Millions of children worldwide are forced to work, report says

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According to the Child Labor Department about 168 million children ages five to seven from across the world are forced to work.

International student Diane Uwacu from Rwanda said that statistic is unacceptable.

“Child labor is using children to do work that they are not physically or mentally apt to do, “ Uwacu said. “It is keeping a person from accomplishing his goal in life by burdening work that someone else is qualified to do. It is abusive and ought to be eradicated in all its forms.”

Although the report claims world child labor has declined over the past several decades, in several countries it is still prevalent. According to Uwacu, in Rwanda child labor is still common and the Rwandan government is working hard to educate its young citizens.

“A country’s economy is sustained by the education of its youth,” Uwacu said. “If more children are deprived of their right to education, the future of the country will suffer from that. It follows that rather than benefiting from educated people, the country will have to worry about adults who can’t support themselves and need to be supported instead.”

The Rwandan government is looking for different methods to reduce child labor as much as possible and has taken additional precautions by providing free education for the first 12 years of any child’s life.

“The Rwandan government has started to be proactive in creating recreation centers where street kids are brought and taught a profession that would help them start a life out of the streets,” Uwacu said. “There have always been such laws, but it isn’t until recently that they have started to be enforced. New measures involve punishing anyone who employs a child are being taken.”

Brazil too has a long history of child laborers, according to Bob Carpenter, a professor of missions.

“I spent 14 years in Brazil and even there I know that children beg on the streets,” Carpenter said. “Children from the shantytowns stop at traffic lights to clean your windshield. Some of them would be selling food and trinkets on the streets.”

There are many reasons why children take to the streets, but the main reason is they come from poverty stricken homes where in order to survive they have to work to not only support themselves, but also their families back home.

“Many times, families have to supplement their income just to get by and always the children suffer in the long run,” Carpenter said. “It limits their social mobility because of the pressure to work while they are young.”

For extra income, families compromise the education of their children to survive today without thinking of long term consequences of the lack of proper education.

“I would imagine that families feel pressure to get their children working instead of going to school which then compromises their future earning power because they don’t have the education they would need to get better jobs,” Carpenter said. “It is a tradeoff: short-term income verse long-term earning capacity. The family gains in the short run, but the children lose in the long run.”

China, the world’s most populous country, also struggles with the issue of child laborers. More often the children who are seen working are those from the poorest families.

“I lived in China for a number of years and it was a very different experience coming from my small Abilene hometown,” sophomore Jan Bain said. “The place where I lived had 5 million people and that is not considered big in China and children, especially from these poor families, have to grow up fast if they want to survive”

Most of these young children support themselves through life and start working at a fairly young age. They can be seen everywhere on the streets, at the markets trying to sell something or help people carry luggage, Bain said.

“There are very many people in China so it is hard to tell if the government is doing anything to change child labor in the country and it is really hard to keep up with everybody” Bain said. “China definitely needs more regulations to stop child labor, but from what I saw I don’t think that the Chinese government cares enough as they should to regulate child labor.”

The solution according to Carpenter does not lie in new government regulations to stop child labor but the key is Christians coming together in support of a common goal.

“As Christians we need to start or support ministries that do provide job training for teenagers,” Carpenter said.