According to the UNICEF, an estimated 6.3 million children aged 5-14 are currently engaged in child labor and hazardous work in Bangladesh. But 250 of them were lucky enough as they had a day off to attend the National Child Rights Week’2009 at the Osmani Memorial Auditorium in the Dhaka city on Monday, October 5, 2009.

Prime minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurated the week with the theme -"Shishu Surakkhar Adhikar, Din Badaler Ongikar" (Right to Protect Children Well, Commitment for Changed Days). "Our children are the foundation of our future and they will take the responsibility at every level and sector in the future. For our own betterment, our children must be given all facilities just from now on," she said.

Children are special. To children, childhood is a special time--a time for wonder, for learning, and growing. We strive to love our beautiful planet by loving and sacrificing for each other, and loving our treasures, our children. It is our utmost expectation and hope that our society, social services, our employers, and our legal and court system will actually work and function to protect our most precious resource, the children. Understanding the extent of abuses of children’s rights is a first step to building an environment where children are protected and have the opportunity to reach their full potential. But children around the world are experiencing fundamental infringements of their human rights, and suffering physical and psychological harm that has wide-reaching, sometimes irreparable effects.

There is no country untouched by child-protection concerns and violations. According to the ILO, 218 million children aged 5-14 worldwide are at work and are subjected to violence, exploitation and abuse including the worst forms of child labor in communities, schools and institutions; during armed conflict; and to harmful practices such as female genital mutilation/cutting and child marriage. Millions more, not yet victims, also remain without adequate protection.

For all children under 18,352 million in the world are economically active. But most of these children are not performing ordinary, acceptable work. Instead, fully 186 million child laborers aged 5- 14 and another 59 million aged 15-17 are classed as child laborers. This means that on a world scale, one child in six is a child laborer. In the worst forms, toil 180 million children, one in eight. Over 60 percent of the world's child laborers are living in Asia. Millions children around the world are subject to trafficking.

Poverty, bad schools, and a lack of social protection lead the most vulnerable, children, into work -- whether in agriculture, fishing or other primary industries -- or in manufacturing or service industries, a particularly pernicious category when we are speaking of children, as it includes domestic work but also illegal activities such as drug trafficking or prostitution. A poverty cycle exists, where children born into abysmal poverty are forced by circumstances to work too young, which is directly detrimental to their health but indirectly also leads to inferior education -- which only condemns the next generation to more or less the same situation. While it is abundantly clear that the poverty conundrum at the very heart of this problem where poverty breeds the worst forms of child labor and the worst forms of child labor breed poverty, socio-economic inequalities based on language, race, disability and rural-urban differences remain deeply entrenched.

There is a direct link between child labor and education. Country like Bangladesh, nearly 50 per cent of primary school students drop out before they complete grade 5, and then gravitate towards work, swelling the number of child laborers. Out of a total population of 153 million, 54 million are under 15 years. Over 20 percent of the child population is not in primary schools. According to an internal report by the Department of Primary Education, around 70 percent of children in Bangladesh who complete their primary education are unable to read, write, or count properly,

Child labor leads to a continuing cycle of poverty, even in countries undergoing a process of economic development. If the global phenomenon of child labor appears today as a ubiquitous feature of economic life, it is hardly a recent development. children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o'clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate.

Because of its developing, third-world state, child labor abounds in Bangladesh. According to the second National Child Labor Survey conducted by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics in 2002/2003, the total number of working children aged 5-17 years in rural areas is estimated at 6.4 million as against 1.5 million in urban areas. As many as 93.3 per cent of all working children aged 5-17 years operate in the informal sector. Agriculture engages 4.5 million (56.4 per cent children), while the services sector engages 2 million (25.9 per cent), and industry, 1.4 million (17.7 per cent). A total of 1.3 million children are estimated to be working 43 hours or more per week.

Children are working as maids and servants, in garment factories and engineering workshops, in the transportation sectors as helpers, in the cigarette factories, as roadside restaurant workers and street vendors, and in tea plantations and other agricultural sectors. A large number of children also work as domestic servants, mainly in cities. Report says, Dhaka itself alone is smashing the future of 300,000 children who are working for its household activities. Besides lack of salary or without salary or no fixed salary, violence ranges from verbal abuse to physical abuse and torture are part of the life of these working children that includes calling names, shouting, complaining and finding faults, the use of insulting and filthy language, obscene words, beating, slapping, whipping, and being burnt with hot spoons or rods.

Children, who are working as prostitutes, helpers in auto, painting or engineering workshops, blacksmiths, brick or stones crushers, construction workers, saw mill workers, tannery factory workers, public transport workers, scrap-shipyards, rickshaw-pullers, as well as in hazardous professions like welding, are more vulnerable to disability. Sheikh Hasina in her address requested all to give special attention to the mentally and physically challenged children of the society, but the best way to manage disability remains its prevention.

In January, 1990, Bangladesh signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child, one of the first states to do so following the promulgation of the Convention in 1989. Despite having signed and then ratified the Convention Bangladesh has yet to change its domestic law to fit with the Convention's terms and norms and juveniles in conflict with the law continue to be regulated by the Bangladesh Children Act 1974 that is the only legislation specifically addressing children. However, this law deals only with children in need of protection and children in conflict with the law, often without making a clear distinction between the two groups. The Act makes children the objects of its provisions, rather than the holders of rights. There is no comprehensive public system to protect children from violence, abuse or exploitation. Also a lack of adequate support services for children prevents full implementation of existent government policies.

A society cannot thrive if its children are forced into early labor or denied their basic rights. Policy makers, civil society leaders, employers, key stakeholders, and the enlightened citizenry of the country, including media should understand their moral responsibility to eradicate child labor from the society. And of course, government needs to be shaken by the shoulders and made to see it’s not just a case of instilling laws to quell international pressure.


Ripan Kumar Biswas is a freelance writer based in New York. E Mail : Ripan.Biswas@yahoo.com