Anti-Slavery’s work on child labour

and addressing the problem globally

Presentation given by Jonathan Blagbrough,

Child Labour Programme Officer, Anti-Slavery,

on 23/6/00 at National Consumers’ League,

Child Labour Coalition, Biennial Conference,

Washington D.C.

Introduction

Colleagues, Friends, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I bring greetings from London, which, when I left it two weeks ago was still – unfortunately - in the throes of winter!

Firstly, can I say how delighted I am to have the opportunity to address you today. I will make my apologies in advance for what you may find to be a fairly dry presentation – you could say typically British and downbeat! – but behind which lies a great deal of sentiment and experience on the issue of child labour.

Anti-Slavery International, as you may or may not know, has the rather dubious honour of being the world’s oldest international human rights organisation, and as such has been fighting for the eradication of slavery in all of its many manifestations around the world since 1839. In partnership with local organisations in many countries Anti-Slavery researches, raises awareness and campaigns to eliminate child and adult slavery by pressurising governments to acknowledge the existence of slavery and to abolish its practice.

As you would imagine, Anti-Slavery looks at a range of different issues and groups of exploited people in many different countries. Debt bondage, or bonded labour, is a key area of our work (focused mainly on South Asia, but also notably in Brazil), as are issues relating to migration and trafficking. Our women’s programme centres on West Africa, where we look at issues including early marriage and the enslavement of women through systems which treat them as the property of men. The focus of my work is on child labour – in particular on those forms of labour which constitute some of the very worst cases of exploitation and abuse, such as children working as domestic servants, trafficked children, and those in bondage and other forms of slavery.

While I cannot claim to know everything that there is to know about Anti-Slavery and its long history, I hope that I might be able to provide one or two insights into Anti-Slavery’s experience on the subject of child labour. As Anti-Slavery’s Child Labour Programme Officer for the past 5 years my work has centered around child slavery issues and the worst forms of child labour around the world – particularly on the situation of child domestic workers.

The focus of my paper today is to present you with some information about Anti-Slavery International’s activities on child labour. Over the last day and a half you have already heard from a number of people with tremendous experience of child labour issues, and so it is my intention to relate some of Anti-Slavery’s experience in the last 25 years about child slavery:- forms of child labour which may be less familiar to you all, but which I think you will agree, constitute some of the worst situations of child exploitation; situations which the new ILO Convention No.182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour has rightly prioritised. I would also like to share with you some thoughts, based on this experience, about what works – and doesn’t – in dealing with child labour.

Focus of Anti-Slavery’s work

Anti-Slavery (or the Anti-Slavery Society as we were then known) began identifying and documenting the child labour situation in countries around the world more than 25 years ago – beginning with studies in places such as Morocco, India, Thailand and Jamaica. Our primary focus then was on child slavery, rather than the wider ‘worst forms of child labour’.

Since then, however, we realised the need to focus our attention on broader issues – partly because of our concern that there was still relatively little interest in child labour issues, but also because we recognised the interconnectedness of a wide range of child labour practices. Indeed, our offices in London are a testament to our belief in the importance of looking at all forms of child labour – housing as we do the UK branch of ECPAT – the campaign to End Child Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking; the office of the international Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers; and the Consortium for Street Children, a group of organisations working with street children in every continent.

In the 1980s we also recognised that child labour was not just an issue confined to developing countries, but was also a problem in our own back yard. Therefore, over the last 20 years we have undertaken studies in and continue to maintain a watching brief on European countries including Spain, Italy, Portugal and my own country, the United Kingdom.

The current focus of Anti-Slavery’s work on child labour is in two main areas: worldwide advocacy activities – by which I mean lobbying, public education and campaigning - in relation to the worst forms of child labour and ILO Convention No.182; but also specifically on the situation of children working as domestic servants, or child domestic workers as this group of particularly exploited and vulnerable children are more commonly known.

One of Anti-Slavery’s key strengths, if I can be so bold as to blow our own trumpet, has been in focusing badly-needed attention on forms of child labour which have gone largely unheeded and ignored, most recently (and successfully, judging by the great deal of recent interest being shown on the issue from a number of quarters!) on the issue of child domestic workers.

