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13 yr old maid's plight casts light on child labor in India
Say what now?? "The International Labor Organization has found that India has 12.6 million laborers between the ages of 5 and 14,"
FIVE and 14??
From NYTimes
NEW DELHI ? The girl?s screams were brittle and desperate. Neighbors in the suburban housing complex looked up and saw a child crying for help from an upstairs balcony. She was 13 and worked as a maid for a couple who had gone on vacation to Thailand. They had left her locked inside their apartment.
After a firefighter rescued her, the girl described a life akin to slavery, child welfare officials said. Her uncle had sold her to a job placement agency, which sold her to the couple, both doctors. The girl was paid nothing. She said the couple barely fed her and beat her if her work did not meet expectations. She said they used closed-circuit cameras to make certain she did not take extra food.
In India, reported to have more child laborers than any other country in the world, child labor and trafficking are often considered symptoms of poverty: desperately poor families sell their children for work, and some end up as prostitutes or manual laborers.
But the case last week of the 13-year-old maid is a reminder that the exploitation of children is also a symptom of India?s rising wealth, as the country?s growing middle class has created a surging demand for domestic workers, jobs often filled by children.
The Indian news media, usually a bullhorn for middle-class interests, ran outraged front-page articles. But the case was hardly unique. Last week, an 11-year-old Nepalese girl, working as a servant, said that her employer had beaten her with a rolling pin, according to the police.
Indian law offers limited safeguards and limited enforcement to protect such children, and public attitudes are usually permissive in a society where even in the lowest rungs of the middle class, families often have at least one live-in servant.
?There is a huge, huge demand,? said Ravi Kant, a lawyer with Shakti Vahini, a nonprofit group that combats child trafficking. ?The demand is so huge that the government is tending toward regulation rather than saying our children should not work but should be in school.?
The International Labor Organization has found that India has 12.6 million laborers between the ages of 5 and 14, with roughly 20 percent working as domestic help. Other groups place the figure at 45 million or higher. Unicef has said India has more child laborers than any other country in the world.
Many of these children come from India?s poorest states, either through shadowy job placement agencies or by kidnapping. In 2011, more than 32,000 children were reported missing in India, according to government crime statistics.
Mala Bhandari, who runs Childline, a government hot line for child workers, said India?s urbanization and the rise of two-income families were driving demand for domestic help. Children are cheaper and more pliant than adults; Ms. Bhandari said a family might pay a child servant only $40 a month, less than half the wage commonly paid to an adult, if such servants are paid at all.
Indian law deems anyone younger than 18 a minor. But the Juvenile Justice Act of 2000 also creates a loophole: Children between 14 and 18 are allowed to work a maximum of six hours a day in nonhazardous work. Children younger than 14 are prohibited from working as servants, a statute that is widely flouted. Employers are required to provide daily education and document the child?s daily break hours, though most families ignore such requirements because enforcement is largely nil.
?What happens within the four walls of a home, nobody knows,? said Ms. Bhandari, who contended that while abuse was not the norm, it was not rare.
Domestic work employs millions of people in India, most of them adults. India?s rich often have a retinue of servants, drivers and other helpers. Mukesh Ambani, the billionaire industrialist, reportedly has several hundred domestic workers in his skyscraper residence in Mumbai, the country?s financial capital, with some of his servants trained by one of India?s elite hotels. Some Indian families living abroad also take a servant; last month, an Indian maid in New York won a $1.5 million judgment against an Indian diplomat and her husband for abusive treatment.