Vol 14, No.1 (2004)
ISSN 1546-2250
Images to Educate and Inspire: Child Labor and the Global Village- Photography for Social Change1
S. L. Bachman
Julia Dean
Nick Madigan
Citation: Bachman, Sarah L., Julia Dean and Nick Madigan. (2004). “Images to Educate and Inspire: Child Labor and the Global Village- Photography for Social Change.” Children, Youth and Environments 14(1): 190-207.
Keywords:child labor, photography
A small boy walked into the railroad car, as the train click-clacked along the tracks that span India. The boy was small-boned and young-looking: perhaps five years old, or eight, or ten– it was impossible to tell. He wore a shirt and shorts. His feet were bare.
The boy clutched a broom made of stiff fibers, about two feet long. He swung the broom on the bare floor beneath the hard seats, sweeping dust, peanut shells, crumbs, bits of paper, and other filth into a pile in the center aisle. Some passengers lifted their feet so that he could sweep the linoleum below. Most ignored the boy and his broom. When the boy lifted his hand, asking for baksheesh, only a few passengers looked in his eyes or placed a coin on his open palm.
Julia Dean, a Los Angeles freelance photographer, watched the boy as he swept and begged his way from one end of the railroad car to another. She had seen the boy climb on board at one station. Many stations later, she watched him climb off, cross the tracks, and climb on another train going in the opposite direction.
The boy touched Dean’s heart. She decided right then to use photography to do whatever she could to help child laborers, such as the boy she had watched on the train.
Assembling the Team
More than three years later, Child Labor and the Global Village: Photography for Social Change was born.Dean decided to assemble a team of photographers to produce a series of stories about child labor around the world. She was inspired by the work of great documentary photographers she had studied or worked with, such as Berenice Abbott, a pioneering woman with whom Dean had apprenticed and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photo-journalists of the 1930s and 1940s. The FSA team– whose 11 core members included such luminaries as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans- made images of such power that they still define the Great Depression in the eyes of many Americans.
To assemble her own team, Dean began with five talented photographers she knew personally. All had worked with Dean when she operated a stock house (a service that supplies stock photographs to users, who pay for a limited number of uses) that carried photographs on themes related to economic development and humanitarian issues.
To choose the other five, Dean conducted a contest. She placed advertisements in photography magazines inviting photographers to send in their portfolios. From the pool of 143 portfolios received, photo editors– from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and National Geographic– looked for work that both was aesthetically strong and told a clear narrative story.
The final team selected included: Ernesto Bazan, Gigi Cohen, Julia Dean, Marie Dorigny, Brian Finke, Joel Sartore, Al Schaben, Judy Walgren, Jon Warren, Clarence Williams, and Francesco Zizola. All were full-time freelance or staff photographers, although Finke was a student when he was chosen.
A photo editor from National Geographic, Bert Fox joined the project as Director of Photography. Nick Madigan, now a New York Times reporter, joined as a reporter. Sarah Bachman, a freelance writer who had written about child labor for the San Jose Mercury News, U.S. News and World Report, among other publications, also joined as a reporter and later became the project’s assistant director.
To help establish credibility, Dean recruited an advisory board that included individuals who have long been active in fighting the worst forms of child labor, as well as individuals employed by or on boards of human rights organizations.
Each photographer has been assigned to depict the world of a working child in one country (or, if the child is a migrant, two countries). Each photographer has also been asked to keep a journal of his or her experiences. As of July 2004, six photographers had finished assignments in India, Nepal, Cambodia, Peru, Haiti, and Burundi. (Although not all assignments have been determined for the remaining five photographers, one of them will complete a story in the United States.)
The project’s mission is to:* Educate people about this complex issueBy photographing individual children in their worlds– their families, communities, countries– the project hopes to see behind the child labor label. Child labor is the result of a complex set of factors: poverty, lack of schools, poor health care, war, and many others. Solutions must meet the needs of individual children. People who want to help need to know more about who these children are, to know what they need.
* Move people emotionally
* Motivate people to take action
What Is “Child Labor” and what Role Does “Environment” Play?
