Research in Child Labour in Asia

According to the latest ILO research the number of child labour in the Asia Pacific has deteriorated by 5 million to 122 .3 million from 2000 to 2004, despite this positive decline the region still faces this plague of child labour, the number of working children in Asia is by far the largest region where child labour is one of the most serious social issues

International Labor Organization (ILO) suggests that poverty is the greatest cause behind child labor. Children work to support their selves and family. Mostly their families are unable to cope with time. The ratio of these work child for a household is between 25% to 40 %. Many scholars have reached the same conclusion. child trafficking, commercial sexual exploitation, bonded child labor, child domestic work, hazardous child labor and the recruitment and use of children for armed conflict or drug trafficking are some of the horrendous types of child abuse.

Child abuse is one of the evilest kinds of social evil which has also transcended into being a custom nowadays, feudal in many regions own vassals and massive human slavery that include children in the majority.

The presence of a great number of child labor is considered as a very great issue in the terms of economic welfare. Those children who work in different factorial industries are always deprived of basic schooling and early education. They never get the opportunity to develop physically, intellectually, emotionally and psychologically.

The core responsibility of eradicating child labor is firstly on the people residing in a certain society people should play their part as active citizens by reporting these incidents and as whole diminishing this trend of snatching human rights, secondly the government should pass laws and rules that strictly prohibits and prevents this culture by imposing fine and imprisonment as a consequence and to deter people from such activities, strict legislation action must be taken in order to prevent children from the shackle of this horrendous slavery.

Lastly, we are all international citizens and countries around the globe should step forward and try all their best to prevent this by letting NGOs such as UNICEF and other child protection organizations to take necessary steps, by highlighting this dilemma and spreading awareness around the globe.

Child labor is an issue that is as old as it is endemic, and while there are laws banning the practice, they have proved difficult to fully enforce. The reason for this is simple: it is extreme poverty that leads the guardian of young children to put them to work for whatever pittance they are granted by their employers. And this is the reason the practice is so hard to stamp out. Perhaps a more pragmatic first step towards eradicating child labor would be the establishment of registries under welfare bodies where the names of children employed in households are entered so that their welfare can be monitored on a frequent basis. In the long term, of course, the only thing that can end such exploitation of children is poverty alleviation and family planning. (Published in Dawn, January 27th, 2017)

“Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together, and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.” – Grace Abbott

“The first and continuing argument for the curtailment of working hours and the raising of the minimum age was that education was necessary for a democracy and working children could not attend school.” – Grace Abbott

If we can’t begin to agree on fundamentals, such as the elimination of the most abusive forms of child labor in the world, then we are not ready to march forward into the future.” – Alexis Herman