Child Labor: Heartbreak to Hope

Child labor around the world is heartbreaking. Families in desperate situations have to make difficult decisions about their family’s welfare, choosing to put their children to work instead of putting them in school. Or the family becomes indentured, and the children have to help pay off the debt. Or a child is stolen by human traffickers.

This is the state of child labor today, a problem nowhere near being solved but one with hope on the horizon. Estimates put the number of children ages 5 to 17 actively working at 218 million.[1] If you counted all of them as the population of a country, they would create the world’s fifth largest country.[2], [3]

The International Labor Organization defines this state of children in labor with these characteristics:

• “Is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children.
• Interferes with their schooling by depriving them of the opportunity to attend school, obliging them to leave school prematurely; or requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work.”[4]

Not all work done by children qualifies. It’s important to note that children can still do housework and contribute to the home in reasonable ways. These types of activities are a normal part of childhood and do not deprive children. It is the types of work that result in the above definition that are devastating to these children.

Even worse, there are types of work that are the most heartbreaking to witness involving children: hazardous work and human trafficking. The ILO defines these as:

• “work which exposes children to physical, psychological or sexual abuse
• work underground, under water, at dangerous heights or in confined spaces
• work with dangerous machinery, equipment and tools, or which involves the manual handling or transport of heavy loads
• work in an unhealthy environment which may expose children to hazardous substances, agents or processes, or to temperatures, noise levels, or vibrations damaging to their health
• work under particularly difficult conditions such as work for long hours or during the night or work where the child is unreasonably confined to the premises of the employer.”[5]

When confronted with these realities that millions of children face, we need not ask is child labor illegal. The truth of the hardships is painful to witness.