IT SHOULD'NT HURT TO BE A CHILD

"Who was that young girl I saw in your   

household the other day?"
"She's someone my wife has taken in. She comes from my wife's village - her family is very poor."

"I thought you were deeply opposed to child labour?"
"Of course I am! She isn't child labour - we don't pay her to work! My wife took her in out of kindness."

"I thought I saw her in the kitchen doing the washing-up."
"Naturally she helps my wife about the house."

"And does she go to school?"
"Well, no ...

As societies develop and households become more nucleated with fewer spare hands around to do the chores, families who have the means take others into their households to carry part of the domestic burden on their behalf. In many developing countries, where incomes are low, employment opportunities few, and education limited, an available pool of female and child labour to undertake menial occupations readily exists. The pattern of change in many countries today, where some families form part of the go-ahead, modern industrialised world while many others languish in an increasingly depressed and backward rural economy or on the squalid fringes of urban life, lends itself to the servitude of the poorest members to others who are better off. As domestic workers, children and adolescents are often preferred to adults because they are cheaper to hire, more malleable and cost less to support. Their youth and dependence on their parents also means that they are unable to resist plans made on their behalf to send them away to the households of strangers - if it occurs to them to do so. The process of recruitment is becoming more organised, as agents and traffickers trawl rural areas offering incentives to parents.
The result is that more children and young people today are working in households in no way related to their own, often at considerable distance. The term 'child labour' is usually applied to children working in factories, mines, sweatshops, and other organised places of wage employment created by industrialisation. But these are not the only workplaces where children are found. The household is the oldest workplace in the world, and children and young people have always grown up undertaking duties to help make it function. In traditional rural environments where families are usually still large and labour-saving devices non-existent, their contribution is essential. And even today, in every society, learning to help with the family chores is seen as an important part of upbringing. However, when a child is placed in a household not closely related to his or her family for the purpose of giving that household the benefit of her or his domestic labour, this is no longer 'upbringing' but 'employment'. The notion of 'giving the child a home' may be used to mask the fact of employment so as to avoid its implications - especially the right to compensation for the child's labour. Unfortunately, the responsibility to provide the child with care, nurture, and developmental support is also often avoided. The right to childhood itself is denied, let alone other childhood rights such as the right to education.

Confusion between the role of a child's patron or benefactor and that of an employer may lead to ambiguity in the relationship between the household and the child domestic. Even where the presence of working children on the streets, or in mines, factories or other formal workplaces is deplored, consciousness that child domestics too should be seen as working children may be lacking. Laws and public policy may fail to set this right.
The potential for exploitation and abuse may therefore be even greater than in the formal workplace, where regulations on hours, tasks, pay, and other characteristics of work do at least exist. In a private household, there are none - except those agreed between the employer and employee. Most child domestics live in, are under the round-the-clock control of the employer, and have very little freedom or free time.
 When the employee is a child or young person, especially a girl, she is powerless in any negotiation over terms and conditions. Often the negotiation is done on her behalf her by a parent or some other person and she has to put up with the result. In the worst case, the terms may be so exploitative as to be akin to slavery. In the best case, a number of child rights are likely to remain unfulfilled. The lack of recognition accorded to their status and household role is a unique attribute of the situation of millions of young domestics - who constitute the most hidden, invisible and inaccessible of all child workers.
Many parents who send their children away to work are naively convinced that the promises of a better life, of education and contact with the rich and powerful represent a genuine opportunity. They do not realise that a much more potent reality is drudgery, loneliness, loss of freedom and reduced childhood opportunity. The escape from poverty is the overwhelming motivation - both for themselves, for the girls and for the rest of their families. But if the job does not work out, or the child is miserable or abused, she may be blamed for her plight unless her parents can be brought to see that her placement as a domestic in the house of a stranger is not a panacea for their own problems or her future happiness.
The child domestic is often deeply isolated and unhappy - which can be expressed in a sullenness and lack of co-operation which may itself excite the employer's wrath. The experience of being persistently spoken down to, scolded and ordered about imparts to the child a sense of worthlessness as a human being and a lack of will or capacity to assert any independence of spirit. Employers may encourage this in the name of good discipline, because the child's malleability is one of his or her principal assets as a worker.

There is no magic recipe to solve this problem. Improvement in the lives of child domestic workers is dependent on changes in public attitudes and private behaviour, without which change in the law and in public policy will be impotent. The attitude of considering child labour as “charity” has to end. If we stop patronising employers and products that use child labourers, it will act as a deterrent. If everyone decides that they will not employ children, it can help a lot. Everyone’s childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living in a nightmare of darkness of the soul. Let every child be free.