Amalia Fawcett: Child poverty too complicated for quick fix

Following the news that 470 former Indian child labourers await a decision about their fate while factory owners pose as relatives to get them back to work, we need to ask why the causes of child labour have not been tackled.

These specific child labourers, who are being housed in a night shelter while the Government wonders what to do with them, bear a striking resemblance to children in Bangladesh who were removed from child labour in 1992.

About 180 million children around the world are involved in some of the worst forms of child labour. Although it is not the only cause, poverty plays a major role.

It is a fact that child labour is a transgression of human rights. It is also a fact that these boys in India, who range in age from 5 to 14, now have nowhere to go. Because the poverty causing them to work has not been dealt with, they risk being pushed into more dangerous occupations now they have lost their embroidery jobs.

This is what happened when the Child Labour Deterrence Act, commonly referred to as the Harkin Bill, was pushed through the US senate. It aimed to ban garments that were made using child labour from being imported into the US from Bangladesh. The bill was successful, monitors were trained and garment factories were inspected regularly to ensure no child labour was used.

Eight and a half thousand children left the garment factories, almost overnight, but the poverty that pushed them into work in the first place was still present and many ended up in increasingly risky money-earning schemes.

The children believed the campaign that lost them their jobs was an act of hatred, and many, like those locked up in India, wanted to work to help support their families.

It was considered a lesson learned. Officials involved in implementing the Harkin Bill admitted that they needed to have schemes in place to be sure when children are removed from child labour they have safe alternatives, their families have some steady income-generation schemes, and schooling is available.

Above all, the reasons they work must be addressed. Yet only 13 years after the Harkin Bill was first set in motion, the lesson is being ignored in India. If a family's income source is stabilised and schooling is provided for the children, they are less likely to be forced to send their kids to work.

Other schemes to free children from child labour have been successful because they target the reasons children are pushed into work. Programmes such as World Vision's Born to be Free initiative in Tamil Nadu state includes income-generation schemes for families whose children have been working.

Once a child is freed from the labour, they are sent to a transit school to help them catch up in their studies so they can join their peers in school or be retrained in a skill that can provide a steady income.

Schemes such as these acknowledge the situations of the families and the wishes of the children and target poverty at one of its sources by providing training and education for the next generation.

Poverty is a transgression of children's human rights and it results in other rights, such as education, freedom, a family life and the right to play, being taken away. But a solution is not simply to remove the children from work and send them home - it must target poverty and provide viable alternatives to child labour for families to gain an income.

* Amalia Fawcett is an advocacy/policy analyst for World Vision New Zealand.