From the frontlines of child advocacy around the world, guest commentary on the work that's being done to help children.
Coming of Age Homeless in our Nation’s Capital
February 8, 2010 | Jamila Larson
It was the youngest ones who always got me. The newborn babies returning from the hospital to a homeless shelter as their first home. No balloons or fresh cribs waiting for them.
The toothless toddlers smile broadly, wiggling across the dirty shelter floor, happy to be alive, oblivious to their circumstances in life. (more…)
Haiti: Time for Empathy to Replace Sympathy
February 3, 2010 | Pharis Harvey
For the past several weeks, I have watched with alternating feelings of horror and wonder at the catastrophic events in Haiti, the total collapse of cities, towns and homes, the virtual disappearance of the government, the mass deaths and exponentially added tragic inability even to grant the dead a dignified burial,
Haitian Red Cross volunteer Miname Glaude holds Michel Laurent (15 months) at a Red Cross medical center in Croix de Priez
A Personal Journey in Kenya
| Paul Miller
Nothing in my personal or professional background prepared me for the work I took on in Kenya in 2006. I was born in New York in 1949 to a middle-class family of four and educated through college at Ohio University as a major in English and Communications. Professionally I have worked as a television producer/director for 39 years; living in Los Angeles with my own family of four. But somehow my first visit to Africa in 2005 as a reluctant tourist (I couldn’t understand why my wife didn’t want to take the kids to Europe) happened at a time in my life when I was looking for something more fulfilling to do. That’s why a visit to the St. Francis Integrated School in Karen created a perfect storm of inspiration that has changed my life forever. (more…)
Effort to pass Legislation to Protect Farmworker Children Gathers Steam
January 26, 2010 | Reid Maki
In November, I reminded folks that young children—children who are 12- and 13-years-old and even younger in some cases—harvest fruits and vegetables on many U.S. farms and that many of them are allowed to do so because of loopholes in U.S. child labor law that go back to the 1930s. Child advocates have been trying to close those loopholes for years, and today, I’m happy to report that the campaign is progressing well. (more…)
Domestic Child Labor – Part Two
January 25, 2010 | Armand Pereira
Civil society and the media have also played a critical role in mobilizing action and in tracking government obligations to the ratified UN Convention on the Children’s Rights (1990) and the ILO Conventions 138 and 182 respectively on Minimum Working Age (1973) and the Worst Forms of Child Labor (1999). (more…)
Domestic child labor: An overview of Brazil’s recent experience
January 20, 2010 | Armand Pereira
Child domestic work received little attention until the late 1990s. It remains highly neglected because of the relatively invisible nature of such work, the difficulty in getting good data within and across countries, lack of interest among policy-makers and legislators, limited law enforcement, etc. In several countries, labor-related laws still do not address domestic work, much less that of children which is still perceived by many people as a “good” option for poor girls. This problem has as much to do with children’s rights and public attitudes as with deregulated labor markets and necessary changes thereof. (more…)
Going to School in Uganda for the First Time
January 12, 2010 | Joanne Offer
My visit to Uganda coincides with a time that many children dread—the start of the new school year. Yet as I travel from school to school, I can see that for the children here things are different
“Before I was able to come to school, I was fetching water for money,” said 12-year-old Lakot Cavine. “It was hard work and it made me tired. I worked all day in the sun. It was a long day.”
Today, Lakot attends primary school in Kitgum, thanks to a unique program run by the IRC called LEAP— Livelihoods, Education and Protection to End Child Labor. Across north and northeast Uganda, the IRC is paying the school fees of children and former child laborers, repairing school buildings, installing latrines, constructing new houses for teachers, and training teachers to become better instructors. (more…)
Cristina’s Story
January 11, 2010 | Petra Lent
Several years ago, during the editing of a documentary on child labor, I screened an interview with a 19-year-old girl, Cristina. She had been working as a nanny in various wealthy families in Salvador since the age of fourteen. The interview was in Portuguese, and I was lining up the English translation track to the Portuguese original. In the way that you do when you have a story to tell, I was looking for a particular kind of sound bite. An expression of resentment at missing childhood, while raising other people’s children. Something like that. I was looking for a type. (more…)
Girls in Afghanistan
December 2, 2009 | Pharis Harvey
My traditions, my customs and my heritage (Pakistan)
In the UNICEF report on The State of the World’s Children issued last week, it emerged that Afghanistan is the most dangerous country in the world to be a child, particularly a girl child. Child mortality is the highest in the world, as more than one fourth of all babies (257 of 1,000) die before their fifth birthday.
Only 40 percent of girls of primary school age attend school. More than 2 million children are orphaned. Only 18 percent of girls aged 15-24 are literate, while 33 percent between ages 5 and 14 are engaged in child labor that, for the most part, deprives them even of the opportunity to attend school. The chances of a woman dying in childbirth are 1 in 8.
I hope that, when President Obama releases his strategy for Afghanistan next week, he takes into consideration what these grim statistics mean. These are problems that cannot be solved by military means, yet they are closely related to the ongoing violence the US and NATO are in that country to end. (more…)
Child Slaves in Sudan
December 1, 2009 | Ellen Ratner
I just got back from my second trip to Sudan and India. This post is going to focus on Southern Sudan and a later post will focus on India. Sudan is a country that has been torn apart from civil war. Most people have heard of Darfur and the troubles there but are unaware of how the country “fits” together. Britain gave Sudan independence in 1956 and it has been a country of on- and off-again civil war. It is divided into Northern Sudan, which is mainly Arab Muslim, Darfur, which is mainly African Muslim, and Southern Sudan, which is mainly African Christian. After the government declared Sharia Law in 1983, Southern Sudan rebelled and there ensued a civil war, which did not end until the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in 2005. Other than Cambodia and WW II it has the most wartime deaths in the last ninety years killing nearly two million people. The strife was so bad that even the beautiful African animals left for Uganda and Kenya and are still nowhere to be found. (more…)
It’s Time to Do the Right Thing and End the Worst Form of U.S. Child Labor
November 7, 2009 | Reid Maki
Reid Maki is the coordinator of the Child Labor Coalition and the National Consumer League’s Director of Social Responsibility and Fair Labor Standards. He has worked on domestic and international child labor issues for the last 15 years.
Most people don’t associate egregious forms of child labor with the United States. People tend to think that U.S. child labor laws have successfully done away with the worst forms of child labor. But there is a dirty little secret that not many Americas know: young children harvest fruits and vegetables on many of our farms.
Nightline, the ABC News show, highlighted agricultural child labor in an October 30th investigative report “Blueberry Children” that found several children under 12 in Michigan picking blueberries, including a 5- year-old. The children sometimes work till 9:00 p.m. One 11-year-old told reporters he was in his third year in the fields. Another small child talked about the danger when pesticides are sprayed nearby.
Josie Ellis, a nurse with Migrant Health, told Nightline that the fields in North Carolina, where she is based, are full of working children. She noted that the kids acquire severe rashes, respiratory illnesses, and neurological impairments from their contact with pesticides.
They also miss out on their childhoods because they are working long hours. “Play is something that migrant children know very little about. Work they know,” said Ellis. “We see frustration. We see really tired kids. We see depression in children….despair…the inability to dream…the inability to see past high school…the inability to see past junior high school….I think it’s shameful that our nation tolerates child labor,” added Ellis. (more…)