All formal and informal definitions of the term child labor come down to one core question: What kind of work is harmful for children?That simple question has caused enormous controversy since children’s work became a public issue about 200 years ago. Even simple terms such as “work” and “child” inspire philosophical and practical discussions. For instance, how should “work” be defined: all activities outside the home, only paid activities, work whose product has an economic value in the marketplace, or something else? How old is a child? What is the definition of “harm:” work that physically injures a child; work that psychologically injures a child; or work performed by a child that displaces an adult worker, thereby reducing the adult’s wage? If a child is paid less than an adult for the same work, is that harmful?
Three international conventions set fundamental– although sometimes cross-cutting and confusing- parameters for answering the core question: What kind of work is harmful for children?
· International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 138 sets an international standard for the ages at which children (persons under the age of 18) should be allowed to work. Most paid work is allowed at age 15, with some exceptions. Physically harmful or dangerous work, however, is allowed only for persons older than 18.
· ILO Convention 182 defines, and calls for immediate action against, the “worst” forms of child labor. These include slavery; sex work; forced work; and work that is harmful, hazardous, or morally objectionable.
· The Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the United Nations General Assembly adopted in 1989, says that children have the right not to be economically exploited. It also establishes other children’s rights.
In general, work that is harmful or hazardous for a child involves working in a dangerous, or harmful environment. The environment can be physical, social or psychological.
For example, underground mining is hazardous work because the environment is both dangerous and harmful. A child crawling into an underground mineshaft is in danger of being killed if the mine shaft collapses. That is only one of many risks of working in a mine. Another risk is injury to a child’s lungs – a risk that is almost guaranteed to result in harm to the child. A child pounding on a rock face, trying to loosen a few pieces of coal, for instance, sends rock dust into the air. Breathing rock dust may lead to silicosis, and in turn, to tuberculosis.
Complexity
Child labor has proven to be difficult to eradicate because its causes are complex. Solutions may seem simple in concept, but rarely are simple in reality.In the early 1990s, when U.S. Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and other United States legislators proposed a bill to ban imports of goods made by children, they hoped to inspire poor countries to take children out of work and put them into schools. Instead, several other things happened. For instance, in Bangladesh, children were fired from jobs in garment factories, but went into other work. Only later did the Bangladesh garment manufacturers, the ILO, and UNICEF devise a plan that would not only take children out of factories, but also put them in schools. 2
Child Labor and the Global Village has adopted a definition of “child labor” that encompasses complexity. It encompasses the physical, emotional, and psychological harm children suffer when doing inappropriate work, but also the benefits of appropriate work. More about these issues, as the project sees them, is explained on the website’s FAQ page: http://www.childlaborphotoproject.org/childlabor.html
Solutions are explored in the photo essays, but the project does not endorse detailed answers to the problems that the photographers witness. Most of all, the stories raise questions about how best to protect children from harm, while also allowing them to survive and learn the kinds of practical skills that work teaches.
Each of the six completed photo essays tells a story through the eyes of one photographer. Accompanying text helps explain more about the story, such as what led the pictured child to his or her work, and what might help him or her to build a better future. Each photo essay goes beyond describing the child’s life, or a general problem such as child soldiering or human trafficking, to also show the work of a person or organization that is trying to help children.
Achievements
News Media
Stories from the project have been featured in newspapers and magazines, including photography magazines (Rangefinder, Photo District News), general news media (Los Angeles Times Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle), and National Public Radio.Exhibits
Photos produced by the project are part of an exhibit that has traveled to the U.S. Congress, universities, schools, and other forums in the United States. Internationally, the photographs have been shown in Bangladesh, and in a school in Brunei. Other exhibits are planned.Education
The stories have been used as teaching tools. A curriculum by the Stanford University Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education includes selections from Finke’s story about India. Dean, Bachman and others have lectured at K-12 schools and universities.Hopes
From the moment Dean came up with the idea of a team of photographers until today, the project has considered many options for how to move forward. Some succeeded. Others have not materialized.We would like to find more outlets for publication. This depends on finding editors who are interested in the stories our team produces.
Much more could and should be done to show the photos in the United States and internationally.
