Making chalk in a factory in Mandsaur, India. |
Working
on the ground and in international campaigns, NGOs have managed to shed a glimmer
of hope on the lives of hundreds of thousands of child slaves
At five in the morning,
well before most children get up to go to school, 12-year-old Abula sets out on a
six-kilometre barefoot trek along a road made of mud and stone to work on a coffee
plantation in Bouafle, Côte d’Ivoire.
When he gets there, wet and tired, the foreman tells him where he is to plant that
day. “You have to work fast because they threaten to punish and starve us if we don’t
do the set amount of work,” he says. “If we can’t work because we’re ill, we risk
being physically tortured. One day I saw them torture two friends of mine who wanted
to escape. Both of them ended up dead.”
Abula was rescued by Anti-Slavery International, which was founded in London in 1839
and proclaims itself the world’s oldest NGO.
Along with other international organizations, such as the ILO, UNICEF and
the European Union, NGOs have grown much more effective in their fight against child
slavery and gone beyond simply trying to make governments and international bodies
aware of its most extreme expression. Their most valuable work lies in rescuing and
rehabilitating dozens of children suffering the cruellest forms of exploitation.
These NGOs work though close coordination between North and South. Those in the South
gather evidence and testimonies, while those in the North publicize the issue and
help organize international campaigns, the most striking of which was the Global
March Against Child Labour in 1998, when groups set out from Asia, Latin America
and Africa to assemble outside the ILO’s headquarters in Geneva and denounce all
exploitation of the world’s children.
Anti-Slavery International is now pressing governments and political leaders to make
the fight against child workers part of their political programmes. It maintains
permanent contact with NGOs in the South and funds projects there to investigate
the situation of child workers.
One such NGO is the Bangkok-based Child Workers in Asia (CWA), which recently highlighted
the case of a child who was being atrociously exploited. Like Abula in Africa, 14-year-old
Devi Lina Sari also rose before dawn to go to her job on a sugar plantation in Medan,
Indonesia. “I set out at 6 a.m. every day except Sunday,” she says. “I start work
at seven and finish at four in the afternoon, with an hour’s break at midday.”
Like all children of her age, she’d like to play with her friends, but after cutting
sugar-cane for eight hours she is too exhausted to do anything but rest. “If I cut
myself with the machete, the boss pays for medicine but I have to reimburse him.
If I’m ill and can’t work, I don’t get paid.”
When CWA identifies a child worker being exploited, one of its officials goes with
a policeman and a social worker to rescue the child and return him or her to the
parents (if the child has been taken away by force), or else hand him or her over
to a rehabilitation centre or volunteer family if the youth has been sold as a slave.
Children who have had the traumatic experience of slavery are rehabilitated over
a period of three to six months.
The worst kind of child exploitation is sexual. Maria, a 12-year-old Honduran girl,
was kidnapped in her country, sold in Guatemala and taken from there to Mexico, where
she was bought by the owner of a bar who forced her to become a prostitute, servicing
20 men a day.
This tragic case was discovered by Casa Alianza, founded in Guatemala in 1981 and
now the Latin American branch of Covenant House, a New York-based NGO. Casa Alianza
started out by rehabilitating street children in Central America, but for the past
four years it has focused on exposing the sexual and commercial trafficking and exploitation
of children, which includes pornography, sexual tourism and child prostitution.
This is a massive task, but it has already proved effective: Costa Rica’s special
judge dealing with sex crimes acknowledges that two-thirds of the cases coming before
him have been raised by Casa Alianza. |
