Final Exam
Muhammad Abdullah Butt f2021-422
Momina Zahra Shahbaz F2017-111
Child Labour In Pakistan
Labor extracted from children in Pakistan is one of the many prevalent issues. Various sectors require skills larger than their young life mainly due to poverty, lack of education and mere convenience.
young children appointed at house help since young ages.
While the world is involving more machines and using technology to perform industrial actions, replacing manual labor, Pakistan is drenching in the blood, sweat and tears of children doing labor. It is of immense significance to note that lack of law is not an issue but the implication is. The Pakistani constitution reserves the right to sue any individual or company who hires children under the age of 14 or 18 years. Penalties increase depending on the offense made against the child ranging from physical abuse to using them for drug trafficking. However, the fact that in the presence of law, more than 3 million children are doing labor all over Pakistan, speaks volume.
One such domestic child laborer, Abu Bakar, 10, said “I dont have time, why would you ask me if I study or not”, when he was asked if he studies after getting free from work. Bakar added, “my sister will wear a good school’s uniform, I know”.
Such sentiments are shared by most of the young helpers at houses, factories or workshops who either are supporting their families or they do not have anyone to support them. Children belonging to families below the poverty line often find themselves in situations where they cannot access education or basic necessities of life. In order to even remotely support themselves or families, freedom to enjoy their childhood begins to look like a luxury which they cannot have.
According to Mr. Salim, 42, young house helpers make good workers and are more active than the adult ones. His stance is no different than most house owners who prefer keeping children below the age of 8-10 years as they are easy to mold into certain behaviors and characteristics, most suitable to their living style.
U.S Department of Labor shared data in 2021 in which it was revealed that Sindh has a relatively higher percentage of children working as compared to Punjab. From age 5 to 14, about 12% of the population of children are doing labor of all sorts in Punjab and in Sindh it is a stellar number of 21.5%.
Sectors Using Underage Workers
Primary to tertiary sectors, each of them has a preference for young workers. What is unsettling is that the difference between young and underage is highly ignored.
In Pakistan, the agriculture sector is the main sector contributing 18.9% in GDP with a labor workforce of 42.3% which comprises 69.4% of underage workers. The numbers according to the data tells the popular choice of laborers and the reasons behind them are nothing less than hideous. Sometimes children are used by landlords as debt payers of their poor families who fail to repay the amount of loan or pay the due amount as rent. This has been a tradition in rural areas regardless of gender. Those children suffer from emotional, physical and sexual abuse. Furthermore, even the kids who are not traded off and work on farms or near landlords, they suffer tremendously at the hands of people in power. Excruciating working circumstances are provided to the children who do not even have a fully developed brain to process things.
Rao Umar Aslam, a landlord, confirms how most farmers are using children as laborers. “They are easy to teach and can obey things without questioning authority”, he added. This suggests not only these children are subjected to physical exertion but in fact their basic human right of freedom of speech, among others, is violated on so many levels.
Car and electric workshops are filled with children who not only do extensive hours of labor but are not even paid the minimum wages. Underage workers are considered cheap labor because people either replace their wages by giving meals in a day or they provide them with a corner to sleep at night. Similarly, brick kilns usually have children aged 5 or above to transport heavy bricks around the kiln.
What Does Child Labor Do To Children?
Exploitation of any form results in a depreciated value of one’s existence. Psychological issues are common among children who are robbed of their childhood.
Studies show that most children who are not even aware of what happens to them, suffer from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) due to all that exposure to inhumane conditions. Most children enter the age of adolescence and yet, they are not allowed to break through their circumstances.
Child labor is coined as the modern day slavery because of its similar attributes. If a family is poor, they have to send their children off to work regardless of their gender. Girls equally put in work hours and often meet with sexual or emotional harassment at the hands of their keepers. Even parents give away their children to wealthy people in exchange for monthly allowance, the money that the child working has no claim on.
The Citizen Foundation is one such organization and chain of schools that helps in keeping underprivileged children into schools and even if they have to support their family by working, at least they get basic education simultaneously. Lack of education and unsafe growing environment is one of the many aspects which take a major hit when a child is put to do labor, leaving his childhood behind.
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