Over 3,400 children rescued in Operation Muskaan in July alone

HYDERABAD: The July leg of Operation Muskaan rescued 3,470 children from across the State, who were mainly child labour, ragpickers, or were missing or orphans. Of those rescued,  a whopping 2,508 children were child labour who make up 72% of all the children rescued, followed by street children who were 422 in number. This is the second-highest number of children ever rescued in the State since 2017 January, when 4,033 children were rescued.

While the numbers are optimistic and showcase how combined efforts of Women and Child Welfare Department, Police and Labour department is yielding results, a closer look on the 5-year data shows a different picture.

Till date, operation Muskaan and Operation Smile combined, close to 10 special drives have been conducted between 2014 to 2019, wherein, 2 drives in January and July are conducted every year. An analysis of the number of children rescued shows that there has been no significant reduction in the number of children rescued, with numbers ranging between 2000-3000 on an average.

In fact, the share of child labourers has been consistently high, with an average of 60-70% of those recused being employed in odd jobs. In the last 5 years of the 26,946 rescued, 16,300 were child labourers.

Officials note that may be due to the fact that conviction rate being very poor in all cases, children who were rescued are simply taken for rehabilitation and the cases are not pressed in time.  The labour department’s annual statistics suggest only 103 have been convicted in 5 years out of 888 cases booked. None of those convicted have served a term in jail. “Even today, the children rescued in Operation Smile are found 6 months later in Operation Muskaan. The departments, be it Women and Child or Labour need to make more concrete efforts to track these kids post-rescue and ensure effective rehabilitation,” Achyuta  Rao, Child activist.

86% rescued kids belong To Telangana

Of the 3,470 children rescued in July during Operation Muskaan, 2,992 belonged to TS. This implies that close to 86.22% of children on the streets are from the State, forced or coerced into the situation either as orphans, beggars or child labour.

According to officials, all these children rescued, have been rehabilitated by the State or by the other mediums. For those sent back to their parents, there is no certainty on the fate they meet as there is no mechanism to track them.

In fact, though the labour department has a mechanism of setting up Special Training Centres as per the National Child Labour Project. to help child labour to bridge the gap on lost academics and restore them to regular school, nothing concrete has happened with merely 36 operational. A whole of 54 have been approved but yet to start and furthermore, at least 19 more STC’s are awaiting funds.

Source

Five Myths About Child Labor And Why We Need To Bust Them

June 12 was World Day Against Child Labor. This is the second in a series of articles exploring the state of child labor today.

The image of a child chained to a loom was emblazoned in my mind.

When I was 12, I read a news story about the murder of a child slave, Iqbal Masih, in Pakistan. This mental picture was my introduction to the existence of child labor. It’s the same type of image that tugs at us in campaigns and accompanies news stories. It’s iconic and powerful. But it’s also misleading.

A simplified image of child labor as faraway factory work masks its complicated reality. In place of a deeper understanding of child labor -- why it exists, who’s involved, what factors allow it to continue -- we have ingrained myths that blind us to solutions.

After 25 years of learning and working alongside communities and empowering children to escape the cycle of poverty, I know there are solutions to this endemic problem. First, we need to topple the myths:

1. Child labor is factory labor.

Children work in appalling conditions producing clothes they could never afford to satisfy the appetites of wealthy countries. It’s a tidy story with readily identifiable bad guys: fast fashion and unregulated capitalism. But this is not the whole story.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), 70% of child laborers -- more than 105 million girls and boys around the world -- work in agriculture. The majority of those work alongside family members on subsistence farms, helping feed their families.

There’s no clear bad guy in this scenario. Poor crop output, lack of market access and the impacts of climate change all converge to imperil farmers in the Global South. But if we can build capacity for these farmers, we can ensure their children aren’t needed in the fields and can remain in school. A 10% increase in crop yield resulted in a 7% drop in poverty in Africa, so empowering farmers to grow and sell more and providing access to drought-resistant seeds, improved water systems and innovative agricultural methods can help reduce the ranks of child laborers.

2. Child labor only happens in poor countries.

Child labor is a global scourge. Africa, Asia and the Pacific regions are home to 9 out of 10 child laborers. But that still leaves millions of children across the Americas and Europe who are missing out on childhood.

In the U.S., accurate numbers for child laborers are hard to come by, but one number is indisputable: 452. That’s the number of work-related deaths among U.S. children between 2003 and 2016. More than half of those deaths happened on farms, where according to Human Rights Watch, children as young as seven are often working 10-hour days.

