HIDDEN DOMESTIC CHILD LABOUR
Introduction
...Operational
Areas...Reasons...Problems
..Types...Mode
of Wages... Pictures
The problem of Hidden Domestic Child Labour seems to be resistant to
any direct approach by adults to employers. Since so much publicity
has been devoted to the plight of all forms of child labour, people
are quite conscious that such practices are wrong. At the same time,
this does not deter them from employing children and in many cases exploiting
and misusing them.
While legal battles rage and advocacy takes its time, there are children
growing up in factories, shops and private homes deprived of some of
the most basic rights even to food, medical care and sleep.
It was this realization that moved us at Loreto Sealdah to do something
practical to alleviate the suffering of such young children. “
Her name is TODAY” – today her bones are being formed, her
brain is ready for education – if we miss today, she misses out
on life. How many young lives and how much talent is lost to India through
child labour !
Realising that the direct approach by adults would not be effective,
we involved the regular school students of class V – VII for this
work.
They search about in their own areas, high rise flats, whatever, and
wherever they find a domestic child labourer, they approach the employers
for permission to take him / her out for an hour or so a week to play
with her. Few employers can withstand the persistence of determined
10 to 12 year olds who have made it their mission to befriend these
HDCLs and if possible even get them into school.
When they take them out from their employers houses, they listen to
them, play with them and even teach them, and every few weeks they arrange
get togethers at Loreto Sealdah where they can play, act out dramas,
sing , draw and develop their talents.
In this way, we hope to build up a picture of these children and of
their employers which will later on enable us to design programmes to
so affect people emotionally that they will feel ashamed to employ a
child.
The first attempt we made to ascertain the total number of such HDCLs
in Kolkata was accomplished through asking each school to collect the
names and addresses of whatever children they found in their areas working
in people’s houses. That first count netted 4,900 children for
which we have the names and addresses of their employers.
