CHILD LABOUR NEWS SERVICE
CHILD SERVANTS VULNERABLE TO ABUSE.
The government has paid no attention to the plight of child domestics, many of
whom have fallen victim to sexual harassment by their employers, activists
say. Arist Merdeka Sirait, the secretary-general of the National Committee
for Child Protection and Global March National Co-ordinator for Indonesia,
said that child domestics had to cope with sexual harassment and physical
abuse at the hands of their employers due mainly to the absence of a legal
basis for protecting them. According to the committee, at least 1.8 million
Indonesian children were working as servants across the country in 2000, up
from 1.5 million in 1999. Many of these were young females, who were often
abused both sexually and physically. Arist was commenting on a study
presented at the ongoing Manila Forum on Child Domestic Workers in Asia,
which showed that more and more children in Asia, including Indonesia,
worked as servants amid rapid modernisation and widespread poverty. (Jakarta
Post)
-- PHILIPPINES: BILL ON DOMESTIC CHILD WORKERS
Visayan Forum Foundation (VF) an organisation that works with child domestic
workers is close to a breakthrough on a landmark bill. This bill could make
the difference to hundreds of thousands of exploited child and adult
domestic workers throughout the Philippines. Child domestic workers in
particular toil far from home at the expense of their education and welfare.
Many of these children have been trafficked and suffer regular abuse at the
hands of their employers. The passage of Senate Bill 751 and House Bill 608,
commonly known as the "Magna Carta for Domestic Workers", is at a critical
stage. Final discussions in the Philippines Senate and House of
Representatives on this bill are taking place. Just two years ago passage of
the same bill was thwarted as a result of Presidential impeachment
proceedings.
-- ECUADOR: LEADING PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE USES CHILD LABOURERS
The New York Times reported that Ecuador's leading presidential candidate and
the country's richest man, Alvaro Noboa, uses child labour at his Los Alamos
plantation to produce Bonita brand bananas. The plantation is one of the
most modern in this Latin American country and employs some 1,300 workers to
tend banana plants fed by a state-of-the-art irrigation system. The New York
Times interviewed numerous children at the site. In Latin America, an
estimated 42 million children from ages 5 to 14 work. Growers
and exporters in Ecuador, who supply 25% of the bananas eaten in the United
States, say the product earns them about 30% less today than a decade ago,
often prompting them to turn a blind eye to labour codes. Children often
work for no wages in order to help their parents meet daily quotas so their
pay is not docked.
KIDS IN PERILOUS WORK
- Many of 300,000 employed in cocoa production not paid the US Agency for
International Development (USAID) and the Labour Department released key
findings that indicate that some 284,000 child labourers work in hazardous
conditions on cocoa farms in West Africa, 200,000 of whom work in Cote
d'Ivoire and most of whom work alongside their families. Such hazardous work
includes spraying pesticides without personal protection and clearing
undergrowth with machetes. There is also evidence that up to 2,500 child
workers may have been trafficked for cocoa work in Cote d'Ivoire and
Nigeria. More than 4,800 farmers, child and adult workers, and community
leaders were interviewed. The study on child labour on cocoa farms in the
Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon and Ghana was one of the steps agreed last
year by labour watchdogs, food makers, millers and consumer groups to end
abusive child labour practices by 2005 at the latest
Some estimates have put the number of child slaves at 15,000, prompting
proposals to bar US imports of cocoa unless shippers can prove it was grown
without slave labour.Cocoa is the primary ingredient in making chocolate.
Two-thirds of all cocoa products are consumed in Europe and North America.
Ivory Coast grows more than 40% of the world's cocoa and neighbouring Ghana
is No. 2 with 15%.
"Clearly, poverty is the underlying cause for the child labour situation in
West Africa," said Jim Gockowski, the researcher from the International
Institute for Tropical Agriculture who supervised the work.
The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and national
research collaborators in Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria
conducted the surveys with the support of USAID and USDOL, the global
chocolate industry, ILO-IPEC, and West African governments.
The Chocolate Manufacturers Association, a trade group for the U.S. chocolate
industry, said the study "confirms the need to address the safety of
children on cocoa farms and the economic well-being of cocoa-farming
families" as well as supporting the multi-step process to reform labour
practices.