Gaps in labor laws have left child farmworkers open to abuse. What's more, our focus on imperiled children overseas has rendered those closer to home invisible.

3. International companies are the source of child labor.

This may have been true in the past, but today, the companies with the most buying power are the best bet to root out the worst forms of exploitation.

Human rights due diligence, a new framework demanding corporate responsibility throughout the supply chain, can help. New technologies like blockchain are making it easier to map every step of supply chains, and many companies are already adopting this new rigorous approach.

The adoption of the United Nations' Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights set a global benchmark, which some nations and states have already risen to meet. California enacted new legislation in 2012 to mandate supply chain transparency, while a 2015 law in the UK requires companies to disclose measures they’ve taken to mitigate risks of slavery.

Savvy companies will meet rising consumer demands for transparency and responsible production, not only by doing no harm but by moving the needle proactively. Successful businesses will partner with nonprofits and communities to create well-paying jobs and eliminate the extreme poverty at the root of child labor.

4. Child labor is a stand-alone problem.

Child labor is tied to poverty, access to education, women’s rights and farmer training programs. But the issue that rarely gets drawn into this web is conflict.

Rates of child labor are 77% higher in countries affected by armed conflict, compared to the global average. Recently, UNICEF reported on 180,000 Syrian refugee children who have been forced into work, while Human Rights Watch revealed a quarter of children in Afghanistan work to support their families after nearly two decades of armed conflict.

Conflict breeds vulnerability. That’s why the ILO and aid organizations are embedding child labor programs in post-conflict reconstruction development. This means increasing support for displaced families and helping restore the rule of law.

5. Child labor is unstoppable.

Finally, a myth I am happy to bust. Child labor is a maddeningly stubborn issue, but we’ve made remarkable strides.

In 2000, there were over 246 million child laborers around the world. Today, there are nearly 100 million fewer children endangered by their work. This incredible feat has been accomplished by governments, corporations and development organizations working together to change business practices, educate people about children’s rights and lift communities out of poverty.

Child labor rates are dropping, but far too slowly. We need more holistic solutions that address the root causes of the issue. For instance, UNICEF first championed a systems-based approach that focuses on prevention. It supports countries with strong laws, where children are free from exploitation, services provide for basic needs and cultural practices minimize vulnerability. But we all have a role to play.

Western governments can incentivize legal reforms and the creation of strong child protection frameworks, in line with the UN's Convention on the Rights of a Child. Businesses can enshrine accountability into their cultures and invest in their communities to ensure that services meet people’s needs and that workers are paid fairly. And nonprofits can deliver localized programs to address household poverty and access to education, motivating parents to keep their children in school.

These solutions are attainable. But first, we must topple the myths that lead to our misunderstanding of the problem.

---

Source

Bolsonaro, who worked from age 8, defends child labor in Brazil

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, no stranger to controversy, sparked a new brouhaha this week by repeatedly defending the practice of child labor. "I've been working since I was eight years old... and today I am what I am," the far-right leader said during his weekly live forum on Facebook.

"Look, when a child of eight or nine years old works somewhere, many people denounce it as 'forced labor' or 'child labor,'" he said on Thursday. "But if that child smokes coca paste, nobody says anything."

"Work brings dignity to men and to women, no matter their age," he added.

Elaborating on the theme at an official event Friday, he added: "I worked from the age of eight planting corn, picking bananas... while studying at the same time.

"And today I am what I am. This is not demagoguery, it is the truth."

His comments provoked strongly critical reactions.

"He is the best example to incite a child not to work -- to keep him from growing up to become an adult like (Bolsonaro), with so much hatred and such incompetence," said Marcelo Freixo, a socialist politician.

Brazilian law prohibits children younger than 16 from working, except in the case of apprentices, who can begin work at 14.

According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), some 2.5 million children and adolescents aged five to 17 work in Brazil.

On Friday, Bolsonaro's minister for Human Rights, Family and Women, the former evangelical pastor Damares Alves, tried to put an end to the controversy.

"Our generation worked from a very young age," she said. "I worked from a very young age. But this does not mean that we are going to decriminalize (child labor).

"Let us be clear that for children to work is a violation of their rights, something that cannot be allowed."

Bolsonaro is not known for being politically correct. In 2011, he told Playboy magazine he would rather see his own son "die in an accident" than come out as gay. He has said poor people are too ignorant to understand family planning.