We also would like to arrange more international exhibits, but appropriate venues and funding will be required. International arrangements to exhibit photos can be complicated and expensive. In one case, the exhibit cost for an international exhibit was paid by the project, while shipping occurred in a personal suitcase. The project is much larger now, and so improvised shipping arrangements will no longer suffice. In another case, an elementary school in another country promised to pay shipping for one poster-size photo, but the shipping was not paid and the photo was never returned.
Working across international borders, and with a geographically dispersed team, poses other challenges, too. Once photographers reach the countries where they will take photographs, they are on their own. One photographer found that the non-governmental organization that he hoped would help him report his story no longer existed. Some photographers have kept extensive diaries, and others have not. Some photographers have telephoned or emailed (thank goodness for email) frequently, and others have not.
A book is planned, but again, bringing this idea to fruition will depend on practical issues such as funding. One prestigious publisher of photography books said it was interested, if the project could send the publisher copies of the photographs and more than $50,000. That was out of the question, because the project was still raising money to send photographers out in the field. The project produced one version of a book, using desktop publishing software, but the resulting volume was too expensive to use as a fund-raising tool. The project is now considering other ways of publishing a book at a lower cost.
We hope to take the photos back to the communities where they were taken, and start discussions about child labor among the children, their families and communities. Again, the possibilities are limited only by imagination and resources. A Bangladeshi group asked if it could take some of the photographs to villages around the country, in order to start discussions about child labor. It was a wonderful plan, but funding could not be found in time to make this terrific idea a reality.
The project was approached in Los Angeles by a group of people interested in putting together a video about the stories. The group had one meeting and then never met again.
The funding we have received to date has come from a wide variety of donors, including one company foundation; several family foundations; individual donors and the in-kind services of many volunteers. Corporate sponsorship has come from Canon USA, Inc., Eastman Kodak Co., and A and I Labs in Los Angeles. The project is trying to raise about $200,000 to finish the photographic assignments and complete a book.
Other hopes - publishing another edition of the school curriculum, bringing photographs back to the communities where they were taken, etc.– will be achieved if the resources can be found.
Lessons
Every project like this one faces constraints and challenges. The lessons we have learned probably apply to any equally ambitious and idealistic project.Paying the Bills
The project sends out each photographer as it raises the money to pay their contracts. But raising money for a non-profit project in a recession-wracked economy is hard work. The slow pace of fund-raising disappointed at least one of the photographers, who had hoped to finish the assignment quickly. Even when enough money is raised to send out a photographer, arrangements still move slowly. All the team members have other full-time work (Dean, for instance, runs a photography studio and school), and so the assignment is carried out whenever the photographer can fit it into his or her schedule.Sticking by a Plan
The project’s design imposes some limits. One prospective funding agency, for instance, said that it would put up the money for one photographer, in return for lifetime copyright over all photographs produced. We could not accept the offer. The photographers’ contracts say that after the project ends, copyright on photographs produced for the project will be shared with the photographer and the Photo Project. The contract is standard for freelance photographers, who make some of their income by selling the use of photographs in their portfolios.Many people have suggested other ways to assemble 11 photo essays about child labor: hire photographers in target countries; acquire photographers’ already finished photo essays; train children to make their own essays (as, for instance, Zana Briski has done- see http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/HTML/FILM/Zana.htm). While many of these suggestions are terrific, accepting them now would change the nature of the existing team and the project.
This project began as a dream and as an experiment. We are learning along the way, but we do want to complete the project we set out to accomplish, in a way that we think will produce important stories and fine photography. We believe it will make a difference on the issue of child labor– and, ultimately, for the children themselves.
Summing Up
Measuring the impact of our work is difficult, but we have a few clues that we are on the right path:· The project regularly receives requests for exhibits and presentations.
