The children are obliged to work for long hours in hazardous conditions for substantially low wages.
Child Labour is not a new phenomenon. During the Industrial Revolution children as young as the age of 4 were often employed in dangerous, often fatal conditions. We all remember the chimney sweepers singing tunes in Marry Poppins with smiles on their faces.
158 million children between the ages 5-14 are working in dangerous conditions. That is 1 in every 6 children world wide.
Dangerous circumstances may include operating large machinery without protective wear and working with chemicals and pesticides that are harmful to their health.
These children are putting their lives at risk for as little as $1 a day.
All the conditions involved with child labour have a toll on a child's mental, emotional and physical well being and development.
The employees go unseen and unheard. Working behind walls of houses as domestic help, hidden out of sight on plantations, and behind closed factory doors.
Most incidents occur in rural areas with poor households- most commonly in LEDCs.
Families are left with no choice but to send their children out to work in order to make ends meet.
Children of these households are expected to shoulder responsibilities to help support their families.
When you don't know whether you will be able to feed your children in the morning, your last priority is whether they get an education or not.
There has been an ever rising problem with child labour in Jordan.
There was an estimated 33,000 child workers in 2008 across the Kingdom.
The main cause is because financial issues are so bad within households.
Many fathers fall ill, leaving the responsibility of supporting the family to the children.
All city dwellers have seen the childeren who resort to selling chewing gum and newspapers at the traffic lights, and selling vegetables along the airport road.
They might confiscate the goods a boy is selling, thinking they are doing it for his own good; but in truth they are putting more and more families into poverty.
They have to dip their bare hands into scolding water to palpate the cocoons to produce the silk you wear.
They sit for hours in damp, dark and cold areas rolling the cigarettes that you smoke.
No one reading this post would ever send their sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, nieces or nephews out to work knowing the conditions these children are facing.
If you wouldn't let it happen to your child,
Why do you let it happen to someone else's?
Stop child labour.
Signed,
I still fail to understand how on Earth no matter how poor you are to allow your child to work and prevent them from their innocence. I would rather kill myself or even yet sell my soul to the devil than to do that. The adults are supposed to provide for the family not the other way around and I still fail to understand how you'd be able to do that just because you want to make ends meet. At the end of the day I always have believed that whenever there's a will, there'll always be a way shining its path to you.
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