Abstract
The chapter considers why working children are often damaged by policies and programs intended to protect them, pursued in defiance of research that has shown such policies and programs frequently to be harmful to children. It offers an explanation in terms of five widespread illusions: about the universality of childhood, about the incompetence of children, about what constitutes protection from harmful work, about what is moral in relation to children’s work, and about the competence of agencies supposedly protecting children. The chapter uses recent behavioural research in cognitive science to explain why people in these agencies persist in their views against much empirical evidence and impose them against the wishes of working children, their supposed beneficiaries.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Information from the book was supplemented by private correspondence with Rachel Burr, who has kept in touch with some of the persons involved. The programme was eventually stopped by the Government of Vietnam, which closed the school and instead committed boys to labour camps.
- 3.
We criticise only general minimum-age laws and recognise merit in putting age limits on specific types of hazardous work as a valuable tool in some situations.
- 4.
There is a growing literature on this topic, which is discussed in Bourdillon et al. (2009) and Bourdillon et al. (2011). Examples of more recent studies are Edmonds and Shrestha (2012) on failure of legislation significantly to affect children’s time use, Bharadwaj et al. (2013) on perverse effects of legislation increasing time spent on work, Maconachie and Hilson (2016) on international standards exacerbating poverty, and Dammert et al. (2017) questioning the effectiveness of market-oriented policies.
- 5.
We are aware of Sect. 2a of article 32, which requires that states parties shall “Provide for a minimum age or minimum ages for admission to employment”. We notice, first, that this wording allows for different ages for different kinds of employment, and second, assumptions arising from the history of minimum-age legislation, which we discuss above, influenced thinking at the time the Convention was constituted. Our argument stands that a general minimum age for employment fails to meet the goals set out in Sect. 1 of the article.
- 6.
One indicator often cited to justify prohibition of children’s work is the widespread inverse correlation between school outcomes and work. This is misinterpretation of the data, often a direct product of faulty research designs. Such studies need to consider bi-directional causality (work can interfere with school and school system failures can drive children to work) and to control for such background variables as poverty, household structure and education level, economic environment, and children’s aptitudes, all of which are known to strongly affect both work and school (see Bourdillon et al., 2011, pp. 108–132). Formal education on its own is not an adequate indicator of child well-being: multi-dimensional indicators sensitive to specific situations of children are needed.
- 7.
Definition from Psychology Today website, https://www.psychologytoday.com/search/site/groupthink (accessed 12 June 2018).
- 8.
For an example of how this works in practise in relation to child protection, see Howard (2017, pp. 97–123).
- 9.
- 10.
We are aware of philosophical discussions of various strands of ethical consequentialism, and of different components that make up morality. For the purpose of this essay, we simply assert our conviction that consideration of expected consequences is necessary for deciding what kinds of action are moral, and that moral judgements that ignore expected consequences are thereby flawed.
- 11.
Something similar happened in development studies. William Easterly (2013) explains how a particular model of development became prominent and widely practised with disastrous results for many of the poor it was supposed to help, because influential people ignored contrary evidence and kept contrary views out of conferences and discussions.
- 12.
For example, UNICEF (following the ILO) suggests as a classification for ‘child labour’:
-
a)
children 5 to 11 years of age that during the week preceding the survey did at least one hour of economic activity or at least 28 h of domestic work, and.
-
b)
children 12 to 14 years of age that during the week preceding the survey did at least 14 h of economic activity or at least 42 h of economic activity and domestic work combined. (http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/stats_popup9.html (accessed 11 June 2018).
There is no empirical justification for regarding 27 h of chores as benign or one hour a week of economic activity as harmful to school-going children of any age.
-
a)
- 13.
For discussions of this topic, see Wet and Vidmar (2012), especially chapter 2, Jure Vidmar, “Norm conflicts and hierarchy in international law; towards a vertical international legal system?” pp. 13–41.
- 14.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/open-essay-better-approach-to-child-work (accessed 11 June 2018).
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Bourdillon, M., Myers, W. (2022). Illusions in the Protection of Working Children. In: Howard, N., Okyere, S. (eds) International Child Protection. Palgrave Studies on Children and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78763-9_4
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