A Real Human Being

In all the years that I worked to advance children’s rights, particularly the right to be free of harsh labor at too early an age, two children stand out in my memory. One was an eight year old girl in Bangladesh, the other an eleven year old boy in India.
In 1998, I visited Bangladesh […]

In all the years that I worked to advance children’s rights, particularly the right to be free of harsh labor at too early an age, two children stand out in my memory. One was an eight year old girl in Bangladesh, the other an eleven year old boy in India.

In 1998, I visited Bangladesh for the first time, to see the results of a campaign against child labor in the garment industry that we had supported for several years. The result of that campaign was a negotiated agreement between the ILO, UNICEF and the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA). That agreement had resulted in several thousand under-aged children leaving the factories and being placed in schools that were run by a well-respected NGO in Dhaka. (It also resulted, according to critics in Bangladesh, in thousands of children being forced into other more onerous work, including prostitution and brick works. But those charges were never substantiated by any independent source.) The president of the BGMEA took me around the Dhaka factory area to visit a number of the schools. They were each small classrooms, some under tents, some in temporary buildings, most with very minimal furnishings. But in each school I met twenty or more students aged 6 to 12 years old avidly and excitedly pursuing studies, learning to read and beginning to learn math and other subjects.

At each school I asked the students, “What do you want to do when you finish studying here? Do you want to go back to work in the factories?” And at every school, the question was met by a loud and vociferously shouted “No!” Then I asked the students what they wanted to be when they grew up. Almost without exception, the boys all wanted to be policemen, and I realized that in their young lives, policemen were the only men who seemed to have any power. The girls had more imaginative, if sometimes unrealistic, hopes. Some wanted to be doctors. Some wanted to be teachers. And one eight year old said simply, “I want to be a real human being.”

Without knowing precisely what she meant, I could tell what her wish said about where she had come from. She had been working since very early in life as a helper in a garment factory, bringing supplies to the sewers, cleaning the floors, loading machines, running errands. She had been treated as just another piece of machinery, a function rather than a person. She had probably been paid very little if anything for her labor and may well have had to sleep at night on the factory floor. Those were the conditions that were common in Bangladesh’s factories at the time. But what she hadn’t had was any respect or encouragement, any help or any dreams that could see realization, any opportunities for a different life or a different self-understanding. At the tender age of eight, she had been trapped in a dead-end life. Just getting out of that situation and into school had opened for her a new world, and her way of describing that world was striking. It was a world of “real human beings.”

The other child I remember so vividly was named Satish. In 1994, I had joined Kailash Satyarthi and about 100 other Indian child labor activists and children on a march from the southern tip of India to New Delhi. I stayed with the group for about one month, going from village to village to talk with elders and parents about the importance of ending child labor abuses and the dangers of letting their children go with recruiters making false promises of good jobs and education. I learned an immense amount about India in that eventful month.

In each village, Kailash and the other leaders would hold a rally, and would introduce some of the fifty or more children in the march, all liberated child laborers, many of them actually former child slaves. One such boy was Satish, about 11 years old. He had been a worker since about age 4 in a match and fireworks factory in southern Tamil Nadu state. His legs showed the scars of multiple burns and his hands and arms the results of frequent cuts. Many of the scars were from cruel punishments for minor offenses. Kailash brought him up to the platform each day and told the crowd about his experience. At first, Satish just stood there, never speaking, showing no emotion at all. He was completely closed in, unable to risk showing any feeling.

But I watched him throughout the month, as he began, at first reluctantly and very hesitantly, to interact with other kids on the bus and as they played at each stop. By the end of the month, he had recovered much of his ability to smile, to play, and to speak. Just being able to be a child had worked almost magic in him! Toward the end of the march, when he was asked to come to the platform, he was able to talk about his experience and to join with others in seeking to end the abuses that had afflicted him. He had become “a real human being.”

We sometimes downplay the importance for children of just being kids, of letting their imaginations flow, of the joys of play that are unbounded by forced labor, and of receiving affection and encouragement from adults. But these two children will forever be etched in my mind as exemplifying why it is so important to continue the struggle to end the abuses of children, whether those abuses take place in the family, in social restrictions, or in foul working conditions where they have no voice, no rights and no future.

Harvey has been a member of the Fair Labor Association Board of Directors since its founding, and was a participant from 1996 in the Apparel Industry Partnership, a multi-stakeholder negotiating group of non-governmental organizations, trade unions and companies that was initiated by President Clinton to form the FLA. He also serves as founder, past president and currently board member emeritus of the RUGMARK Foundation USA, part of an international initiative to prevent child labor in the carpet industry of south Asia and to provide schooling for affected child workers in India, Pakistan and Nepal.

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Original source : http://mediavoicesforchildren.org/?p=4122…