The plight of children who drop out of school to help their families
Latha is a 16-year-old from Hatton, who dropped out of primary school at Grade 5. Her parents have not been to school and she says they do not know the value of education. Her mother is a labourer on a tea estate and her father finds work occasionally. Whatever money her father earns, he spends on alcohol. Latha has three siblings and shares the responsibility of looking after the family with her mother. So even though she would like to go to school, Latha has to work to help support the family.
This is just one of many such cases in Sri Lanka where children are denied an education because of poverty and the need to work to support their families. Children who enter the labour force – willingly or not – end up being employed in sectors such as construction, fireworks, motor repairs, fishing and healthcare. Others venture out as household domestic workers and in the estate sector. In many cases, the nature of their work leads to their exploitation.
Child labour does not include all work done by children. Children’s participation in work that does not affect their health and personal development, or get in the way of their education and schooling, is not considered to be child labour. Child labour usually refers to work that ‘deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development.’
At one level, the state has a duty – as enshrined in Article 27(3) of Sri Lanka’s Constitution – to protect children from ‘exploitation and discrimination.’ At another level, it has the duty to ‘promote the interest of children and youth to ensure physical, mental, moral, religious and social development.’
Though precise and up-to-date statistics on child labour are limited, they are not particularly damning. The 2008/09 Child Activity Survey by the Department of Census and Statistics (DCS 2011) reports that 1.3 percent of children between five and 11 in Sri Lanka are engaged in some form of economic activity, while 2.2 percent of children in the 12-14 age group are involved in child labour.
A review of child labour issues and concerns (this was carried out in 2010 by CEPA, for the ILO and Ministry of Labour) examined child labour issues in the fisheries, tourism and plantations sectors.
The involvement of children in potentially dangerous fishing practices, the possibility of sexual abuse and child trafficking from fishing families for domestic labour or sexual exploitation seem to be the most salient child labour issues in the fisheries sector.
In tourism, there are many activities listed as ‘the worst forms of child labour,’ but the main issue in Sri Lanka has been child sex tourism. It looks as if efforts to address this sad fact has reduced the number of incidents, but it is difficult to establish whether the situation has improved or if it has gone further underground.
Poverty among plantation-worker families – especially among those outside the regional plantation companies – means that like Latha, children can be forced into labour on our estates. They could end up looking after the family while both parents go out to work, or they may be sent out as domestic servants, or as workers in informal sector enterprises.
Ensuring that children and young people have an environment that supports their physical, mental, moral, religious and social development does not mean merely eradicating child labour and insisting that children go to school. Formal schooling that takes up all the waking hours of a child must provide a quality education if it is to compensate for the fact that a child at school is distanced from her community and from learning the rules of socialisation, oral traditions, history, and craft and traditional skills.
Engagement in the community has been, and continues to be, a way in which children and young people learn. Moreover, children like Latha unfortunately do not have a choice – the economic compulsions for survival are so great that they simply have to work.
The challenge is to protect children from exploitative labour, while at the same time creating conditions whereby they attend school… and ensuring that when they do, the learning they receive is worth it.
– Compiled by Roshni Alles
and Priyanthi Fernando
LMD
The Voice Of Business
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