Children at work!

All of you will no doubt have entered a toy shop at one time or other; perhaps to look for a present to for a son, daughter, nephew or niece. You may also have been to one of those gift shops where you can find original, hand made knickknacks, to give to a friend or relation on some special occasion. Many of those toys we have bought and objects we have given or received have no doubt been produced in Asia. A large number of them have certainly been made by children, often under conditions of virtual slavery. To make that leather ball which our children chase around the garden, a five-year old from Pakistan has worked eighty hours a week in exchange for just a piece of bread. To produce that hand-made oriental carpet, an Indian child will have slaved over a loom for fifteen hours a day.

This gravely unjust situation is extremely widespread, not only in Asia; the phenomenon is now so serious that UNICEF’s entire report for 1997 focuses on it. World-wide, there are hundreds of millions of exploited children. And this is just an estimate; it is something which cannot be calculated with precision, since it is often illegal and therefore a hidden reality - although most governments are well aware of the situation.

Iqbal Masih, a 12 year-old Pakistani boy, became a symbol against child exploitation everywhere when he denounced the conditions of children in Pakistan’s oriental rug industry. But on Easter Sunday, 1995, angered by his revelations, those greedy and ruthless men who owned the factory where Iqbal had worked had the young child brutally murdered, another innocent victim of avarice and cruelty.

Estimates tell us that in Africa and Asia, one out of every three children works; in Latin America, the figure is one in five; in India alone, ninety million children are currently being exploited: they work in the tobacco and textile industries. Perhaps they even feel somewhat lucky compared to their South African or Ivory Coast counterparts who work in gold and diamond mines, or to the young Brazilian children working on sugarcane and coffee plantations.

Many will say that, unfortunately, in some regions of the globe underdevelopment (or rather, a type of development which is conditioned by the weight of a country’s international debt and by the policies of the huge financial organisations of the West) is something about which little can be done. But this, too, is an illusion: UNICEF points out that child labour exists even in rich countries, although it is proportionally at a much lower level. Indeed each country, and each great city has its ‘twilight zones’, and its own share of injustice, alienation, suffering and extreme poverty.

Recently, the pope reminded us that it is more than simple compassion, it is a fundamental duty of justice to protect children. It is something more than just kind words or international children’s days every now and then; something more than treaties and protocols which may be most admirable, but are ultimately just pieces of paper.

The ‘something more’ needed is a deeper awareness of the value of human life, and of the ‘preciousness’ that we find within every human being, especially children, a preciousness which needs rights and freedom, and which is earned every day when each of us does our duty, and accepts our own responsibilities, ever mindful of those who hunger and thirst for justice when we make our commercial choices.