· In 2002, Judy Walgren and Sarah Bachman appeared before a committee of the House of Representatives. Walgren showed photographs she had recently completed of Nepali women who had been trafficked to Mumbai (Bombay) to work in brothels. Bachman spoke about the project, and trafficking, in general terms. The hearing had begun with the State Department’s presentation of a report on human trafficking. The report had concluded that India was making progress to reduce trafficking, but Walgren’s photographs (see below) served witness that much work remained to be done. For a copy of Walgren’s and Bachman’s testimony, click on:
http://www.house.gov/lantos/caucus/TestimonyBachman060602.htm
· In 2004, two stories about the project or based on its work appeared on National Public Radio. Dean received several emails saying that listeners had been touched and inspired. One listener sent a poem. To hear a story, featuring interviews with Julia Dean and S.L. Bachman, that was broadcast on National Public Radio, click on:
“Photo Exhibit Spotlights Child Labor Across the Globe” at
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3600016
· What is most inspiring is hearing that people working against child labor have been able to use the photographs to further their work. Perhaps the best example is Inderjit Khurana, who started the Ruchika School for children working at the train station in Bhubaneswar, India. Khurana told us that when she completed a new building to house the Ruchika offices, she would hang Brian Finke’s photographs on one wall as testimony and inspiration.
When all 11 photographers have completed their assignments, they will meet together in celebration – and to launch an international traveling exhibit. By then, the project hopes it will have many other publications, exhibits, and achievements to report. In the meantime, the project remains open to ideas, invitations, and other feedback.
Stories
Six stories have been completed, of the 11 that are planned. The following narratives are similar to the narratives on the project website, but they have been expanded and edited to emphasize the relationship between child labor and the physical, social and emotional environment.Brian Finke: Sankar Sells Water at the Railway Station
Sankar, 14, and his friends worked at the train station in Bhubaneswar, India, and also on the trains that passed through the station. Like the boy that inspired Julia Dean to start the photo project, Bapi, 12, and other children begged for baksheesh after sweeping up garbage from the floor beneath the feet of train passengers. Nageswar Rao, 10, shined shoes while sitting on the train station waiting platform. Sankar and several other boys sold fresh water to train station workers, or to travelers on the trains.Sankar and Brian Finke, a New York City-based photographer, formed a special bond. Bapi also stood out for his intelligence and compassion. When other children were being harassed or were in trouble, Bapi would call ChildLine, a free service that children in Indian cities may call in emergencies.3 On average, Sankar and his friends who sold bottles of fresh water earned about 50 to 100 rupees ($2-$3) a day. For Sankar, the money was enough for food and other bare essentials.
During the few weeks that Finke observed Sankar, Bapi, Nageswar Rao, and their friends, he watched them climb on and off trains again, and again, and again.
From one, perhaps unorthodox, standpoint, the children at the Bhubaneswar railway station seemed to be doing relatively light work. The heaviest children’s work at the station was carrying baggage– and there is no doubt that young children lifting heavy weights, for employers who may not treat them well or pay them fairly, are performing heavy work both literally and metaphorically. Even so, many children around the world sweat more, and get paid less, than water sellers, shoe shiners, and sweepers.
Despite appearances, however, the children faced myriad hazards. Most did not make enough money to help their families rise from poverty. Few went to formal school, although many went to a non-formal school started by the Ruchika Social Service Organization. Some of the best students would be able to transfer to formal school. Others would be invited to take part in Ruchika’s vocational training programs. Living at the train station offered no security. Sankar lived in an abandoned railway car.
The social environment, too, was full of dangers: Girls on the trains are often targets of sexual harassment. They tried to reduce their risk by working only on the earliest morning trains. All children, working without supervision or promising futures, were vulnerable to the treacherous appeal of tobacco, alcohol and harder drugs.
The physical environment posed more immediate hazards. The trains are heavy machines. The trains often injure the children, and sometimes kill them, according to Inderjit Khurana, Ruchika’s founder. In 2002, the trains took Bapi’s life. Bapi was trying to climb off a train when his clothing got caught in the descent ladder. The train started to move, and he was dragged to death.
Finke’s assignment was his first big working trip abroad. He felt particularly close to some of the boys he photographed, who were not much younger than he. Before he left, he rented a car for a day, and took Sankar and friends to the beach.
