Iqra GC University ( Department of physical therapy)

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PAKISTAN STUDIES
Name : Iqra
Roll No. : 8145
Department : DPT
Semester : First
Assignment Topic : Child Labour
Submitted to : Miss Kinza Fiaz
References : Wikipedia, Bilal Waqar
presentation

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CHILD LABOUR
Definition:
Child labour refers to the exploitation of children through any form of
work that deprives children of their childhood, interferes with their
ability to attend regular school, and is mentally, physically, socially or
morally harmful.
Such exploitation is prohibited by legislation worldwide, although these
laws do not consider all work by children as child labour; exceptions
include work by child artists, family duties, supervised training, and
some forms of child work practiced by Amish children, as well as by
indigenous children in the Americas.

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Child labour has existed to varying extents throughout history. During
the 19th and early 20th centuries, many children aged 5–14 from poorer
families worked in Western nations and their colonies alike. These
children mainly worked in agriculture, home-based assembly operations,
factories, mining, and services such as news boys—some worked night
shifts lasting 12 hours. With the rise of household income, availability of
schools and passage of child labour laws, the incidence rates of child
labour fell.
The vast majority of child labour is found in rural settings and informal
urban economies; children are predominantly employed by their parents,
rather than factories. Poverty and lack of schools are considered the
primary cause of child labour.
History:
 Early 20th century:
In the early 20th century, thousands of boys were employed in glass
making industries. Glass making was a dangerous and tough job
especially without the current technologies. The process of making glass
includes intense heat to melt glass (3133 °F). When the boys are at
work, they are exposed to this heat. This could cause eye trouble, lung
ailments, heat exhaustion, cuts, and burns. Since workers were paid by
the piece, they had to work productively for hours without a break. Since
furnaces had to be constantly burning, there were night shifts from
5:00 pm to 3:00 am. Many factory owners preferred boys under 16 years
of age.
An estimated 1.7 million children under the age of fifteen were
employed in American industry by 1900.
In 1910, over 2 million children in the same age group were employed in
the United States. This included children who rolled cigarettes, engaged
in factory work, worked as bobbin doffers in textile mills, worked in

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coal mines and were employed in canneries. Lewis Hine's photographs
of child labourers in the 1910s powerfully evoked the plight of working
children in the American south. Hine took these photographs between
1908 and 1917 as the staff photographer for the National Child Labour
Committee.
 21st century:
Map for child labour worldwide in the 10–14 age group, in 2003, per World Bank data. The data
is incomplete, as many countries do not collect or report child labour data (coloured gray). The
colour code is as follows: yellow (<10% of children working), green (10–20%), orange (20–
30%), red (30–40%) and black (>40%). Some nations such as Guinea-Bissau, Mali and Ethiopia
have more than half of all children aged 5–14 at work to help provide for their families.
Child labour is still common in many parts of the world. Estimates for
child labour vary. It ranges between 250 and 304 million, if children
aged 5–17 involved in any economic activity are counted. If light
occasional work is excluded, ILO estimates there were 153 million child
labourers aged 5–14 worldwide in 2008. Some 60 percent of the child
labour was involved in agricultural activities such as farming, dairy,
fisheries and forestry. Another 25% of child labourers were in service
activities such as retail, hawking goods, restaurants, load and transfer of

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goods, storage, picking and recycling trash, polishing shoes, domestic
help, and other services. The remaining 15% laboured in assembly and
manufacturing in informal economy, home-based enterprises, factories,
mines, packaging salt, operating machinery, and such operations. Child
labour predominantly occurs in the rural areas (70%) and informal urban
sector (26%).
Child labour accounts for 22% of the workforce in Asia, 32% in Africa,
17% in Latin America, 1% in the US, Canada, Europe and other wealthy
nations.
Accurate present day child labour information is difficult to obtain
because of disagreements between data sources as to what constitutes
child labour. In some countries, government policy contributes to this
difficulty. For example, the overall extent of child labour in China is
unclear due to the government categorizing child labour data as "highly
secret".
Causes:
 Poverty Lack of meaningful alternatives
 Cultural beliefs Macroeconomic factors
Young girl working on a loom in Aït Benhaddou, Morocco in May 2008.

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International Labour Organization (ILO) suggests poverty is the greatest
single cause behind child labour. For impoverished households, income
from a child's work is usually crucial for his or her own survival or for
that of the household. Income from working children, even if small, may
be between 25 and 40% of the household income.
Lack of meaningful alternatives, such as affordable schools and
quality education, according to ILO, is another major factor driving
children to harmful labour. Children work because they have nothing
better to do. Many communities, particularly rural areas where between
60–70% of child labour is prevalent, do not possess adequate school
facilities. Even when schools are sometimes available, they are too far
away, difficult to reach, unaffordable or the quality of education is so
poor that parents wonder if going to school is really worth it.
In European history when child labour was common, as well as in
contemporary child labour of modern world, certain cultural beliefs
have rationalised child labour and thereby encouraged it. Some view that
work is good for the character-building and skill development of
children. In many cultures, particular where the informal economy and
small household businesses thrive, the cultural tradition is that children
follow in their parents' footsteps; child labour then is a means to learn
and practice that trade from a very early age. Similarly, in many cultures
the education of girls is less valued or girls are simply not expected to
need formal schooling, and these girls pushed into child labour such as
providing domestic services.
Biggeri and Mehrotra have studied the macroeconomic factors that
encourage child labour. They focus their study on five Asian nations
including India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines. They
suggest that child labour is a serious problem in all five, but it is not a
new problem. Macroeconomic causes encouraged widespread child
labour across the world, over most of human history. They suggest that
the causes for child labour include both the demand and the supply side.