I would like now to look in more detail at some of these ‘ignored’ forms of child labour – which from Anti-Slavery’s point of view, and from the point of view of the new ILO Convention, constitute a priority for immediate action. By looking at these issues in slightly more depth I think it is easier to get a feel for the kinds of strategies which might work, or not – aspects which I will comment on later in this paper.

Our experience

Slavery and practices similar to slavery cover many different situations, but the problems associated with them have a number of similarities. Children caught in slavery and slavery-like situations are frequently separated from their parents and families, becoming completely dependent upon adult strangers for their health, safety and well being. Invariably, the children are unaware of, or are deceived about, the situation they will find themselves in – and of what will be demanded of them. Such children are not free to leave their place of work when they choose.

Although ‘servitude’ has never been made explicit in international standards concerning slavery, the concerns that it challenges are addressed under the terms of the 1956 UN Slavery Convention. Article 1(d) of this Convention states:

‘any institution or practice whereby a child or young person under the age of 18 years is delivered by either or both his natural parents or by his guardian to another person, whether for reward or not, with a view to the exploitation of the child or young person or of his labour.’

The implications of this article are enormous, addressing as it does, issues relating to a child who is living away from home to work, whether or not the child is paid.  A key concern remains the child’s total dependence on an employer for their health and well being.  However, although the convention has been ratified by more than 100 states, it has never been invoked by national authorities to prevent the millions of children working in the situations it describes.  One of the reasons for this may simply be that the practices which it describes have never been identified under a single title.  However, Anti-Slavery believes that this type of child slavery can aptly be called servitude.

In describing the Mui Tsai  (‘little sister’) system prevalent in China and Hong Kong at the time, a 1951 report of the UN Ad Hoc Committee of Experts on Slavery – forerunners of today’s Geneva-based United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery – raised a number of key elements which were considered to constitute servitude for children:-

“Under this [Mui Tsai] system, young girls are transferred by their parents to other persons for employment in domestic service until they reach an age when they can marry.  When they are married they are under no further obligation to their employers.  In [many cases] some money is paid in consideration of the transfer.  Sometimes the child is transferred as a free gift.  Sometimes there is an intermediary or broker.  In some cases the child or young person is definitely sold; in other cases the parties to the transaction regard the money payment as a consideration for the child’s services in domestic employment.”  (Draft Preliminary Report on the Ad Hoc Committee of Experts on Slavery of the United Nations, 1951)

In practice the Mui Tsai system has many parallels in the situation faced by millions of children working as domestic servants today, a practice which is probably the single largest employment category for girl child workers.

For example, in a 1993 submission to the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery of the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Anti-Slavery reported that throughout West Africa, girls from rural areas are taken in as servants by urban families with whom they stay for several years.  Parents may give or sell the labour of their children either directly or with the help of intermediaries. In some cases the girls are barely five or six years old and they may remain with their employers until they reach adulthood or marry.

The vulnerability of child domestic workers to abuse and exploitation is often made greater as a result of their being trafficked long distances both within and especially across borders. Anti-Slavery’s work in West Africa over the last few years is a case in point.

Once the cross-border recruitment of children, particularly young children, was recognised as abusive, more and more information has become available about substantial flows of children.  We started out looking at children being taken mainly from Bénin and Togo to Nigeria and Gabon, but then came across dozens of other examples.  The authorities in Mali had been concerned for many years about children recruited in southern Mali to work in Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa and coffee estates, again often unpaid and in a form of slavery.  For years too, there has been information about a smaller number of African boys recruited, particularly from Mauritania and the Horn of Africa, to work in the Gulf, for example as camel jockeys.  Malian children also go to Guinea to work, this time girls as domestics.

Debt bondage, or bonded labour as it is known in South Asia, describes the situation of a person who is required to work in order to repay a debt, where the terms of the repayment are not limited or defined. Some children of bonded labourers are born into bondage, compelled to work for their parents’ master without any wages. In such instances, when a bonded labourer dies the responsibility to pay off the debt automatically shifts to his children.