Clarence Williams: The Army’s Appeal in a War-Torn Land
Child soldiering is one of the “worst” forms of child labor, according to the ILO. Obviously, a child fighting a battle risks death. The risks are obvious, too, for children who are kidnapped, drugged, and raped so that they will become fighters. Less obvious is the appeal of the military in a land of much chaos, great poverty, and few good choices for children trying to build a future. If the national political, social, and physical environments are torn by war, a child may join the army because the military life offers hope that is all too scarce in civilian life.Since 1993, Burundi has been gripped by a civil war between the Tutsi-led government and rebel groups dominated by, and claiming to represent, the Hutu majority population. The civil war has killed at least 300,000 people, including government soldiers, rebel fighters, and civilians. The national economy is all but paralyzed. The army, however, offers a tantalizing array of benefits: three square meals a day, handsome uniforms, and the thrills, if they can be called that, of combat.
The government has herded the mostly Hutu population into camps near the capital city of Bujumbura. Viewed from one angle, the environment in the camps is about as safe and orderly as any camp of refugees might be. Viewed from another angle, the camps’ social environment is stifling. Children from the camps may join the army and guerilla groups to escape poverty, crowding, boredom and the lack of freedom.
Desperation and hopelessness drives some young men to think that they have little choice but to join. Others join in a relatively open manner.
In 2000, when Clarence Williams, a Los Angeles-based, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, visited two military training camps, Burundi officially did not recruit children younger than 18 years old as government soldiers. Every young man at each camp said he had been born 18 years earlier. Whether the boys were actually 18 or not was impossible to check.
Human Rights Watch reported that both government and rebel forces had fighters under the age of 18. The recruits’ faces suggested that this was true. Williams photographed a truck driving toward a graveyard, carrying the body of a 16-year-old government soldier.
Burundi has since made some progress toward peace. In November 2002, the new Burundian government signed the optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which establishes 18 as the minimum age for forced recruitment, conscription, or participation in armed conflict. By signing the optional protocol, the government followed through on the previous government’s order that children under 18 should not be recruited for the army.
“But the government observed no such rule for the civil defense program, where children as young as 14 were enrolled this year. The rebels recruited and in some cases abducted children for military service,” reported Human Rights Watch in its 2002 World Report. By July 2004, however, only one rebel group continued to fight with the government. A new peace plan was in place and most of the anti-government groups were supposed to begin demobilizing on July 15– beginning with the child soldiers.
After Williams returned from Burundi, he felt somewhat discouraged with photography. The people he had seen needed much more, and more immediate, help than a lone photographer could offer. For a time, Williams considered becoming a doctor.
Jon Warren: Recycling Garbage for School Fees
Around the world, city dumps are full of people working: Adults and children scavenging for metal cans, sheets of paper, plastic drink cartons and anything else that will fetch a few pennies form the recycling middle-man. Scavenging allows people to survive, but there are few more dangerous or unhealthy environments in which to work.Seattle-based photographer Jon Warren followed three siblings–boys Kayrith, 14, and Ratha,12, and their younger sister Minea, 10– and their cousin, Thavara, 11, working as scavengers in the giant Stung Meanchey dump outside of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
The boys were earning money for school fees, and for family expenses. The Phou siblings lived near the dump with their father Bo, 37, mother Sam On, 35, younger sisters Srey Yaan, 5, and Srey Yan, 4, and a 10-month-old brother, Sam Naang. Thavara lived with the Phou family, and took care of the younger children when she was not scavenging. On average, they earned about $0.35 each a day selling scrap to middle-men.
Of all environments in which children work, a dump is among the most undeniably awful. December 1999 was hot and humid, making the usual sickly sweet smell of garbage all-enveloping, and at times overwhelming. For the first few days after arriving at the dump, Warren felt so nauseous he wondered if he would be able to finish his assignment. He never got used to the smell, but gradually, he learned to work despite it. Several of his photographs show flames and smoke from the fires set by spontaneous combustion– or by scavengers, trying to dampen the stench.
Rain helped dampen the smoke, but created new, hidden hazards. Sodden piles of garbage could slip free of the angle of repose, sliding suddenly down, burying everything below. Even harder to avoid were the hidden puddles: watery pockets of unsettled stuff below a seemingly solid surface. Warren, who is nearly six feet tall, sank into such a sub-surface pocket up to his thigh. Thavara said that she had sunk in one up to her neck.
