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| Sunday, 7 December 2003 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Children in bondage by Jayanthi Liyanage For children in the plantation sector, poverty is not the main issue. It is alcohol-addiction of their parents and elders.
This practice is identified by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as one of "the worst forms of child labour" in Article 3 of Convention 182 concerning the prohibition and immediate action for the elimination of the worst forms of child labour. Sri Lanka is among the 159 states which has ratified the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1989. While the country has ratified all the eight conventions of the CRC, the rights of the child have largely remained a myth specially when it comes to the plantation sector. These issues were highlighted at a recent workshop on child labour, held by the National Workers Congress (NWC) at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute (SLFI), for the management representatives from 11 estates where the NWC had previously conducted a baseline survey on "Strengthening of plantation communities to prevent child domestic labour" to identify children and families vulnerable to child labour. Estates from Polgahawela, Deniyaya, Hatton, Matugama and Koggala were screened by the survey which collected information on 1,808 children of 872 families in 12 plantations. It was barely two weeks ago, that the Sinhala press reported the death of a young mother and a father from Madolkelewatte, both of whom their 10-year-old daughter had given evidence as being in the habit of habitually getting drunk with arrack (Dinamina -27.11.2003). When the father came home drunk, the couple had had a row, resulting in the mother pouring kerosene over herself and lighting herself up. In the melee to rescue her, the father too perished, leaving the children orphaned.
Fundamental principles How can we implement the rights of child, to combat the malady of child labour? The fundamental principles of the CRC recognise a child to have "equal value" as that of an adult which gives him all the rights enjoyed by an adult. Among such rights are the right to information, education, health, development, protection, to be free from torture, to live with one's family, the freedom of association and expression and the right to self-esteem. Article 3 (1) of the Convention articulates the principle of "the best interests" of the child which balances the need for providing protection while respecting the child. One instance of how this principle has been grossly misused is in a parental decision to send a child for domestic labour, depriving him or her of a proper education. The question of increasing the minimum age for children for admission to employment as per the recommendation 146 of the Minimum Age Convention or Convention 138 of the CRC was raised at the workshop by Shyama Salgado, National Programme Manager, ILO/IPEC. Article 2 of this convention recommends raising this age to 16 years for all sectors of economic activity. "Our difficulty is that the compulsory school age for Sri Lankan children is from 5-14 years," said Salgado. "Unless this too is changed, raising the employable age gives no protection to children who are employed at the age of 14." There is also the fact that children who reach the compulsory school ceiling of 14 years have still not gained their GCE Ordinary Level qualification, which bars them from employment which could give them economic security, independence and respect in society. While the global employable age remains 15 years, Sri Lanka adapted it to 14 to be parallel with the school age ceiling. Salgado estimates an overwhelming figure of 100,000 children in the country to be vulnerable to child labour, with upto 10,000 children already engaged in labour. Convention 182 of the CRC lists the worst forms of child labour as practices of slavery such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage, serfdom, forced or compulsory labour, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict, use of a child for illicit activities, prostitution or the production of pornography or pornographic performances and work which harms the health, safety or morals of children. Auctioning children Input from the workshop participants revealed a startling practice of auctioning estate children for domestic labour when they came to Colombo at festival times. "It is easy to use children as labourers," said Prof. Harendra de Silva, Chairman, National Child Protection Authority. "They have not been told the norms of society and cannot comprehend what is right or wrong. Quite a number of them are not even paid. Their parents come once a year to collect a few thousand rupees. The urban homes need labour and there are organised traffickers who bring in children for such homes and get paid periodically." He has identified child labourers to come mostly from the slums of the North-Western Province, tea/rubber estates and the poorer homes of the Moneragala District. The illiteracy of the parents, triggers the vicious circle of labour from generation to generation and the family problems of being under single parenthood due to one parent deserting, or orphanhood, play a major part in forcing children to labour. The NWC survey found 191 families to be single parent families, of which the highest number came from Matugama. 127 families were mother-headed. Lack of parental skills in alcoholics, to provide nutrition, and prevent sexual abuse of their own children was another impediment. The solution obviously lay in empowering the children through better education. The NWC survey found that the education needs of the estates surveyed had not been addressed in a proper manner. "A marginalisation of the quality of education," as Prof. De Silva described it. Either the teachers were in short supply, or they came to school late. The poor quality of transport prevented the teachers and the children alike in attending schools regularly. Some schools were closed down for "poor attendance" though not due to a lack of school age children in the area. Children with potential for learning had to move to schools as far as 40 km away. Children in the plantations were generally admitted late to school making them older than their peers in the same grade which created disciplinary problems to the teachers. There was marked truancy. Children not attending school were found to be scrubby and ill-mannered. "The bulk of the children going to school in the plantation areas find their present and future too bleak to continue with their education, and are forced to drop out early, creating a vicious cycle of events which eventually end up in their disillusioned parents sending them out to be employed," sums up the survey report. All this is in a scenario where estate children now find plucking, tapping, weaving and other sundry work in tea and rubber plantations unattractive, and if in-depth interventions are not found to address this desire for social mobility, carries the potential of raking up social unrest of a grave nature. In the 12 plantations surveyed, 34 children were found to be child domestics while 15 children had been rescued from domestic labour and 457 children had dropped out of school. What was alarming was that 203 of them (92 boys and 111 girls) had dropped out between Grades 1-5. The highest drop-outs in this range came from Matugama, Deniyaya and Hatton which the survey recorded as the prime areas for child domestic labour. "Address this as a rights issue," said Prof. De Silva. "It is we adults who fight for the rights of children by proxy and we need to get out of the process of justifying child labour." How do we make the CRC relevant was clarified by Shyamala Gomez, Senior Consultant, Human Rights Commission and former Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of Colombo. "In identifying the best interests of the child, the most important principle is the non-discrimination on any basis." ILO has tackled the issue of non-schooling estate children by designing a package of non-formal, vocational and catch-up education and psycho social and legal aid, but was impeded by a lack of multi-task partner to implement it. In a bid to go lateral to find partners who specialised in each component, Salgado initiated discussions with Plantation Human Development Trust (PHDT) on the logistics of taking the package to estate children. As Meghamali Aluwihara, Industrial Relations Advisor, Employers' Federation of Ceylon (EFC) reported, trained volunteers are already at work in the estates and such volunteers could form an ideal channel for providing non-formal education to estate children to overcome an otherwise inevitable fate as child workers. |
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Plantations
are the main source of child domestic labour in Sri Lanka. a grave concern
is the malaise of debt bondage where children are sold for service in lieu
of unpayable debts. Surveys reveal about twenty five per cent of the
country's estate children to be under debt bondage.
NWC's
baseline survey observed a rampancy of sale and distribution of illicit
hooch as a sub industry in the plantation sector and the estate
managements were highly disturbed by the sub culture of substance abuse
brought on by it. Thalarasara, an ayurvedic tonic, is used in large
quantities as an intoxicant. The survey also found that the parents
intoxicated by alcohol used the crudest language and engaged in open sex
in the presence of their young children. Almost half of the parental
income was spent on alcohol and such parents were the role models for
these children, who carried these habits forward to the next generation.
