The menace and horror of child labor in Pakistan

Oblivious of your identity I can accuse you of supporting businesses that exploit children, period! Don’t be outraged; odds are you may have done so. Maybe you bought a Walt Disney T-Shirt for your daughter unaware that a 12-year-old girl in Haiti stitched your present. Or maybe you couldn’t resist that gorgeous carpet from India ignorant that a 10-year-old boy fettered to his loom knotted it. Or that a 6-year-old factory worker in Pakistan produced the Nike soccer ball that your family kicks around in the backyard.
Welcome to the dark world of dismay and anguish. Hail the never-ending nightmare of child labor. It’s a sordid affair that in an era of technical advancement, children from nearly every nation are being callously browbeaten with labor.
What could be worst then when parents sell their own children to get work or money to survive? These ‘bonded’ children then have to work off the debt; which is near to impossible regarding the meager wages and outrageously high interest rate. These slave laborers are violated in sadistic and horrendous manners and their masters buy, sell, or trade them at their expediency in the same or a different country.
Forcing children to work in vile conditions, diminishing their basic rights and exploiting their innocence is criminal. Child labor not only callously robs children of their childhood but also contributes to adult unemployment. While being cheaper labor, they are defenseless against bulling, beatings, and sexual abuse; are easier to control and are threatened into obedience. This wheel of child labor continues generation after generation as children grow into unskilled adults who become unemployed as the next generation of children takes their former jobs.
Especially in developing countries where there is a thin line between poverty and survival many children are forced into working full time. Exposed to the harsher realities of life at tender ages like 6 or 7, these children comprehend survival, sense of responsibility and the desire to share the financial burden and whatever comes in their way including prejudice, injustice and rejection.
The child labor is paid one-third of an adult’s wages and on top of that not only are the factory conditions appalling but also hazardous to health. There’s no ventilation and use of the reeking unsanitary bathrooms is allowed two times a day. The concept of sick leave doesn’t exist and suspicion of formation of a union results in instant and illegal redundancy.
Textile mills and the carpet industries have eight-year-olds tending looms and breathing air thick with cotton dust. Working at the looms can damage the eyes, cause lung disease, stunted growth, and a susceptibility to arthritis. Five-year-olds work hip-deep in slurry pits at brick kilns and adolescent girls stoke furnaces in 160-degree heat. At the tanneries nursing mothers, as young as 13 to 16 years, mix tubs of chemical dye.
Children are forced to work in 13 to 15 hour shifts that can last up to 22 hours with only 3 days off in nine months. The production goals are often ludicrous, forcing workers to stay long after their shifts are over to reach their quota at super human speed.
When we speak of child labor, the first thing that comes to mind is the third world countries whose governments are condemned and industries held responsible for exploiting children. However, only a few know and realize that the developed nations are equally responsible in the act and for providing a market for child produced goods.
United States imports clothing items from China made by young girls from 7 to 17 years of age often working ninety-six hours at fourteen cents per hours. United States labels that you don using slave labor are Ralph Lauren, Liz Claiborne, Bugle Boy, Wal-Mart, J.C. Penny, Sears, The Limited (Structure), T.J. Max, Casual Corner, Kmart Cherokee Jeans and many more. (Naming Names)
Of all the places in the world you certainly wouldn’t expect "the happiest place on earth" would have their mementos being made by slave labor. Ironic as it is, The Walt Disney Company is one of the biggest companies that have contractors in other countries making their toys and clothes. In Haiti, girls stitch Aladdin T-shirts for 28 cents an hour, in Burma-6 cents an hour. In Vietnam, 17-year-old girls who work 7 days a week for 17 cents an hour make toys. 101 Dalmatians and Lion Kings shirts were made in a factory in Bangkok while working 72 hours per week. On the other hand, in 1996 it was estimated that Michael Eisner, the CEO of the Disney Corporation, made about $102,000 per hour. Disney Land may be "the happiest place on earth" for you but is it also for those who slave for it?
In Cambodia children work in salt fields, agricultural fields, pack the fish in ice, load bricks unto carts and wheel the heavy freight, operated heavy brick making machinery, work in garbage dump while they are paid half of a adult’s wages and live miserably in makeshift shacks.
In Mexico children live on the streets, sleep on the pavements, work illegally on the roads washing windshields, selling candy or shining shoes. Most of the children are males between the ages of 12 and 17 earning the equivalent of about $8 a day.
Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels recruit child soldiers in guerrilla war against government forces; some as young as age 12 were enlisted as combatants after heavy fighting in the northern peninsula of Jaffna in May last year.
Cambodia also has a long history of child soldiers, especially under Khmer Rouge. However, even to this day, hundreds of kids between 10-15 are forced to fight in northwestern Cambodia.
Children in India and Pakistan sell wares at traffic signals, weave carpets, handle machinery without adult supervision, plough and harvest fields, work in auto workshops, and tea stands. While child labor in Sialkot, Pakistan, responsible for 75% of the world production of footballs, has brought more recognition to the footballs then the game itself. Children as young as five stitch footballs for famous trade names such as Nike, Puma, Decathlon, Adidas or Reebok while earning less than $ 1 a day.
To flee poverty, Africa's children are exploited by traffickers, who make billions of dollars a year by ‘fresher flesh’ for as little as 14 dollars a head and sending them to slavery in Europe or the Gulf. Girls barely five to eight years’ olds work as domestic slaves or are destined to prostitution or miners. Tanzania girls under 15 work in nightclubs where they are victims of sexual abuse.
Child trafficking is a thriving business as lucrative as smuggling of drugs. In the early nineties, the Human Rights Commission research revealed that scores of Pakistani boys between the ages of 4-10 are sold to the sports-loving Sheikhs of Gulf countries to be used as jockeys or camel boys in camel races and the average yearly flow of children is over 6000. There they were chained, beaten and malnourished to keep their weight down.
Child trafficking world over has multiple dimensions that make it tricky to recognize and acknowledge in countries where it is rampant in many sectors of urban and rural informal economy, as domestic servants or sex slaves. The practice is difficult to control as traffickers uses the array of informal authorities at internal level and it is delicate to label people as child traffickers when they are traveling abroad with supposed nieces, nephews, or friend's children. Poverty, cultural practice and anticipation often lead illiterate parents to entrust their children to more affluent relatives or acquaintances who are unreliable.
This year in May, 250 children allegedly sold to human traffickers by their parents or guardians were discovered aboard a slave ship in the Gabonese seal port where it was refused docking. It returned to Benin's main seaport in Cotonou where it had loaded its human cargo. Because most of the children were escorted, only 23 children could be confirmed as slaves. Alfonso Gonzalez of Terre des Hommes, a local non-governmental organization, told Reuters that some families had received between approximately $13.5 for each child.
These children are not to be blamed; their only fault lies in being born poor or being kidnapped. What can you accuse Sakina of? A twelve-year-old who has stitched countless ball since she was five, only for other children to play with because by nightfall she is too bruised and weary and can’t even dream of owning a ball. Or Sila Kumari, a domestic worker who since 9 years of age started work at 3am to work in 5 houses until her day was over at around 10pm and was filled with thrashings and abuses.

Will you not sympathies with Ashraf, whose master beat him brutally, charred his hands in the flames of a gas-stove, barbarically branded him with a red-hot iron rod as a punishment for drinking left over milk after being kept hungry for two days. And not to be forgotten is twelve-year-old former slave Iqbal Masih, acclaimed by human-rights organizations around the world for his crusade against child labor. A small, ailing boy, bonded at age four to a village carpet maker spent six years cruelly chained to a loom, which he worked fourteen hours a day. Fed just enough to keep him functioning, he was beaten more often than the other children for defied the master and attempting to escape. At ten he finally slipped his fetters and sought the help of the BLLF. The International Labor Organization in Sweden honored him; Reebok presented him with its prestigious Human Rights Youth in Action Award in Boston and ABC News featured him as its Person of the Week.Iqbal’s struggle continues and his sacrifice prevails through other young fighters against wretched child labor, for on the evening of April 16, 1995, Iqbal was shot dead by the ‘carpet mafia’ while visiting relatives in a rural village.So next time you encounter a five-year-old child sells plastics combs near a traffic signal, don’t scorn him. Weary as he is, this tiny child’s strength is his widowed mother and a younger sister. Remember that there are no ‘happily afters’ to these children’s tales, their despondent survivals aren’t Cinderella stories because their lives aren’t fairy tales to begin with. Sources:(“Naming Names,”) 1-18, http://www.nlcnet.org/China/names.htm(Shapiro) Bruce. Mickey Mice Unite. www.salonmag.com. /may97/media/media970529 (Disney/Haiti Update) www.Summersault.com/~agj/clr/newsletter.news_10.html63 Comments: shezray_tenver.yahoo.com