classes last only two hours a day instead of six. What’ s the point for my son to go there?”
In addition to poverty, war and natural disaster also drive“ children out of school and into dangerous work,” the U. S. Department of Labor’ s Bureau of International Labor Affairs reported.
Schools are damaged during fighting, or destroyed by floods and landslides. Militants attack or destroy schools. Teachers flee. Schools are used to house refugees from other areas. Local and national economies are devastated. Parents and other family members are killed.
Yet quantifying child labor remains difficult. Kids go in and out of the labor market. Afghanistan and Pakistan are both fast-growing countries with no censuses and few birth records.“ It follows that the annual incidence of spells of household child labor is often greater than would be apparent from survey data,” the UN reported.
It’ s also hard to monitor. People tend not
to report illegal activity; in some cases, the practice has deliberately gone“ underground.”
For example, after international outcry over children hand-stitching soccer balls in Sialkot, Pakistan,“ the whole industry has moved into private homes, which has made it a bit difficult to monitor if child labor is being used,” Hussain Naqi, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’ s national coordinator told Reuters. It is commonly accepted that“ this is not just an issue in Sialkot, child labor is occurring all across Pakistan.”
Yet the Pakistan government does not take it all that seriously, child advocates say.
“ The government of Pakistan does not collect data on the number of criminal investigations, prosecutions, children assisted or convictions of child traffickers and those using children in other exploitative forms of labor,” according to the DOL. This lack of data“ hampers the government’ s ability to assess the prevalence of child labor and to develop policies or plans for future child-labor initiatives.”
The“ worst forms” of child labor are the hardest to quantify. The 1990 ILO Convention puts armed conflict, prostitution, and drug trafficking in this category.
Who are they?“ Children trapped in the worst forms of child labor … are often drawn from social groups facing the most deeply entrenched disadvantages,” according to the UN.“ Living in informal urban settlements, on the streets of major cities, or in remote, highly marginalized rural areas, they are poorly served by public education systems.”
International law requires children in these situations be immediately removed and provided social services. But given that they are often trafficked for sexual exploitation or cheap labor, many of these children slip under the radar.
Even if there were reliable numbers, Brown wrote,“ Statistics alone can never capture the suffering, the fear and the loss of human potential that comes with child labor. … They do not measure the exhaustion of children forced to work long hours or lift heavy loads. They do not monitor the fear of chil-
A young Wakhi boy uses a pick to dig fodder for his family’ s livestock on the mountain above his family’ s home in Afghanistan’ s Wakhan Corridor.
14 | Journey of Hope C E N T R A L A S I A I N S T I T U T E