Deputy Under Secretary for International Labour Affairs Tom Moorhead said,
"These children are not only working in dangerous jobs, they are also losing
the chance for an education. But with this survey information we can better
define the problem and in turn design a better program to address the
problem. Most important is that the chocolate manufacturers and the West
African governments have been working closely with us to eliminate
exploitative child labour in the cocoa industry."
As part of that effort, an International Cocoa Initiative was launched on July
1 to support field projects and act as a clearinghouse for "best practices"
to reform labour practices, to develop a plan to enforce standards against
child and forced labour, and to help determine the best ways to monitor and
report on compliance with those standards.
The report will be soon made available at http://www.usaid.gov and
http://www.dol.gov/ilab.
(From the files of US Newswire)
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ITALY GATEWAY TO EUROPE FOR CHILD SEX SLAVES
Rome -- Italy is a main gateway into Europe for children sold into sex
slavery, lured from poverty into a trade worth US $7 billion a year
world-wide, delegates at a conference on child trafficking were told.
Each year some 6,000 children aged between 12 and 16 are victims of child
trafficking, according to a recent study carried out by non-governmental
organisation, Terres des Hommes.
Leaving behind desperate poverty in Eastern Europe for the promise of a better
future many find themselves sold into forced labour, often sexual
exploitation, in western Europe.
Experts say differences in European child law contribute to making Italy a
magnet for child exploitation.
The generous provisions for minors under Italian law, who are guaranteed
protection and the right to education, are exacerbating a problem they were
intended to resolve, said Teresa Albano of the International Organisation
for Migration (IOM). "The policy stimulates child trafficking. Families push
their children to come to Italy so they will be protected and get an
education," she added.
Thousands of immigrants, including children, arrive on Italy's long coastline
seeking an entry point to Europe each year. Experts say that child
prostitutes come mainly from Eastern Europe and former Soviet countries
including Albania, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine.
Some 37% of female minors trafficked into Italy are Albanian according to the
report by Terre des Hommes, followed by Romanian, Moldovan and Nigerian
children.
Italy's centre-right government has made immigration a key policy issue and
passed tough new legislation including measures to digitally fingerprint new
arrivals and boost coastal patrols.
However, Terre des Hommes and Save the Children estimate that in the months of
March and April this year alone almost 700 young women under the age of
consent were working as child prostitutes in Italy.
Many are then moved on to other European countries including Britain, France,
Spain, Belgium, Holland and Germany.
Barbara Limanowska, an expert on human trafficking, said increasingly
sophisticated methods are used by the gangs who buy and sell young girls to
evade discovery. "They respond very fast, more and more of the women
involved travel with legal documents, are
kept in private apartments and use mobile phones to make arrangements," she
said.
Albano said child trafficking was an international problem, combining
immigration, security and social policy issues, which needed international
co-operation. "It is a complex phenomenon - involving the legislation of the
countries where the trafficking begins, transits and ends," she said.
"But there is a lack of co-ordination. We should learn a lesson from the
traffickers. Despite speaking different languages and operating out of
different countries they co-operate magnificently."
(From the files of Reuters News Service)
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THE NEW FACE OF COLOMBIAN LEFTIST GUERRILLAS: CHILDREN
La Plata, Colombia -- The 13-year-old girl guerrilla, a survivor of heavy
combat recently, sported an oversized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
camouflage uniform and a tear down her cheek as her nation's highest
military command peppered her with questions. The girl had few answers.
Twelve hours of heavy fighting killed at least 30 people in southern
Colombia's Huila province, one of several battles in the region last month.
When the shooting was over and bodies were counted, more than half the dead
were boys and girls not yet 16. Three survivors were girls ages 13, 15 and
16.
The teens are among a growing division of Colombia's leftist insurgency known
as the FARC, youth recruited as soldiers and spies. Armed Forces chief Gen.
Fernando Tapias has estimated that a third of the FARC's 17,000 soldiers are
minors.
Even military officials acknowledged that their success on the battlefield
last month had more to do with rebel novice than military acumen.
''This is the great tragedy,'' said Defence Minister Gustavo Bell, also
Colombia's vice president. ``Who knows how many of these children had
musical talent or mathematical talent? They are our future.''
Although Colombia's two other illegal armies, the leftist National Liberation
Army and rightist United Self Defence Forces of Colombia, also recruit child
warriors, 80% of child soldiers are FARC members.
A 1998 study by the national Office of the People's Defender showed that 18%
of child combatants had killed someone and 60% had watched people being
killed. Some 25% had seen kidnappings, and 28% had been wounded.
