A work being carried out
in very diverse forms
Work the children revêt today of the very diverse forms
which one can classify in seven great types, of which none is specific to a
particular area of the world : house work, forced labor, work in
constraint, sexual exploitation at commercial purposes that we will not study
here, work in industry and plantations, trades of the streets, family work and
the work of the girls. It is thus seen that there are two large poles of
childish activity : the children work either at the house, within a family
sphere (Paragraph I), or in factories or companies, i.e. in the formal sector
(Paragraph II).
Paragraphe I :
Child work within a
family sphere
Of all the employment occupied by the children, most frequent
are the agricultural or domestic work in the residence of their parents. The
majority of the families, and this everywhere in the world, expect that their
children help at the house, that it is by preparing the meals, while going to
seek water with the well, by keeping the herds, or by achieving harder tasks in
the fields. This type of work can be enriching, because the children learn
while taking part in a reasonable way in the domestic drudgeries, with the
culture of the kitchen garden, and they also draw a feeling from it from pride.
Unfortunately, family work is not always as beneficial, it can be too
fascinating, demanding children as one devotes long hours to him which move
away them from the school and requiring too many efforts of bodies of children
in full growth. In the rural zones of Africa and South Asia, the children start
to take part in the domestic drudgeries well before having the school age. The
girls must go to seek the water and the wood of the household. The children of
the two sexes must contribute to the agricultural work, to deal of the animals
and all that relates to water, work often extremely tiring. Similar models are
observed in many countries of Latin America such as Colombia.
On a world
level, agriculture constitutes the first branch of industry of the children,
but this sector was unfortunately studied little. The synthesis of the data
recorded by the International Labor Office until today in 26 developing
countries delivers an average percentage of 70% of agricultural workers among
the active children14(*).
The World Bank rightly records that the higher the share of agriculture is in
the interior product gross of a country, the more the frequency of work of the
children is high : it is before a whole rural phenomenon. In certain
countries of Africa, one estimates that a third of the agricultural labor is
made up children.
This type of work, especially that of the girls who are
generally charged to deal with the infants, to draw water, to collect wood and
to prepare the meals, is largely invisible to the statisticians charged to
measure the extent of the child work. It is also apart from the sphere of
activity of the legislation, in particular because of the difficulty in
regulating the child work in their family. However, to accept that this form of
activity cannot be controlled amounts accepting that hundreds of million
children do not profit from any legal protection, whereas it is about the most
widespread shape of work children.
The house work children placed in another family that theirs
is a phenomenon very running in the countries poor but these children placed in
constraint domesticates undoubtedly most vulnerable and are exploited. Private
nature and often not declared recruiting of servants makes impossible any
measurement, but the small servants probably amount per million in the world.
This trade is the prolongation of the domestic activity carried on at the house
and consequently, it employs a majority of girls, but one can also find little
boys domestic, in particular in Asia.
The children often are very badly paid to see remunerated at
all ; generally, their working conditions depend entirely on the employer,
with the contempt of their rights : they are private of school, play and
social activity, as well as psychological support of their family. Who more is,
they are regularly confronted with physical violence and the sexual abuse.
Here, an example among so much of others one working day of 7 years Marie,
Haitian, placed by its poor family living in a rural zone, an urban and easy
family : she lifts herself to a height of five hours of the morning, will
seek water with the well while carrying to the return the heavy earthenware jar
on the head, then prepares the breakfast and is used it for the members of the
family, then, she accompanies the children at the school, must buy the
provisions, deal with fire, sweep, wash the linen and the crockery, to clean
the house... She nourishes remainders of the family or of pulp of corn, is
vêtue haillons and sleeps outside the house, by ground. It is regularly
beaten if it is long in fulfilling all its obligations or if its Masters judge
that it misses respect. It appears quite obvious that Marie does not go to the
school. Very often, these girl, domestic employees generally, are parents of
the employer, a niece or the girl of cousins living in the countryside ;
the rural family is not that too much happy to have a mouth in less to nourish
and usually, the relative who takes the child charges some is committed
educating it. Unfortunately, once downtown, nobody is there to make sure that
this promise is held, nor to note the long working hours inflicted with the
young girl. From the nature even of this work, those which undergo it are
hidden with the eyes of the world, without protection. According to the results
of an investigation into the households with average incomes in Colombo, in Sri
Lanka, a household on three employs a child of less than 14 years like servant.
The children are often rather selected than the adults because they can be
dominated more easily and of course less paid. The consequences of this type of
work on a child are obvious : first of all malnutrition bus in spite of
hard work that they provide, they have right only to ridiculous rations ;
then the sexual abuse which is often considered by the employer belonging to
work ; serious problems on the plan of their psychological and social
development because they are very isolated from the community, deprived of any
occupation of rest and play. Children work as servants in Africa, Latin
America, in Asia, in the Middle East and in areas of Europe of the South.
Concurrently to these children who work in the family sphere,
that it are theirs or that their employers, certain children work apart from on
their premises but work neither in a factory nor in a plantation : they
are the children of the streets. Contrary to the children placed as servants,
these children work in the places more in sight, i.e. in the streets of the
cities and the agglomerations of the developing countries. Any person, having
been brought to go in these cities, can testify some : they are
everywhere, praising their goods on the markets or threading between the cars
to propose their services. Hundreds of thousands of children work from day to
day in the streets of the cities, of the streets which are used to them also
sometimes as residence. These children who work in the streets are the product
of the certain social phenomena most worrying today, the fast urbanization, the
racing of the demographic growth and the aggravation of the disparities between
the incomes. Often, these children worked before as servants or in the fields,
but they fled the ill treatments and are found in the street. Very often
deprived of legal identity, they are handled by the organized crime, the not
very scrupulous employers and the upholders to sell drug or to deliver
themselves to the prostitution. What few people know it is that many children
working in the streets provide a vital financial support to their family while
taking responsibility for their when they can it, the expenses of their
education. Indeed, a child who spends six hours in a discharge of Manila can
gain more than one adult in one day ten hours in a close factory. In the
street, they wax the shoes, wash the cars, carry the parcels and find a
multitude in other manners of earning money. While being modest, the sums which
they obtain are not higher than those which they would receive with a work in
the formal sector. Nevertheless, whatever the benefit that they can withdraw,
the sorting of waste is a dangerous work that the children themselves estimate
if degrading that many leaves it preferring even the prostitution to him. The
nature of their work is particularly unhealthy, dangerous and degrading. They
contract various skin diseases (ulcers, scale, etc...) and by collecting pieces
of rusted iron or while going on the fragments of glass, it is not rare that
they are wounded with the risk to catch tetanus, without forgetting that they
often eat the remainders which they find.
* 14 The ILO, the abolition
of the extreme shapes of work children, file of information, Geneva,
1998
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