Dumps also are full of disease and injury: tetanus commonly follows puncture wounds. Lung diseases are exacerbated by dirty air. Bo had a job as a garbage truck worker, but when an illness kept him in bed for three days, the job went to someone else.
Some hazards of living in the dump have two facets: the risk of injury, followed by the lack of any available, or affordable, remedy. Kayrith was constantly hungry and would eat any food he found. Then he would feel sick to his stomach. His family didn’t have enough money to buy cures, and so his mother would rub a silver coin on his back.
Is there anything redeeming in this story?
The family was surviving, and living together, and not broken apart as are many families on the edge of survival. (Other families in the dump had lost a parent.)
The parents were struggling forward: Sam On took out a micro-credit loan from a World Vision–supported program. She hoped to earn a little money by raising ducklings, and selling the grown ducks in a local market.
The boys went to school half-days on weekdays. The rest of each day, and on weekends, they worked.
The pond of dump-runoff near the family’s small house held snakes and frogs. Every so often, one of the boys would catch one, and it would become dinner.
And the dump held many things that, in a child’s eyes, could be toys. One day, Warren’s camera lens caught Kayrith and Ratha walking toward the pond carrying big pieces of Styrofoam that had once been part of a model wedding cake. In the mud-colored water, the Styrofoam floated. The boys climbed on. And then-Woops!— the float turned over, and flipped one of the boys in water, leaving the other boys laughing.
Warren had photographed children in garbage dumps in other countries. He found himself becoming more attached than he had expected to the Phou children. Two other photographers visited the Stung Meanchey dump and disparaged the people there, calling them “animals.” Warren distanced himself from the visiting photographers. How could they be so dismissive? he wondered, and then he realized how much affection he had developed for the children he had photographed. “These were my children.”
Judy Walgren: Trafficked From Nepal to India, Chasing a Dream
Sex work is another of the “worst” forms of work, according to the ILO. The brothels alongside Falkland Road in Mumbai (Bombay), India, have many small cubicles with beds on which women live: servicing johns, sleeping with their pimp-partners, putting their own children down for naps.Some 5,000-6,000 women are trafficked from Nepal to India each year, according to UNICEF. Reasons for the trafficking are complex. They include poverty, lack of schools, gender discrimination, poor health care, war, and others. Non-governmental organizations are trying help. Maiti Nepal tries to stop the flow at the Nepal/India border by questioning young girls who try to cross the border under suspicious circumstances. Apne Aap, an organization in Mumbai, helps girls and women establish formal identities, obtain ration cards, and sometimes, return to their families.
The environment of a brothel is demeaning, filthy, and frightening, Walgren said.
Trafficked girls usually have their identification and traveling papers confiscated by the brothel owners. The women often are physically abused until they agree to take clients. Each woman worked in a space like a small cubicle, with a bed suspended over storage space for their possessions– or sleeping space for their children. The women rented these small spaces for an amount equivalent to 50 cents a day. That meant that the women had to earn 50 cents a day just to pay for living quarters, not to mention food, water, or any other expenses.
Sexually transmitted diseases are rampant, on top of other common communicable diseases such as tuberculosis. One photograph shows a woman sleeping on the street between a garbage box and the Apne Aap office. The morning after Walgren took the photograph, the woman died.
The physical environment of the brothel is cruel, but the social environment also imprisons the women of Falkland Road: some girls are sold to traffickers by their families, who cannot afford to feed them. Other girls are lured into trouble by the hope of a better life, or a job, or a marriage. Their passage from home to brothel sometimes is greased by corrupt officials, and so it is not clear where they could turn for help. Most lack other skills to earn a living. Prostitutes are low on the social ladder in the Indian subcontinent, as in most of the world. Known prostitutes who somehow manage to escape the social environment of Falkland Road and return to Nepal might not be welcomed back into their shamed families. Most women who work on Falkland Road see no way out.
Walgren had won a Pulitzer Prize as a member of a team of photographers reporting on violence against women around the world. Even with that experience in her background, Walgren said after her return that she had been emotionally drained by the assignment, and moved by the sex workers she photographed in Mumbai.
