Child Labour Essay

The future of this world is dependent on the upbringing and development of today’s children. All children, such as yourselves, require and deserve to be raised with proper education, social growth and importantly a childhood filled with friends and happiness. However, some children around the world are not given these privileges and are instead raised in loneliness and fear. Children around the world are forced to work in some of the most dangerous jobs for up to twenty hours a day, barely paid. A job can be as dangerous as packing gunpowder into a canister. With a single spark, an explosion ripping through the factory, killing all the children inside. Or, children could be chained to the ground, weaving intricate carpets for twenty hours straight. Child workers would be paid two to three cents each! If the money from the work was saved up to buy a simple McDonalds chicken burger in India, it would take the child an entire month!

This work, which deprives children of their physical and emotional development, their childhood and dignity is known as child labour. Child labour removes the chance of children to gain their full potential in life and is increasing in numbers and forms at an alarmingly fast rate.

Imagine being enslaved and separated from your family. You have no opportunity to attend school or make friends but you are required to do labour intensive work for the majority of the day. After work, hungry and tired, you have no house to go to for rest but live on the streets begging from those who walk past you. This is the typical life of a child labourer. Those who suffer from child labour must suffer no more. An end to this is vital for the future of society. Child labour jeopardizes the growth in children’s mental, social and physical capabilities. These children are stripped of the opportunity to attend school and thus are also stripped of the opportunity of making friends and learning. A study that compared working ten year-old Lebanese children with children that attended school show that those who work suffer more cases of light-headedness, fatigue, impaired memory and depression. The statistics of child labour are alarming. 168 million children are suffering through child labour. 168 million! That is fourteen percent of the world child population!

Most of us complain about having to do chores and homework instead of playing COD or DOTA or other games. Next time you complain, think about the child labourers, who are abused and have to work instead of doing chores and homework.

Children today must be raised in the best possible way. Forcing children to work, abusing them and let them fend for themselves on the streets is not the best possible way for them to grow up. Child labour must be ended. Like Martin Luther King, I have a dream. That dream is to have every child be able to go to school, for every child to have a childhood full of dreams. To free children of the horror of child labour.