Children who are subjected to bondage on their own account, however, are forced to work as bonded labourers for small loans taken out by their parents or families. Under the kuthia system in India, for example, young boys are taken on a yearly basis against an advance or loan to the parents in time of need. The circumstances vary with some children being bonded to an employer far from home, and others continuing to live with their parents. The size of the advance also varies, and with it the degree to which the child concerned can be considered to be ‘bonded’ or forced to work for that employer.

Child bondage also occurs under the guise of an apprenticeship where children may be pledged by their parents to an employer in return for food, lodging and training.  While properly regulated apprenticeships (as with other schemes containing both education and work components) can be very beneficial to the child, many such arrangements are not subject to any formal contract or conditions, they are made between parents and employers without the child’s consent, and they are easily abused.  Children working under these, or similar, circumstances may find themselves receiving no pay or remuneration other than board and lodging.

Additionally, children may find themselves bonded when, like adult employees, they are compelled to buy food from company stores at inflated prices against advances on pay, or are required to repay the cost of transportation from their original place of residence to their place of work.  Advances or loans made against future work can easily lead to bondage if the terms of the contract are not clear.

A comment on strategies

Just as slavery and slavery-like practices have a number of similarities, so can their solutions; we have already heard today about education being a key overarching strategy. However, broad-brush strategies are not always the best way of dealing with often quite different problems and situations. We must be prepared to prioritise those forms of child labour that, because of what the children concerned are facing, require more urgent attention.

The first point that I would like to make – and it is an uncomfortable one for us as consumers to accept – is that we will not solve the problem of child labour solely through the power of our wallets. As strategies, neither giving money nor boycotting products will stop child labour by themselves. Money to stop child labour, whether it is the dollar in our pockets or the tens-of-millions of dollars recently pledged by the US government to the ILO must be carefully targeted into long-term and sustainable actions which go to the heart of the often complex problems.

Frankly, we can boycott until we are blue in the face but blanket bans are a very blunt instrument – affecting abusers and abused alike, and selective bans merely give competitive advantage to other countries who may be equally at fault but better at hiding their problems. And, of course, in boycotting - or threatening to boycott - without accompanying programme activities, we run the risk that if we do not target the very worst child labour abuses we could be inadvertently pushing children into even more dangerous and exploitative forms of work – such as was the case in Bangladesh’s garment factories during the 1990s, before monitoring and rehabilitation measures were put in place. I am not saying that economic strategies such as boycotting should never be used – sometimes a government’s or an industry’s intransigence demands it - but I am saying that we should be very selective about how we use them.

In this sense the media is both our best weapon, but potentially also our worst enemy. The mid-1990’s saw a proliferation of exposés on multinational companies using child labour. The ensuing furore saw many of these companies rushing to establish corporate codes of conduct and sourcing guidelines to their subcontractors, as well as introducing millions of people like never before to the issue of child labour. It also, however, led many people to believe that all child labour was export-oriented, thus ensuring that the focus was taken off some of the largest and most exploitative areas of child labour such as in agriculture and  domestic service, and onto relatively small and less exploitative situations. This did no service to anyone working on the issues and we are still trying to rebuild a more balanced understanding of the issues amongst the general public.

The second point that I would like to make is that child slavery needs identifying and denouncing, but that these steps are not sufficient in themselves to ensure that effective action is taken.

A clear example of what I mean took place in 1997 relating to the issue of restavek children in Haiti – an appalling situation of child domestic slavery with which I am sure you are all familiar. Anti-Slavery had brought its local Haitian partner organisation to speak on the issue at the United Nations’ Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery in Geneva, Switzerland. Importantly, at that very same meeting Haiti’s Ambassador to the UN also denounced the restavek situation in his country. However, despite such strong denunciation from individuals, groups and even Haitian officials themselves, there has been precious little improvement in the situation faced by the estimated quarter of a million restavek children in Haiti.

[As a footnote to this, I would like to say that there are encouraging signs at the moment, with the recently established ILO/IPEC programme in Haiti, and the efforts of the dedicated few inside and outside of Haiti – including people like Jean-Robert Cadet, a former restavek-cum-naturalised-American, who has recounted his experiences so movingly in a recently published autobiography.]

