Children’s Rights or Employers’ Rights?: The ‘Destigmatisation’ of Child Labour

Abstract

Estimating the extent of child labour has never been an easy task. For obvious reasons, governments in countries characterised by high levels of child labour are notoriously reluctant to seek reliable data, or to publish it where it does exist. Doing so would be to advertise their failure to abide by international child labour conventions, which many have ratified but, for whatever reasons, have failed to enforce. Also, by its nature, much child labour, particularly its more hazardous and exploitative variants — such as child prostitution, child armed combatants, trafficked children — is illegal, ‘hidden’ and difficult to quantify.