Picture this scenario: Aliya, a nine year old child working in a beer-making factory for 12-16 hours a day, seven days a week. She supports her family in helping them to repay a loan. She works for a measly lump of burnt porridge, sleeps on a little rock with a rag to ward off the cold, is beaten senseless for any tiny error made in her work and forcibly returned every time she tried to escape.
Child laborers face the same health risks adult workers do, but at a much higher level. The lack of healthy safe working conditions can be even more devastating and long lasting, resulting in fatal accidents, permanent disabilities, poor health, psychological and emotional damage. Child laborers have a greater risk of losing their hearing, a lower heat tolerance so work may result in sun strokes and fevers, a greater need for food and rest so having to work for long periods of time would result in poor muscle and skeletal growth, are small in size and are unskilled, uneducated and untrained so they are more prone to accidents, have higher chemical absorption rates which could lead to deformations and mutations. They have to work with large machinery and razor-sharp tools, work in very unhygienic conditions where there is a lack of toilets and clean, washing facilities.
The emotional trauma of having to work long hours on a daily basis can harm the social and educational development. Aggression, delinquency, use of illegal substances like marijuana and heroin in an attempt to imitate the rash men at work and falling asleep in school means that very few children complete higher education and most drop out.
Young workers are still growing and developing so they have greater needs that have to be taken into consideration when determining their healthy, safe working conditions. Children should be living a fun, happy, care-free environment, not forced to work. Child laborers have to work due to poverty and because of poverty, they will face additional risks like poverty related diseases (malnutrition, anemia, fatigue, etc) and so can die a premature death.
Children of today are tomorrow’s future, so they must be allowed to grow into good citizens, not be destroyed by undertaking adult work.
