Child Abuse Essay Research Paper People in

Child Abuse Essay, Research Paper

People in the rich world tend to assume that child labor, like

slavery, is something that was abolished a century ago and that now only

exists in third world countries. This can not be any further from the

reality of this issue. In fully developed countries like Canada and the

United States, parents encourage their children to have a job at an

early age, as a way of letting their children gain experience of the

real world. Few people see it as exploite that a child should work

(for example to have a paper route) even if they are paid less than

adult wages and local child-labour laws are infringed by their working

before seven in the morning and after seven o’clock in the evening.

Child labour’ in general is too explosive and negative a word to be

applied to all children workers. It is insulting to those whose lives

are ruined by hard labor to lump them into the same category as those

children who help out in the family shop after school. If people treat

all work by children as equally unacceptable they are trivializing the

whole issue and making it less likely to be able to root out the most

damaging forms of child labor. It is simply the nature and conditions

of children’s work that determines whether they are exploited, not the

plain fact of their work age. Another term that is too loosely used in

the business world and elsewhere is that of a sweatshop’. The term

sweatshop’ stems from the word sweating, originally used in the late

19th century America. It was thought to describe “a subcontracting

system in which the middlemen earned their profit from the margin

between the amount they received for a contract and the amount they paid

workers”. This margin was said to be sweated’ from the workers because

they received minimal wages for excessive hours worked under unsanitary

conditions.

Unlike some problems that are just surfacing in the world today and are

not too predominant, child labor is well developed with around 500

million children enslaved in its trap, including those working as

domestic slaves. Out of these there are over 73 million children that

are under the age of 10. Children, who should be out in the sunshine

having fun with their friends, or playing on a local soccer league are

in actuality slaving over machines in factories or serving families as a

domestic slave. These frail beings work in places like India making

rugs that need 4000 knots per square inch. They are sold as slaves in

Sudan for a mere $15 per child or in Africa for domestic work. In

Pakistan they are enslaved in the brick industry, in Turkey they work in

textile industries, and in Italy they sweat over making shoes that

people all over the world buy and proudly wear. The mines in which some

children are forced to work in Columbia and Peru collapse upon them and

severely injure or kill hundreds of workers. What is unbelievable is

the amount of money that these children are paid for their long hours in

the factory. While most children prefer to work in a factory over doing

domestic chores the conditions are not that much better. Granted there

are hundreds of other children their age surrounding them, but they are

not allowed to talk with them, if they do, they are beaten. They work

between 16 and 18 hours a day, are sometimes shackled to their looms and

can not go to the bathroom or take breaks of any kind. This is indeed

unfortunate, but what may be more regrettable is that children in Canada

complain that they earn only $6.85 an hour as minimum wage. For doing

what, flipping burgers or serving drinks. What they do not realize is

that they can eat when they are hungry, they are allowed to take breaks

(in fact it is mandatory), they can socialize while working and they

work under sanitary conditions with benefits. These children that are

being exploited earn only 31 cents an hour in Honduras, 24 cents in

Nicaragua, and a whopping 56 cents in El Salvador. In Sri Lanka they

are given 18 cents an hour and in China and Vietnam they reportedly

receive 11 cents an hour for their hard work. This may indeed seem like

a very small amount, but it is more than what domestic workers are

usually paid. These invisible millions have money constantly taken away

from them to pay for their shelter, food and clothing. It is very hard

to recognize why as they sleep under the kitchen table in some instances

and their nourishment only consists of whatever falls off that table.

They are denied sleep as they are on call 24 hours a day and are also

sometimes expected (especially if it is a female worker) to provide

sexual favors for the master of the house. As a direct result of this

the girl is beaten by the wife, as she is taking over her role in the

family structure. What is incredibly horrific is that in most cases