Where’s the global outrage over this modern-day slavery? | Kevin Watkins | Global development | guardian.co.uk
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2012/dec/10/global-outrage-modern-day-slavery?intcmp=122
Headline figures tell part of the story. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), there are 215 million five to 17-year-olds trapped in child labour. Globally, numbers are falling at a desperately slow pace. On current trends there will still be 170 to 190 million child labourers in 2020. In Africa the numbers are going up.
Half of all working children are employed in what the ILO describes as “hazardous conditions”. That’s a polite euphemism for conditions that would have shocked even the most hardened Victorian social reformers.
In Mali, boys as young as eight are digging shafts for gold mines and working in tunnels 30 metres underground. They are among the 2 million children worldwide employed by small-scale mines. Another 30 million children, most of them girls, are employed as domestic servants, working long hours for very low pay and facing physical abuse. And there’s a good chance that the metals in your mobile phone include products mined by children working under the control of warlords in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.