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Summary: LAHORE: The exact number of child labourers in Pakistan is impossible to obtain, not least because the majority of labouring children are employed in the informal sector. The government places the official figure at 3.3 million, on the basis of a survey conducted by the Federal Bureau of Statistics, the Ministry of Labour and the ILO. However, more than 23 million children of school-going age are not attending school and are therefore potential child labourers.
Child labour is stealing the childhoods of millions of children in Pakistan, denying them their right to education and to recreation and leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, says a press release issued today by the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC). SPARC has launched its week-long campaign named “Child Labour Free Week” (14-20 November 2005) in collaboration with Coalition against Child Labour (CACL) in 11 districts of Punjab. The theme of the week this time around is, “free compulsory primary education is the only solution to end child labour.” Many working children are young girls toiling as domestic help, unpaid in their own homes or paid a pittance in others’ homes, as prostitutes raised with no other options and as cheap labour in cottage industries across the country. These girls are an invisible workforce in invisible workplaces with special needs demanding particular attention to ensure their equal right to education and to be protected from exploitation. It has been a tradition in this region for well-off families to take in a poor neighbour’s child and ensure his or her education while the child makes a contribution to the household. However, the practice has lost its welfare motivation and children are employed as cheap, easily manipulated household labour without being provided education, better nutrition, medical attention, time for recreation or any other benefits. Some are not even paid. Instead, child servants are routinely physically beaten, tortured and brutalised, some even to the point of death. Many are cut off from their families. Girls and boys are both vulnerable to sexual exploitation while employed as domestic servants. Children working in other sectors are no better off, and face the same vulnerability, exploitation and abuse. Pakistan ratified the ILO Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour in August 2001. Each member which ratifies the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention 1999 (No. 182) should take immediate and effective measures to secure the elimination of the worst forms of child labour. The Employment of Children Act (ECA) was enacted in 1991 and the Bonded Labour Act in 1992. Yet bonded labour and the employment of children continues even in hazardous occupations and in the formal sector, visible to anyone who cares to look, what to speak of the informal sector, out of the sight and the reach of enforcement mechanisms. The maximum fine under the ECA 1991 for employing children is a paltry Rs. 20,000, but the fine is routinely reduced, reportedly sometimes as low as Rs. 50, as no minimum fine has been set. In 12 years since the enactment of the law, not a single employer has been imprisoned for employing children. The government’s commitment to eliminating child labour could be best demonstrated by effective enforcement of existing legislation in order to remove children as a priority from bonded labour and the worst forms of child labour and by making facilities and resources available to provide free, quality education to all children of Pakistan. As long as children are put to work, poverty will spread and standards of living will continue to decline. In no country has poverty been eradicated by child labour, nor has any family been able to rid itself of destitution through child labour. Without planning and budgeting for a macro-level approach based on accurate and realistic figures, however, there is little doubt that there will not be enough schools, teachers and textbooks to make compulsory, quality and free education the reality for all of Pakistan’s children, boys and girls alike, and that the grandchildren of today’s child labourers will also be working their childhoods away.
Child labour in Pakistan is still justified in the name of poverty. Poverty is a major cause of child labour; however, impoverishment not only causes but also is caused by child labour. Child labor depresses the already inadequate adult wages to a point where a father and a child together earn less than the father alone was earning a year ago.