Girl’s Work, or Dignity

Len and Georgia Morris are traveling to the child labor conference in the The Hague this week, so I’m doing the honors for the next two weeks while they’re gone.
Monique DeJong has written a wonderful post this week, Proposed ILO Convention Could Protect Migrant Domestic Workers’ Rights. Domestic work is perceived as a relatively […]

Len and Georgia Morris are traveling to the child labor conference in the The Hague this week, so I’m doing the honors for the next two weeks while they’re gone.

Monique DeJong has written a wonderful post this week, Proposed ILO Convention Could Protect Migrant Domestic Workers’ Rights. Domestic work is perceived as a relatively safe alternative to other forms of work for young girls – a way to train them perhaps for a future as married women running their own households. As two films we’ve posted this week reveal, girls sent into domestic labor often find themselves trapped in private homes, underpaid, underfed and abused. Legislative protections for domestic work are generally weak – Hong Kong and South Africa being the shining exceptions. Dignity Overdue and The Real Cinderella highlight the terrible vulnerability of women and girls working out of sight in other people’s homes. Slow Reform, a report published by Human Rights Watch, analyzes the progress of legal protections for domestic workers in Asia and the Middle East.

An interview with Kate Orne and an extraordinary trailer May You Never Be Uncovered featuring her photographs of women and young girls working in Pakistani brothels slipped under the radar last month. These images are so compelling, that we thought we’d feature them again, as a counterpoint to Monique DeJong’s post on women and girls in domestic labor. I’m often struck by the paradox that cultures that set tremendous store by the protection of women will treat women who fall outside the clan or national group with such scathing disdain. As a teenager in Italy, a foreigner, I still remember the bland, neutral looks of the men and women on the bus watching as I was groped by an older man. By virtue of their lot in life – who they are as much as what they do – the women and children in Kate’s photographs are treated as non-persons. Most heartbreaking of all is the fact that mothers introduce their daughters to the life, because that’s all they have – all they know.

We’ve also posted two new films produced by IRIN Global on so-called orphan diseases, diseases that tend to get overlooked in the push to get a handle on the AIDS pandemic: Drug-Resistant TB and Kala Azar. Drug-resistant TB I had heard of – Kala Azar, a disease spread by sandflies that attacks the spleen, was new to me, though it affects twelve million people worldwide.

Finally, Human Rights Watch has come out with an animated spot, Veggies Gone Wild!!!, urging people to contact their congressman in support of the CARE Act. Come on, now! Do you really want to eat strawberries picked by ten-year-olds? Sign the petition already! See also the Human Rights Watch report, Fields of Peril, as well as Fingers to the Bone, a video on children working in the fields shot by U.R. Romano.

Petra Lent McCarron is an experienced television and film producer and editor. She co-produced Stolen Childhoods and Rescuing Emmanuel for Galen Films. She began her career at WNET (PBS) in New York City as an associate producer for Heritage: Civilization and the Jews. She also worked as an associate producer and stock footage researcher on Robert Moses, for WNET and JFK: A Time Remembered for Obenhaus Films and The Susskind Company.
As a film editor, Petra has worked for the New York Times Oral History Project on their film, Taste Ladies and Ink-Stained Wretches. She was a contributing editor to Stolen Childhoods, Rescuing Emmanuel and Big Guns Talk – all for Galen Films. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia University, her work has been shown on PBS and broadcast around the world.

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Original source : http://mediavoicesforchildren.org/?p=5334…