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License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Empower and protect, rather than prohibit: a better approach to child work

By:   []

Date: 2022-02 

2021 is the UN International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour, but that is not going to happen. Not this year, not by 2025 as stipulated by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and probably not ever. There are simply too many children in this world with compelling reasons to work for that to be, or to have ever been, a reasonable goal. Bans on child labour may reduce numbers in some areas or push child workers deeper into the shadows in others. But they cannot eliminate them from the world once and for all.

But if bans don’t work, what does? And if elimination cannot be the goal, what should be? As the guest editors of the special feature now rolling out on Beyond Trafficking and Slavery, we submit the motto of ‘empower and protect, rather than prohibit’ as a better approach to child work. To understand what this might mean in practice, we’ve asked our contributors – researchers, practitioners, NGO staff, and working children from around the world – to first tell us what we can learn from the strategies, initiatives, programmes and frameworks currently being used to mitigate the hardship many working children experience. We’ve then asked them to explore ways that practitioners and policymakers might build on these lessons to structurally help working children improve their lives.

What do we mean when we say child labour?

But first, we need to make clear what we talk about when we talk about child labour.

‘Child labour’ is generally portrayed as one of the few remaining ‘social evils’ that continues to haunt the world, and in particular the Global South. Type the two words into any online search engine and an array of very young, Brown and Black children working in dangerous and denigrating places, such as mines, brick kilns and garbage dumps, meets the eye.

Over the last three decades, international organisations like the International Labour Organization (ILO), UNICEF and the Global March Against Child Labour have carefully cultivated, mainstreamed, and transformed this one-dimensional narrative into support for the ‘total abolition’ of child labour. However, what legally and empirically lies behind the catch-all concept of ‘child labour’ is much more complex and nuanced than this narrow and sensationalist representation suggests.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/empower-and-protect-rather-than-prohibit-a-better-approach-to-child-work/
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