And as a congressman in late 2014, he said that a colleague was not "worth raping; she is very ugly." A judge ultimately ordered him to pay the woman $2,500.

Source

Why Can't We Ban Child Labor? Knee-Jerk Solutions Won't Work

June 12 was World Day Against Child Labor. This is the third and final installment in a series of articles exploring the state of child labor today.

In 1992, NBC’s Dateline broadcast images of 11-year-olds cutting garments and sewing clothes in Bangladeshi sweatshops into 14 million households. The collared shirts and pleated pants crafted by children were bound for Walmart stores across the United States.

It was the program’s highest-rated episode at the time, and the public was furious. The wheels of government, usually slow to turn, began to trundle forward. Then-Democratic Senator for Iowa Tom Harkin quickly introduced a bill to ban products made with child labor from entering the U.S. market. I’ve met with him multiple times and discussed the complicated legacy of his well-intentioned action.

The legislation died on the table. But it still had a profound effect on tens of thousands of lives.

Worried about the impact of a U.S. ban, factory owners in several countries preemptively fired the children they employed. According to a 1997 report by UNICEF, 50,000 children were dismissed by the garment industry in Bangladesh alone following the announcement of the proposed legislation.

But nothing else changed for those children. Education was still too costly or unavailable. Access to food was still a primary concern, and their families still lived in poverty. So, the children found new, often more dangerous work, breaking rocks, pulling rickshaws, hustling on street corners -- or in prostitution. Tens of thousands of children went from a bad situation to an undeniably worse one.

This tragic example helped set off a debate in development circles. At its heart is a deceptively simple question: Should we ban child labor outright? Development orthodoxy, enshrined in United Nations conventions and International Labour Organization policies going back decades, says yes. “Children shouldn’t work in fields but on dreams,” the ILO slogan says.

That point is inarguable. Child labor is a moral question, and an easy one at that. Children deserve the opportunity to grow, learn and play, no matter the circumstances they are born into. The practice must end. Except the debate isn’t over morality, but the efficacy of methods. Right and wrong have already been established, so what we need now are tactics. We all want a world where children aren't exploited. But the question remains: how do we get there?

A vocal contingent point out that the thousands of children turfed onto the street in Bangladesh is evidence that banning child labor won’t get us there. These efforts, they say, distract from the types of holistic solutions to poverty that target the root of the problem. Child labor is just one symptom, they say. It’s likely that both sides of the debate are right.

We need to get kids out of mines, off the streets and free from factories. We need to end exploitation, pain, suffering and hopelessness. We absolutely need to ban the worst forms of child labor. But any ban must offer alternatives: new sources of income for parents, services for families, innovative farming techniques to ensure food security and accessible schools for children. It must be paired with awareness-raising campaigns to change cultural attitudes, especially when it comes to young girls and domestic work. And it must be met with an equal commitment from Western governments, corporations and nonprofits not to cut and run, but to double down on responsible, sustainable growth.

That’s what the 1992 U.S. ban got wrong. Designed with the best of intentions, it ignored the second part of the equation. It succeeded only in making consumers in the Global North feel better. That feeling came tied to a missed opportunity for real solutions.

This is an unfortunate pattern. Every few years, there’s a crescendo of moral outrage as a story breaks about exploitative labor practices. A boycott ensues, and we feel like we’ve done our part by not shopping from the brands that have been exposed. But the grinding poverty that forces children to work continues unabated. We opt out of the consumer cycle while children remain stuck.

The children captured by Dateline cameras in Bangladesh were working not because they wanted to but because they had to. In our quest to help them, we went for a singular, knee-jerk reaction, laying all of our hope on one piece of legislation. Instead of deploying tactics that would fundamentally change children’s lives, working with local governments to regulate the industry and ensuring that labor doesn’t prevent education, we relegated the already-vulnerable children even further onto the margins, forcing them to fend for themselves. We cut and run, leaving 50,000 children turfed onto the street.

Study after study after study shows that if the only work available to the world’s most desperate children is dangerous, that is the work they will do. That is why we need to race to end the practice of child labor while protecting the most vulnerable children who are susceptible.

The ban had the right idea with the right motivation, but alone, it was the wrong tactic. It wasn’t enough.

My brother, Marc, and I founded WE Charity in 1995 with the goal of freeing enslaved children, and I have seen remarkable progress. There are 110 million fewer child laborers in the world today than when we started nearly 25 years ago. We hope this trend will continue as we gain a better understanding of the hurdles and institute holistic solutions geared toward ending extreme poverty that makes child labor a last resort.

