Thursday, January 30, 2014

A Lost Childhood: Student’s Article on Child Labour

“My mother was involved in an auto accident, and I started working when I was 12. I needed money for my mother’s medicine.” These are the words of my maid. By the time she came to us, she had been working for four years.

She was not the only child labourer. In more than fifty percent of the places on earth, there is child labour. Child labourers generally work as maids or in big factories. Companies like Benetton and Primark have been accused of having children work in their factories. Primark forced their child workers to go into an old crumbling factory. The factory collapsed on top of them when they were inside and many of them died. 

There is an organization called UNICEF of the UN to stop child labour around the world. However, many children work to earn money for their family and employers hire child labour because it is cheap.

In India, children work in agricultural places, as factory workers and, in cities, they work as maids. There is a lot of child labour in India because the country is slightly corrupt and there are not enough police officers going around and checking.

Child labour deprives a child of mental and physical development. It stops a child from getting education and many of these children generally work for up to seventy hours a week. If child labour keeps on going on like this, many children will not go to school and there won’t be enough educated people to advance technology in the future. Even though it is illegal, people still do it. 

We need to stop child labour. And to do that, the government should set up more schools and make sure the children’s parents have jobs and earn enough for the whole family. Ultimately, laws are not enough. If we want to stop child labour, we all need to start doing our own work ourselves and not rely on child labour, and we need to educate people not to hire child labour.


Rohan Reddy, 5E

No comments:

Post a Comment