The Case of Female Child Labor

Abstract

Child labor¹ is a long-standing practice that continues in numerous cultures around the world. Although historically the practice has included both male and female children, the emphasis here is primarily on female child labor. Throughout its history the practice of employing female children has encompassed a wide geographical spread and has, arguably, consumed as many countries as the practices of female circumcision, infanticide, and prostitution together.

The UN’s International Labour Organization estimates that as many as 200 million children go to work rather than to school. They are in developing nations throughout the world, making everything from clothing and shoes to handbags and carpets. These children are the dark side of the new global economy, an international underclass working 12 or more hours a day, six or seven days a week. In the carpet factories of India, they are often separated from their families for years at a time. In the leather-handbag plants of Thailand, children report being forced to ingest amphetamines just to keep up their strength. In the charcoal industry of Brazil, tens of thousands of children work in a soot-drenched hell producing ingredients for steel alloys used in the manufacture of American cars.

Schapiro (1996, p. 205)

Irrespective of what they do and what they think about what they do, the mere fact of their being children sets children ideologically apart as a category of people excluded from the production of value. The dissociation of childhood from the performance of valued work has been increasingly considered a yardstick of modernity. International agencies and highly industrialized countries now turn this yardstick into a tool to condemn as backward and undemocratic those countries with a high incidence of child labor.

Nieuwenhuys (1996, p. 246)