We can end child labor in our lifetime, but it will take both approaches. A ban without the necessary alternatives is naïve, and programs that address poverty while ignoring the ongoing reality of child labor are short-sighted. We can do better. Children around the world are counting on it.

Source

Indian police rescue 17 child laborers in Hyderabad city

NEW DELHI, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Indian police Thursday claimed to have rescued as many as 17 child laborers trafficked into the southern city of Hyderabad from several states.

Acting on a tip-off that a group of 150 children were being trafficked into the city from the states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand, a police team raided Secunderabad railway station late Wednesday night and rescued the children.

"After verifying the age of about 80 of them who arrived, as many as 17 of them were found to be minors, including two children, aged seven and 11," Child Protection Officer (Hyderabad district) Mohammed Imtiyaz Raheem told the media.

"The rescued labourers have been sent to a children's home," he added.

Another police official said that one person has been arrested in this connection. "We have taken into custody one person accompanying the children, We are questioning him to ascertain if there is a inter-state child trafficking ring," he said.

Child labor is the practice of having children engage in economic activity, a practice that deprives children of their childhood.

Poverty and the growth of informal economy are considered to be the key causes of child labor in India. Some other causes are cheap wages and accessibility to factories which can produce the maximum amount of goods for the lowest possible price.

Source

Run for child labor-free PH

THE Run for Child Labor-Free Philippines will get underway on Dec. 6 in an out-and-back course from Abreeza Ayala Malls.

Department of Labor and Employment (Dole)-Association of Concerned Employees and Staff (Aces) president Leo Ariel Pepino bared this Thursday during the Davao Sportswriters Association (DSA) Forum at The Annex of SM City Davao.

"The run will feature 5K and 3K categories. We aim to intensify the anti-child labor campaign," he said.

Registration is ongoing until Nov. 30. Fee is P350 inclusive of race bib, singlet and snacks.

Pepino said the event will benefit the Project Angel Tree that aims to gather and grant

the wishes of child laborers through the building up of a network of patrons and supporters of the national efforts against child labor.
Beneficiaries will be children in Barangay Hagonoy in Kibuaya, Balaba, Mahayahay, San Roque, Colorado and Compostela Valley Province.

"These are areas where children are at risk. They must enjoy their childhood. Child labor should be eliminated in the country," Pepino said.

Proceeds of the run will be used to purchase school supplies, bags and educational assistance for children.

Reference

21-Year-Old Woman Who Took College Exam While in Labor Says, I Just 'Handled My Responsibilities

A 21-year-old Georgia student stunned thousands after a photo of her taking a college exam while in labor made its way around the Internet. But the new mother tells PEOPLE that she simply did what she had to do. 
"I didn't want to give an excuse," Tommitrise Collins, of Macon, Georgia, tells PEOPLE. "I made sure I just went ahead and did what I had to do, I handled my responsibilities." 

She added: "I didn't want to get behind in my work."
Collins says her water broke at around 1 a.m. on Nov. 12 – just one week before she was set to deliver her daughter, Her online psychology test began just hours later at 8 a.m., but she "was hurting really bad by then," she says. "I emailed my teacher to tell her that I was having contractions and that I was in labor and that I'm still going to take the test," the Middle Georgia State University student tells PEOPLE. "It was my decision, she didn't make me do anything." 
Collins rushed to the Coliseum Medical Center, and at around 1:30 p.m., approximately 12 hours after her labor began, Collins took the test. She says that during that time, she was not taking any medication, so the "pain was real."
She finished the test in 90 minutes and ultimately ended up with a "B." 
Unbeknownst to Collins, her sister, Shanell Brinkley-Chapman, took a picture of her while she was taking the test. Chapman snapped a photo of Collins sitting in the hospital bed with a laptop in front of her. 
"I didn't know that she took the picture until after I gave birth," Collins said. "I finally looked on my phone and saw that people were 'liking' something and that [Shanell] tagged me in something. 
She added: [Shanell] didn't know it was going to make this big of a deal, but we see where it got us." 
But Collins hasn't been too preoccupied about the now-viral photo because after 20 hours of labor, she welcomed her daughter, Tyler Elise. The single mother has also set up a GoFundMe page to help raise money to cover college expenses and help with caring for her daughter. 

Reference