Essay About Child Labour And International Regulations

Child Labor
Essay Preview: Child Labor
Report this essay
1.1. Why Child Labour?
As I visited my brother in Cambodia in March 2004, I saw, to my horror, little girls of
10 to 12 years old everywhere on the streets and the bars selling themselves to the wealthy
western tourists who visit the country. This was the first touch I had to the reality of
working children in the developing countries. My first reaction was pity and disgust as I
watched the girls. Next, I simply wanted to cry. The rest of my time in Cambodia I kept
wondering how was it possible that, despite all the international regulations on child labour
and trafficking of children, the streets of Phnom Penh were full of Vietnamese child
prostitutes. When I then got a chance to investigate something through my MA thesis in
Finland, to me it was clear from the beginning that this was the topic I wanted to study.
Something, in the end, must be wrong with the international child labour regulations if the
reality in the developing countries is still so horrid. My initial idea was to study all the
international regulations that relate to child labour but eventually, after some investigation, I
arrived at the conclusion that the International Labour Organisation (ILO) was the
international organisation responsible for the international child labour politics. In the end, all
the other international organisations working in the field of child labour (such as UNICEF
and the World Bank) base their regulations on those of the ILO. I also realised that the
national laws on child labour worldwide are, to a great extent, based on the regulations of the
ILO. Finally, I reached the conclusion that child labour as such is such a complicated concept
that it may simply be impossible to draft regulations on it that could be applied all over the
world. My question was, therefore, how was the ILO attempting to make universal child
labour policies and why? And was it possible, due to the complexity of the concept of child
labour, to draft universally applicable legislation on child labour? Asking myself these
questions I investigated on the topic and