One was Radda, Walgren wrote in her notes. Radda said she had been sold when she was 11. She used to cut grass in her village in Nepal, in a hilly area. Radda met a couple who promised they would get her a job as a domestic maid in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital. Once they reached Kathmandu, the couple got Radda a job as a “maid” with another couple, and that couple brought her to Kamatipura, the brothel district in Bombay.
At first Radda refused to do the work, and so the madam had her legs tied spread-eagled. Hot water was thrown on her genitals until her resistance broke down and she agreed to take customers.
Now, Radda sits on a bench, on the second story stoop of a brothel, waiting for customers, and looking down the dark stairway at an open door, watching the world go by like a movie on a screen. People come and go. Girls stand around waiting for johns. Children play. Men ride bikes. Back and forth, life goes on, while Radda sits like a prisoner on the second story stoop.
Radda says she is tired of seeing her friends die in front of her, one by one. She doesn’t want to see another one die. She herself is sick with the “flu,” which is perhaps AIDS, or maybe TB. She feels clammy, cold, and run down. She coughs, hunched over, sitting on the stool. She says she is 30, but she doesn’t really know. She has been in the brothel for 20 years. Every girl there was trafficked from Nepal, or from other states within India. They were sold by husbands, family members, or strangers.
Radda has never been back to her village. “I want to see my parents. I want to see them very badly,” she says. “I know they would beat me, and they would abuse me. Eventually they would accept me, but if society found out what I had been doing, it would shame my parents and hurt my unmarried sisters, and so they could never be married.” And so, Radda concludes, she will never go home again.
Gigi Cohen: Josiméne’s Story: When a House Is Not a Child Worker’s Home
When is a house not a safe place to work? What is wrong with housework?Josiméne, 10, works as a restavec, or live-in maid, in a two-room house outside of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. Josiméne's parents are small farmers in Haiti's remote and mountainous heartland. Two years before these photographs were taken, Josimene’s parents asked a local woman to find a family that would employ their daughter as a servant.
“At age eight and with her parents’ blessing, Josiméne, was taken from her rural mountain home in Haiti’s heartland to work near Port-au-Prince as a domestic servant,” wrote Gigi Cohen, a New York-based photographer. Two years later, Josiméne, “rushes from one chore to another: day after day, from five in the morning until late at night. Her time is spent doing housework, running errands, minding the store and taking care of the two small children aged four and five, not much younger than she. In return for devoting two years of her childhood to others, she gets a piece of floor space to sleep on and occasionally leftovers to eat.
Josiméne also cleans the two-room house, washes dishes and scrubs laundry by hand. When she has time in the afternoons, she attends free classes for restavec children, run by the Maurice Sixto Foyer, a non-profit organization in Port-au-Prince. On many afternoons, Cohen said, Josiméne's errands keep her too busy to attend.
One afternoon, Cohen watched as Josiméne washed clothes by hand all morning and afternoon. She worked under the full sun, which Cohen said was fierce. (In an email, Cohen wrote, “The sun is unbelievable, my eyes got burnt...”) The laundry took so much time that Josiméne missed school.
Estimated numbers of child domestic workers around the world range into the hundreds of millions. Haiti has an estimated 300,000 restavecs- a term that combines the Creole for "to stay" and "with."
Children cross the line between harmless chores and child labor, according to the ILO, when they are sold or trafficked; bonded to repay family debt; work without pay; are exposed to safety or health hazards; work excessive hours; suffer physical violence or sexual harassment; or are "very young." Domestic maids often are subject to physical, verbal and emotional abuse, and girls often are subject to sexual harassment and rape.
Work in a child’s own home may be arduous, but at the end of the day, the child’s parents usually provide care and comfort. Work in someone else’s home, away from family, transforms a house into something akin to an isolation chamber. "I would like to see my brothers and sisters," Josiméne told Cohen. "I miss them and my parents. I would rather wash the dishes and clean the house for my mother than for these people."
When Cohen first met Josiméne, the girl appeared not to be eating well. She slept on the floor; later the family gave her a sheet to sleep under. Once, Josiméne showed Cohen that she had been beaten behind her knees. Cohen later interviewed the father of the household, who explained that he believed in corporal punishment for his children when they were being disobedient.
