Stories from the survivors of child labour
In this episode, Fuzz Kitto tells stories that are heartbreaking but also shed light on child labour. These stories are told with the hope that we can gain understanding of the complexities, the underlying causes, the sometimes unfathomable desperation that parents and caregivers experience, where child labour occurs. Listen to Slavery Unravelled - Conversations about being slavery free wherever you get your podcasts!
G’day! And welcome to Slavery Unravelled. My name is Fuzz Kitto and I am CoDirector of Be Slavery Free. In this podcast I want to give you an introduction to child labour.
The ILO Definition of child labour is defined by ILO as work that deprives children of their childhoods, their potential and dignity and that is harmful to physical and mental development and interferes also with schooling.
The 2023 Global Slavery Index estimates there are 12 million children in child labour globally.
There are many forms of child labour and worst forms of child labour. It include situations of child labour which are characterised by slavery, sexual exploitation, illicit activities and hazardous work that is likely to harm the health, safety or morale of children. Examples include forced begging, domestic servitude, work in quarries, brick kilns and dangerous work in the fishing industry for long hours and no pay, and child soldiers.
In this podcast I want to introduce you to child labour through stories. Then next week we will look at some deeper understandings and the causes of child labour.
Ebo
When Ebo was 8 years old, his mother uprooted him from his home town in Ghana and handed control of the him to his elder sister and her husband.
They promptly put him to work in highly dangerous conditions on Lake Volta. For long hours every day, he had to paddle their canoe, cast nets and perform the dangerous task of diving deep to untangle nets. When he was not working on the lake, he had to de-scale, smoke and package the fish for sale at the market.
He was beaten and insulted whenever he made a mistake.
For 8 years Ebo worked as a slave for his sister and her husband. He did all kinds of dangerous work.
He made friends with another boy who had been trafficked and forced to work on Lake Volta; where they fished all day in their canoe, in extreme heat and cold or in storms that sometimes capsized their boat.
They were given little to eat.
Sometimes they watched as the dead bodies of children and adults floated past their canoe in the hazardous waters.
“We work three times daily. We start work at 4 a.m., work till noon, and then come back home and go on the lake again at 2 p.m. until 6 p.m. then we go to cast the last net at night.”
When Ebo was 16, he was rescued by Challenging Heights — an NGO working to free children from slavery. He was taken to a centre some 10 hours away from the lake, not far from his home town. Here, he spent 5 months undergoing an intensive rehabilitation program designed to take into account the physical, psychological, behavioural and educational needs of former child slaves.
Ebo then returned to his home town, to live with his aunt — who supports him, with the help of Challenging Heights, so that he can attend school.
Today Ebo is happy to be back at school and savours his new freedom. He plays football and dreams of one day becoming a bank manager.
Sandy
Sandy can't see his hands in the darkness of his shack made from palm bark and zinc on a hillside in the Dominican Republic. But he feels them because of the pain from wounds on his left thumb caused by the knife he uses to trim garlic plants.
It is dawn and he has to hurry if he is to get a place in the landowner's truck. He jumps from the worn mattress that he shares with three other brothers. He doesn't have breakfast because there isn't any. Nor does he wear working boots because he has none.
Sandy manages to climb into the back of the truck before the others, who are adults and other children like him, without a childhood.
In the cold and fog, the icy wind cuts his unprotected face. Sandy doesn't look beyond his hands and forgets his discomfort. His hands are his most valuable working assets. They pick potatoes, extract onions, dig up lettuce, behead beets and cut and gather garlic bulbs. He knows that he can bring home between 80 and 120 pesos, or $5-7, to contribute to the low family income and to buy a pair of shoes. He works in the fields every day from dawn to the middle of the afternoon.
Sandy does not go to school.
For a short time a few years ago, when the family lived in the mountains, he took a long and steep road to go to classes. "But, we were so far away that he never learned anything," says his mother, Viola Delgado. "How could he learn if with the sweating of the trek he forgot what he was taught in school?"
A mother of eight children, the 40-year-old Mrs. Delgado is illiterate, like her husband. In her hut, only a thin sheet separates the cramped "living room" from the beds. A wooden table and wobbly chairs make up the furnishings. Like other huts in El Chorro, there is no electricity or running water. There is no nearby faucet or toilet.
El Chorro is on a hill above the Constanza valley, which is the most fertile in the country. The people living in these huts, about five minutes from town, are farm workers who have come here because there is plenty of agricultural work. But they remain poor because pay is so low.
As soon as they reach a certain height and age, the children go with their parents to the plantations.
They are exposed to the excessive chemicals, or herbicides and pesticides, that are applied to the fields. They are often barefoot and underfed – they drink bottled refreshment to keep them going during the workday. The children are often sick.
Sandy says he would like to study and continue to help his family. His mother also would like him to go to school. "It's more advantageous for me if they go to school, even if they don't earn anything, for they don't make much with a day's work anyway."
There are helpers and community workers in Constanza and El Chorro who are encouraging the children to go to school. They see a big difference in the children after just a short time at school.
The kids speak better, keep their notebooks tidy and are interested in school, not earning money. Sandy will soon be one of those children.
Johanne
Johanne, a 15-year-old Haitian girl, became a victim of human trafficking and a child domestic slave — a ‘Restavek’ — at the age of nine. When she was just 11 years old, Johanne lost her left hand in the 2010 earthquake that ravaged Port-au-Prince.
Francoise, a child advocate from the organisation Restavek Freedom Foundation (RFF), first met Johanne in 2011. She was living in Port-au-Prince with a woman whom she called “Aunty.”
