Child labour is universally condemned by international bodies, including United Nations agencies, and has been deemed as a violation of human rights in various conventions over the years. The 1973 minimum age convention, C138, gave International Labour Organization (ILO) member countries the opportunity to define a minimum working age for the first time. To date, 168 countries have ratified this convention. In 1989, UNICEF set out the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which condemns the economic exploitation of children and has been ratified by 187 of the 189 United Nations member states. The convention acknowledges that children are entitled to hold rights. It also bestows a number of rights on children that should enable them to grow and develop to their full potential, while protecting them from all that is harmful, such as working for a wage. Furthermore, children are recognised as being citizens of their country of birth and productive members of society and are hence expected to have the opportunity to play an active role in society.
The minimum age convention, C138, has nevertheless been subject to fierce criticism, in particular from developing countries. The convention derives from a vision of childhood which is not in tune with the lives of children around the world. It is rooted in an idealised and romantic vision of a work-free childhood dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (Cunningham 1991). In most developing countries and developed countries, children do a certain amount of work. This is part of a developmental process that tends towards self-realisation and fulfilment rather than suffering. More generally, working is an important way to learn about a job and to participate in the local community (Boyden et al. 1998). And as Punch (2001) argues, children are in a position to negotiate boundaries with adults.
As historian Marianne Dahlèn (2007) has shown, C138 was inspired by nineteenth-century European Factory Acts and has largely been a path-dependent process that started with the birth of capitalism and the industrial revolution. It functions ‘as if’ working children in developing countries are mainly vulnerable to exploitation by industry, whereas the vast majority of working children can be found in the agricultural sector, usually labouring on family farms (ILO 2011).
Convention 138 is certainly restrictive, but it does not formally ban all types of work. It allows governments to specify jobs they consider to be ‘light work’ for children aged 13 and over (even 12 in certain cases); this is based on work practices from developed countries. The process of defining and cataloguing light work is, however, so complex that as a rule it has been totally ignored: C138 has thus been considered as a ban on all kinds of child labour (McKechnie and Hobbs 1999).
In consequence, several countries pushed for a change that resulted in the ILO C182 (Bourdillon et al. 2009). In 1999, Convention 182 was promulgated to exclusively fight against the exploitation of children in those sectors of the labour market that were considered to be extreme, and indulging in the ‘worst forms of child labour’, such as slavery and forced labour, sexual exploitation, the illegal trafficking of drugs and any work that could damage the health and well-being of children (both in formal and informal sectors). Henceforth, economically weak countries could at least prevent and control child labour in its worst forms, even if they were unable to stop children working for wages as stipulated in C138. C182 creates a distinction between harmful and non-harmful work . While the latter refers to child work, the former is associated with child labour and hence the exploitation of children. C182 has undoubtedly led to major areas of progress for children involved in prostitution, illegal trafficking and so forth, but problems have arisen in that C182 overlaps with C138. In the first section of the introduction, we discuss several issues regarding this problem of overlapping. Then, we highlight what we mean by child exploitation. Finally, we present the road map of the book.
Working: The Problem of Age
Because Convention 182 overlaps with Convention 138, there is a problem regarding the age at which different types of work are authorised or not. Defending children under C182, and at the same time maintaining the minimum age criterion, is in fact not easily compatible (Bourdillon et al. 2009). Indeed, it implies that all work carried out by children under 12 is harmful and that children who are 12 and over should be categorised according to their age and the number of hours they work. In response to this problem of overlapping, the ILO International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) separates child work into four groups (see, for instance, ILO 2002): (I) children engaged in an economic activity for at least one hour per week, (II) children engaged in child labour, that is (a) all economically active children from 5 to 11 years of age (at least one hour of economic activity per week), (b) economically active children aged 12–14, except those doing light work for less than 14 hours per week, (c) children aged 15–17 engaged in hazardous work , (III) children in hazardous work, i.e. work that is likely to harm the health, safety or moral development of a child (hazardous work not only includes activities in mining, construction and other hazardous activities, but also includes children who work for 43 hours or more per week) and (IV) children engaged in the unconditional worst forms of child labour, i.e. the sectors identified in C182 as forced or bonded labour, armed conflict, prostitution/pornography and illicit activities. This classification derives from both C138 and C182. However, at that moment, it fails to acknowledge the possibility that there are working children under the age of 12.
The classification according to age generally derives from a representation of childhood which is forged by the naturalistic theory of psychometric development (James et al. 1998). This theory is, however, only a modern conception of childhood which does not take into account the social realities of children in their relative contexts. The age limit of 12 years corresponds to the idea that below this age, all work is harmful, and even more importantly, that children have no capacity for autonomy and decision-making. However, we should acknowledge that children under the age of 12 have decision-making capacities that are already widely developed, regardless of the country. For instance, Mayall (2000) notes that 9-year-old children in London develop extensive management skills for their day-to-day school activities, they form negotiated social relationships with adults, and they provide voluntary support to their parents in the event of divorce. In addition, Alderson (2001) highlights the capacity of young children in New Zealand to exert power and to persuade their parents about decisions concerning their health.
Of course, if we are to accept that all children have decision-making abilities, or agency, we must at the same time accept that age is a determining factor in what they can do and what they can choose to do. A 1-year-old child certainly does not have the same capabilities as an 11-year-old, nor an 11-year-old compared to an 18-year-old. Children have evolving capabilities depending on their age and their context (Ballet et al. 2011). To acknowledge this fact is to seriously reconsider the work carried out by children under the age of 12 without automatically condemning it or being of the opinion that children under this age should not work, which in a way is like avoiding the problem. Even under the age of 12, the positive and negative effects of child work/labour need to be addressed. Several of the case studies in this book concentrate on the nature of the activity undertaken by children rather than on their age.
Working: Within the Family or Outside the Family Context
The second problem is also linked to the overlapping of C138 and C182. C138 covers all kinds of paid and unpaid work , apart from domestic work. Overall, work within the family sphere is not seen as being a significant issue. Unlike the hypothetically detrimental work taking place outside the family home, work within a family context is regarded as being acceptable and the economic exploitation of childre...