Josiméne, Cohen, and Mamy George, the woman who had placed Josiméne in service in Port-au-Prince, went back to the region where Josiméne’s family lived for a planned reunion of daughter with father. They were only able to go as far as a town that was a two-hour walk from where Josiméne’s family lived. When they arrived, they learned that Josiméne’s father had come the previous day, and had already returned home.
Josiméne was heartbroken. Mamy George promised to find her a new place to stay.
The story of child domestic workers seems, wrote Cohen, “Like some anachronistic fairytale.” Cohen said that she felt close to Josiméne, but she also had mixed feelings about what she had witnessed. On the one hand, Josiméne was unhappy, and was working very hard in a family where Mamy George, a trusted woman from her home community, had placed her. Her employers beat her, and did not appear to be feeding her much food. She attended school spottily. And yet, Cohen said after returning from Haiti, “When you have a poor family that you know, saying please take my child, I think, it is complex. It is not so simple.”
Cohen returned from Haiti in May 2003. She has not been able to find out what happened to Josiméne since.
For a story broadcast on National Public Radio, and more photographs, click on:
“Haiti's Dark Secret: The Restavecs- Servitude Crosses the Line Between Chores and Child Slavery”
http://www.npr.org/display_pages/features/feature_1779562.html
Ernesto Bazan: Mornings are for School, Afternoons are for Molding Bricks
Miriam Acuna, 13, smoothes off the top of a clay-filled brick mold. The work she does is heavy– lifting wet clay into the mold, and then turning out the formed bricks on the ground where they will dry. Her workplace is a bare piece of ground, under the sun, beside a mound of raw clay.“The work continues through the weekends, throughout the year- an arduous, parching task that ruins hands and twists young backs from the constant bending and carrying,” said Ernesto Bazan, a Cuba-based photographer.
The ILO is working in Peru, Argentina and Ecuador to modernize brick production, eliminate middle-men between workers and the kilns, and supply social services, especially education, to the workers. Brick factories are concentrated on the outskirts of large cities. (Miriam and her family live and work in Huacipa, almost two hours by bus from Lima.) Workers are often unskilled immigrants from rural areas. Fresh water and electricity are scarce. Pay is low, while production quotas are high, and so whole families work together. A British Broadcasting Corporation report said that at least in 2 million children under 18 work in Peru, of whom 500,000 under 12.
Miriam attends school half a day. Then, she changes into her work clothes and molds bricks for the rest of the day. For every 1,000 bricks that Miriam and her family produce (which takes about a day-and-a-half), they received the equivalent of $5 -- if they got paid at all. Sometimes, their “boss” would say that he could not sell the bricks and so would pay them nothing. When the market for bricks was good, the boss could sell those same 1,000 bricks for $50, a huge return on his paltry investment in labor.
Nearly every child in Huacipa works in the afternoons. Some of them, like Miriam, change out of their school uniforms behind a bush before beginning their shifts. Miriam’s younger twin brothers are too young to go to school, and spend whole days at the brick factory with their parents, playing in the mud. At home, which is a shack on a hill side, there is no running water because the family cannot pay the bill. Miriam’s family also is in debt to the local soup kitchen, which provides food to the poor at low cost. Clothes are washed in a stream. A group of nuns helps some of the local families, but, for reasons unexplained to Bazan, not Miriam’s family.
Endnotes
2. For a similar program, see “Children of the Looms: Rescuing the ‘Carpet Kids’ of Nepal, India and Pakistan” by Suzanne Charle in Volume 13, number 2 of CYE.
3. For more information on ChildLine, see “Children and Adolescents Growing Up in Poverty: Comparative Perspectives from India and Brazil- A Report from the World Social Forum 2004, India” in the current issue of CYE.
S.L. Bachman is assistant director and chief reporter for Child Labor and the Global Village. She is a journalist who writes about globalization.
Julia Dean is founder and head photographer of Child Labor and the Global Village and founder and owner of Julia Dean and Associates, which also runs The Julia Dean Photo Workshops, in Marina del Rey, California.
Nick Madigan, a New York Times reporter, also is a reporter for Child Labor and the Global Village.