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Other scholars too suggest that inflexible labour market, size of informal
economy, inability of industries to scale up and lack of modern
manufacturing technologies are major macroeconomic factors affecting
demand and acceptability of child labour.
By country:
In the world's poorest countries, around one in four children are engaged
in child labour, the highest number of whom (29 percent) live in sub-
saharan Africa. In 2017, four African nations (Mali, Benin, Chad and
Guinea-Bissau) witnessed over 50 percent of children aged 5–14
working. Worldwide agriculture is the largest employer of child labour.
Pakistan:
In Pakistan children aged 5-14 are above 40 million. During the last
year, the Federal Bureau of Statistics released the results of its survey
funded by ILO’s IPEC (International Program on the Elimination of
Child Labour). The findings were that 3.8 million children age group of
5-14 years are working in Pakistan out of total 40 million children in this
age group; fifty percent of these economically active children are in age
group of 5-9 years. Even out of these 3.8 million economically active
children, 2.7 million were claimed to be working in the agriculture
sector. Two million and four hundred thousand (73%) of them were said
to be boys.
India:
In 2015, the country of India is home to the largest number of children
who are working illegally in various industrial industries. Agriculture in
India is the largest sector where many children work at early ages to help
support their family. Many of these children are forced to work at young
ages.

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Childlabour laws and initiatives:
Almost every country in the world has laws relating to and aimed at
preventing child labour. International Labour Organization has helped
set international law, which most countries have signed on and ratified.
According to ILO minimum age convention (C138) of 1973, child
labour refers to any work performed by children under the age of 12,
non-light work done by children aged 12–14, and hazardous work done
by children aged 15–17. Light work was defined, under this Convention,
as any work that does not harm a child's health and development, and
that does not interfere with his or her attendance at school. This
convention has been ratified by 171 countries.
The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the
Child in 1990, which was subsequently ratified by 193 countries. Article
32 of the convention addressed child labour, as follows:
...Parties recognise the right of the child to be protected from
economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely
to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be
harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or
social development.
195 countries are party to the Convention; only two nations have not
ratified the treaty, Somalia and the United States.
In 1999, ILO helped lead the Worst Forms Convention (C182), which
has so far been signed upon and domestically ratified by 151 countries
including the United States. This international law prohibits worst forms
of child labour, defined as all forms of slavery and slavery-like practices,
such as child trafficking, debt bondage, and forced labour, including
forced recruitment of children into armed conflict. The law also
prohibits the use of a child for prostitution or the production of
pornography, child labour in illicit activities such as drug production and
trafficking; and in hazardous work. Both the Worst Forms Convention

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(C182) and the Minimum Age Convention (C138) are examples of
international labour standards implemented through the ILO that deal
with child labour.
The global Music against Child Labour Initiative was launched in 2013
in order to involve socially excluded children in structured musical
activity and education in efforts to help protect them from child labour.
Eliminatingchild labour:
Concerns have often been raised over the buying public's moral
complicity in purchasing products assembled or otherwise manufactured
in developing countries with child labour. However, others have raised
concerns that boycotting products manufactured through child
labour may force these children to turn to more dangerous or strenuous
professions, such as prostitution or agriculture. The studies suggest that
boycotts are "blunt instruments with long-term consequences, that can
actually harm rather than help the children involved."
The International Programme on the Elimination of Child
Labour (IPEC), founded in 1992, aims to eliminate child labour. It
operates in 88 countries and is the largest program of its kind in the
world. IPEC works with international and government agencies, NGOs,
the media, and children and their families to end child labour and
provide children with education and assistance.
From 2008 to 2013, the ILO operated a program through International
Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) entitled
"Combating Abusive Child Labour (CACL-II)". The project, funded by
the European Union, contributed to the Government of Pakistan by
providing alternative opportunities for vocational training and education
to children withdrawn from the worst forms of child labour.
Potentialpositives:
The term child labour can be misleading when it confuses harmful work

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with employment that may be beneficial to children. Work is undertaken
from an early age by vast numbers of children in the world and may
have a natural place in growing up. While full-time work hinders
schooling, empirical evidence is varied on the relationship between part-
time work and school. Children who are not doing well at school
sometimes seek more satisfactory experience in work.
Conclusion:
Child labour is such a disease which is widespread in under developed
countries. It should be controlled as far as possible by providing proper
income source to the parents, as almost 50% of the child labour is the
result of poverty. In our country Pakistan, 30% children are at the roads
for selling goods, food items and other things in order to earn money
because the income source of their parents is not enough to feed their
family. Among the other 70%, 60% are those who doesn’t have any
elder person in their homes to earn and feed them as they are devoid of 1
or sometimes both of their parents and the remaining 10% are those who
have to earn in order to afford their educational expenses. So, the need
of hour is to provide the parents with proper income source which
should be enough to feed their family, moreover education should be
free for those who are not able to afford their educational expenses and
for those who are devoid of their parents should have a scholarship in
order to feed their family until they complete their education.
The End