For a time, even the Colombian military drafted 16- and 17-year-olds without
parental consent. The practice has ended, and in 1999, the government
discharged 980 soldiers who were younger than 18.
The FARC formed in 1964 as a Marxist insurgency to force social justice in
rural Colombia, where poverty is rampant and development often shoddy. The
group has since become a 17,500-strong militia financed by the drug and
kidnapping trades.
Peace talks with the group ended abruptly in February, and its leaders were
declared fugitives. The government recently announced $2 million rewards for
information leading to the arrest of the FARC's highest commanders. The FARC
commanders are in hiding while they send children off to fight.
(From the files of Miami Herald)
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TRAFFICKING IN CHILDREN ON THE RISE
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam -- Six-year-old Tran Thi Be felt dead tired, but
still she had to keep running after people on the street and ask them to
spare some change. "Please, help my blind mother," she pleaded with
pedestrians, for an obviously underfed woman sitting nearby.
Despite Be's efforts begging all day in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, she was
unable to earn the sum expected by her "blind mother" who is actually not
her mother at all, but her boss for the day.
Be is just one among hundreds of children trafficked annually to this southern
Vietnamese city to fill a swelling army of drug vendors, prostitutes and
beggars.
She fell into the hands of a child trafficker two years ago and has become his
"asset" ever since. Her keeper has a dozen children, ranging from one to 12
years of age, whom he rents out to professional beggars looking to improve
their earning prospects.
Like in many other parts of Asia and elsewhere, trafficking in children and
women has been on the increase in Vietnam in recent years.
Forced into a life of bonded labour, begging, prostitution, pornography and or
other illegal activities such as the drugs trade, many young Vietnamese
women and children end up as far afield as China, Taiwan, Cambodia,
Thailand, Hong Kong, Macau and Europe.
According to Asia Against Child Trafficking (Asia ACT), between 1982 and 1997,
around 80,000 women and children from Cambodia, Laos, Burma and Vietnam were
forced to work in the Thai sex industry. Asia ACT also said hundreds of
thousands of children are being enslaved and sold every year.
"Child trafficking is one of the most vicious forms of violence and crime
against children since it involves the removal of children from their family
surroundings to face alien and dangerous situations," said Dr Duong Quang
Trung, chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Child Welfare Foundation.
This city accounts for nearly 25,000 working children, some of who are taken
from their parents and sold to others who raise them into a life of
modern-day slavery.
Nearly 14% of teenage children work as prostitutes, a figure that experts
believe has increased sharply in recent years.
Vietnam's Criminal Code includes severe penalties for traffickers who take
women and children abroad for prostitution and other forms of exploitation.
(From the Files of Inter Press Service)
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NEWS-IN-BRIEF
-- ECUADOR: ACCORD SIGNED TO ELIMINATE CHILD LABOUR ON BANANA
PLANTATIONS
Ecuador has moved to eliminate child labour in a new accord signed by
representatives of the banana industry, UNICEF, the ILO and the country's
ministries of labour and education. Following growing condemnation of the
practice of employing children on banana plantations in Ecuador, the world's
largest exporter of the fruit, the new accord, which will take effect in 12
months' time, will prohibit those under the age of 15 from working on such
farms. Ecuador's four largest exporters -- Bananera Noboa, Rey Banano
del Pacifico, AGROBAN and the Del Monte subsidiary in Ecuador, Bandecua -- are
included in the agreement, which covers 60% of the banana exporting sector
and 80% of the country's growers of the fruit. (El Comercio)
-- US ISSUES REPORT ON CHILD LABOUR
The Labour Department released the first annual report on the worst forms of
child labour in 143 trade beneficiary countries and territories as required
under the Trade and Development Act of 2000. Under this act, trade
beneficiary countries and territories are required to implement their
international commitments to eliminate the worst forms of child labour. The
report presents information on the nature and extent of the problem in each
of these 143 countries and territories and the efforts being made by their
governments to eliminate the worst forms of child labour. The department's
Bureau of International Labour Affairs conducted the research and prepared
the report. "This report provides information useful in understanding the
phenomenon of child labour around the world. Such understanding is critical
in developing policies and programs to address this issue." said Tom
Moorhead, deputy under secretary for international affairs. The report is
available online at www.dol.gov/ILAB/reports/iclp/pubs. (US Newswire)
