labor12

250 million children between the ages of five and fourteen work in developing
countries-at least 120 million on a full time basis. Sixty-one percent of these are in
Asia, 32 percent in Africa, and 7 percent in Latin America. Most working children
in rural areas are found in agriculture; many children work as domestics; urban
children work in trade and services, with fewer in manufacturing and
construction.
Child labor ranges from four-year-olds tied to rug looms to keep them from
running away, to seventeen-year-olds helping out on the family farm. In some
cases, a child's work can be helpful to him or her and to the family; working and
earning can be a positive experience in a child's growing up. This depends
largely on the age of the child, the conditions in which the child works, and
whether work prevents the child from going to school.
The Children's Rights Division at Human Rights Watch has focused its efforts on
the worst forms of child labor. Children who work long hours, often in dangerous
and unhealthy conditions, are exposed to lasting physical and psychological
harm. Working at rug looms, for example, has left children disabled with eye
damage, lung disease, stunted growth, and a susceptibility to arthritis as they
grow older. Children making silk thread in India dip their hands into boiling water
that burns and blisters them, breath smoke and fumes from machinery, handle
dead worms that cause infections, and guide twisting threads that cut their
fingers. Children harvesting sugar cane in El Salvador use machetes to cut cane
for up to nine hours a day in the hot sun; injuries to their hands and legs are
common and medical care is often not available.
Denied an education and a normal childhood, some children are confined and
beaten, reduced to slavery. Some are denied freedom of movement-the right to
leave the workplace and go home to their families. Some are abducted and forced
to work. The human rights abuses in these practices are clear and acute. We
have found similar problems in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the
United States: children who work for too many hours and too many days, for too
little, or sometimes no pay, subject often to physical abuse, exposed to
dangerous pesticides, and made to work with too dangerous tools. Our
objectives in tackling these aspects of the complex and troubling child labor
issue include drawing attention to the plight of child workers, helping to end
these appalling practices, and contributing to the debate on the rights dimension
of the larger issue of children and work.