What I am getting at here is that effective strategies require systematic linking of ‘carrot and stick’ policies. Yes, beating countries to implement their own laws and to abide by international standards is important – very important – and as a human rights organisation this is a key weapon in Anti-Slavery’s arsenal. But we must also be clear that such an approach must be balanced with pragmatism, which in many cases involves advocating and encouraging step-by-step improvements to the situation of child workers – even though this may seem to conflict with our ultimate goal of eliminating the practice of child labour.

Of course, striking the right balance given shifting and often complicated political, social and economic factors is not easy. In some cases we can be too understanding and accommodating of local situations to the extent that we achieve nothing for the children concerned. Let me take you to the other side of the world and the situation of child bonded labour in Pakistan. In the early 1990’s there was a high-level meeting about the issue of child bonded labour held in Islamabad, sponsored by the ILO, from which a detailed programme of action against the practice emerged and was agreed to by the Pakistan authorities. However, since 1995 there has been a systematic denial of the existence of child bonded labour by successive Pakistani governments. In 1996, in response to a complaint made about the awful child bonded labour situation throughout Pakistan, but particularly in Sindh province, the European Union allocated money to the ILO to work with the Pakistan authorities to eradicate the practice. Since the Pakistan authorities were denying its existence, the ILO was forced to tread extremely carefully and to adopt a ‘softly softly’ approach. I visited Sindh province in February of this year: - four years on - and there has been no perceptible improvement in the situation there – where there are an estimated 40,000 bonded labourers, at least 10,000 of whom are children.

[Indeed, it is interesting to note that it was around 1996 when, as a result of  international pressure, attention on the situation of child labour in Pakistan began to focus on the football-stitching district of Sialkot – and away from (the in many ways far worse) situation of child bonded labour.]

Thirdly, that one of the most important - but difficult – strategies is the need to change people’s attitudes on child labour. In many countries, for example, child domestics are seen as such a common and natural part of life that their existence is not even questioned. Just two months ago I was in Kenya talking to a child labour activist about the situation of child domestic workers, only to find that the tea I was served was brought to me by her child domestic!!! The practice is so deeply ingrained that it will take some time to change attitudes, but I do know that it can be done. I have seen some of the most excellent projects in places like Bangladesh, Togo and the Philippines, which have managed to change the attitudes of parents and employers of child domestic workers in local communities. This is despite there being no law which demands it!

Indeed, formal laws are next to useless in regulating the treatment of child domestic workers in most countries, since they are notoriously irrelevant to people’s actual behaviour. However, changing people’s behaviour at the local level can be remarkably effective. Voluntary standards can be developed that are enforced wholly by the communities themselves – and very effectively too, since they reflect the beliefs and attitudes of the whole community.

Lastly, and it sounds obvious, but we need to think carefully about what we can do that will most help the children concerned before we act. Research, needs assessment, call it what you will, is a vital part of ensuring that we work in the ‘best interests’ of the children concerned. For example, some NGOs in West Africa, particularly in their children’s country of origin, assumed that it must be in the ‘best interest’ of those children who had been trafficked to repatriate them and put them through some form of rehabilitation, in a children’s home or the like. Others suggested that children may be better off left where they are, but given substantial support, particularly to attend school, either full-time or while they continue working part-time. This was the suggestion made earlier this year by an NGO in Gabon, which could see from research that it had undertaken that as fast as children from Benin and Togo were repatriated, new youngsters were being sent to take their place!

Let us also remember that ‘undertaking research’ needn’t mean a vast academic treatise. With a few basic tools, small organisations with their ears ‘close to the ground’ as it were, are perfectly placed to collect information about the situation from the children they are close to. Collecting small-scale but reliable data can provide a very useful snapshot of the situation in a certain area, and can be used to inform and improve future activities. With this in mind, Anti-Slavery developed a ‘handbook for research and action’ on child domestic workers – a very practical ‘how to’ guide for use by small NGOs with little or no research experience.

Thank you for your attention and I would be very happy to take questions.