This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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What’s wrong with the Global Estimates on Child Labour?

By:   []

Date: 2021-12

These are the kind of situations the ILO and other campaigners against child labour want the public to think of when we try to wrap our heads around the mind-boggling global estimates, be it 250 or 160 million children.

Is the egregious also representative?

Seemingly clear-cut statistics as well as heart-wrenching vignettes both serve the same function: they collapse a huge diversity of experiences into a few quick takeaways. This makes the story being told around child labour easy to digest, but it also makes it severely incomplete. If we allow that diversity back in, we see that the situation many ‘child labourers’ face is more complex and often much less dramatic than the ILO makes it out to be.

The data underpinning the global estimates is based on national household surveys that question families about the work children do during a particular reference week (usually the week before the survey). Children are considered to be in child labour when:

They are aged 5-11 years and have worked for one hour or more in any form of work except for unpaid household activities.

They are aged 12-14 years and have worked for 14 hours or more, including after school or during holidays.

They are aged 12-17 years and have worked for one hour or more in predefined hazardous industries or hazardous occupations (e.g., mining, quarrying, construction).

They are 15-17 years and have worked 43 hours or more per week.

This means that an 11-year-old child that goes to school full-time but has helped their parents at the market or in the fields after school or on the weekend for an hour or two, in that reference week, is considered to be one of the 160 million child labourers whose work needs to be eradicated. Needless to say, this is far removed from the images and stories of children stuck in slave-like conditions that accompany the global estimates in media and advocacy campaigns.

Ironically, the global estimates do not actually provide us with any data on child slavery, bondage, trafficking, soldiering, or prostitution. These practices go beyond the scope of the information that can be collected through standard household surveys. In short, the global estimates are instrumentalised to forward a narrow representation of child labour that shocks and ‘sells’, but that representation isn’t found in the data being gathered. On the contrary, the numbers aren’t even attempting to capture it.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/whats-wrong-with-the-global-estimates-on-child-labour/
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