Forced to perform numerous household chores, including carrying water in 20 litre buckets up and down the hillside every day, she was also subjected to abuse and prohibited from attending school.
Francoise negotiated with Johanne’s “Aunt” to allow Johanne to go to school. Still, Johanne was often late for class because she had to complete her chores before leaving the house.
Eventually Johanne was chased out of her “Aunt’s” home. With the assistance of RFF, Johanne was placed in the care of her father and was able to return to school full-time.
Nazira
Nazira is a softly spoken 33-year-old living in Sydney. She’s bright-eyed and smiles often. There's little sign of her harrowing experience as a child slave in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan.
Aged just seven, she was forced to pick cotton in the hot sun along with thousands of other children, under a state-controlled system of forced, unpaid labour.
"We would start picking early in the morning, for the whole day,” Nazira says, “I was pretty young, I was seven years old then. I just remember being very bored, and hot, and looking after my little brother, and so very tired as well.”
“It makes me really sad and angry that someone else can just take away your rights like that, to take away your life, and just do whatever they want with you.”
Nazira, her mother Zuhra, and baby brother Faruh had crossed the border into Uzbekistan in 1992, after fleeing their home in Dushanbe, the Tajikistan capital. At the time, Tajikistan was in the grip of civil war, which lasted five years, left up to 100,000 people dead and displaced between 10 and 20 per cent of the population.
“My stepfather was in one of those fighting parties, and soldiers [from the opposing forces] came to our house,” Nazira said. “They threatened my mother, saying ‘if we come tomorrow and you’re still here, we will kill your son in front of you and rape your daughter and kill her afterwards’.
“We were terrified. So we escaped into Uzbekistan that night and left everything behind.”
Nazira hoped the family could stay with relatives in Samarkand, a city in Uzbekistan, but they were rejected and her mum had to leave the children with another family.
“So, like everyone else, we were forced to pick cotton every day during the season,” she said. “It was something we accepted as normal because other families were also forced to do that”.
“All the schools and colleges would close because the kids would stop studying so they could go to the fields to pick cotton.”
“No-one was paid, I never saw any money, no-one was paid”.
After 9 years of campaigning to stop this forced labour in Uzbekistan, The International Labour Organization of the UN proclaimed in 2022 there was no longer any forced labour in the cotton production of Uzbekistan
L. O.
I was sixteen. Five years ago, I joined an armed group in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was no longer studying because I wasn't clever enough at schoolwork. One day, armed men came into my aunt's shop where I worked. They drank all we had and then asked me to go with them to their base so that they could pay me. I asked two of my friends to accompany me.
When we got there, they locked us up for two days. The armed group was preparing to fight, and they let us out and told us that we could choose between becoming soldiers and dying.
We had no choice but to become soldiers. That same day, we were initiated by fetishes. When night came, fighting broke out, and we fought all night. One of my friends who had come with me was killed. I was very angry and decided to stay with the group to avenge my friend.
One day, we were engaged in a clash with another armed group in the bush; the fighting was intense, and we had run out of ammunition. Some members of our group had just been captured.
Twelve children, including me, decided to try to escape to the nearest village. We hoped to get to the MONUSCO forces, who would be able to help us demobilise. However, we were intercepted by another group before we could find them. We were beaten and locked up at this armed group's camp and then quickly incorporated into its ranks. I continued to take part in fighting with this new armed group.
It was difficult to find enough to eat, and we were forced to steal goats in the villages, which we often had to eat raw.I sometimes cry when I recall what I went through.
I think a lot about a great friend of mine who was killed in the fighting; he was only 9. After he was recruited into our group, his mother came and begged for him to be released.
She took three goats to the commander so that he would let her son leave the group.
Eventually, he took pity on her and promised to hand him over to her the next day. That night, however, we were sent to fetch cassava flour from the villages. There were ten of us, but I was the only one with a gun; the others only had spears and knives.
On the way, we met some armed men who shot at us and killed my friend. He was the humblest of the group, and we all really liked him; he made us laugh. We all wept bitterly when we saw that he had been killed. We no longer thought about dying – we were filled with rage.
We went down into the villages and killed many people, both civilians and combatants. Every time I think about that boy, I am overtaken by a desire to kill.
“It wasn't easy being a girl in an armed group. Sometimes the boys protected us from the violence meted out by the adults, but the commanders took advantage of night patrols to sleep with the girls.”
They intimidated us, and if you refused to sleep with them, they would kill you and then go back to the camp and say you had been killed in the fighting.
There were clashes all the time.
I was tired of the war and had become so thin that I was just a sack of bones. One day, when my commander sent me into the town to find food, I took the opportunity and escaped again. I went to the government forces with three of my friends. I was ready to leave the armed group and join the regular army, but they said that I was not old enough.
I was transferred to a transit and orientation centre to be demobilised. I was going to be reunited with my grandfather in North Kivu, but all reunifications in the area were stopped because of the Ebola virus. I appealed to those in charge of the centre, and they decided to take me back to my village. I was finally reunited with my family.
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It is often easier to get to understand child labour by hearing these stories. And as I said next week we will look at some of the reasons why child labour happens.
What can you do in response to these stories?
Share them around – tell them to others. Or get them to sign up to the podcasts.
Donate to Be Slavery Free, and help us continue to unravel the story of modern slavery.
And in the next episode I’ll tell you what you can do in some areas.
This has been Fuzz Kitto for Be Slavery Free
And I Look forward to catching you next time.