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Monday 26th July, 2021

The tragic death of Ishalini, 16, who was slaving away at a politician’s house, and the resultant public outrage have galvanised the government, a section of the Opposition, the National Child Protection Authority (NCPA), the police, etc. The NCPA has reportedly undertaken a mission to search for the poor children employed as domestic workers and take action against their employers. Sadly, a hapless child had to die a painful death for these institutions to swing into action.

It may not be difficult to find underage domestic workers if the public fully cooperates with the NCPA and the police, and the assistance of the Grama Niladaris is enlisted for the task. But tracing these children alone is not the solution to the vexed problem of child labour.

Who will ensure that the children to be saved are fed, clothed and educated? Most of the existing children’s homes are not run properly, and there are various allegations against them including child abuse. The media has reported numerous such instances. These institutions must be developed, managed properly and monitored regularly. There is bound to arise a need for many more such institutions to accommodate former child workers to be placed into protective custody. There is no way the children saved from semi-slavery can be reunited with their parents who are too poor to look after them. One only hopes this aspect of the problem has been taken into consideration by the authorities tasked with protecting children.

Most child workers are from the plantation community, and this is an indictment of the estate sector political parties and trade unions. The politicians representing the plantation workers are conducting protests and calling for action against those responsible for Ishalini’s death. But the problem of plantation children being taken to other parts of the country as domestic workers is as old as the hills. The protesting politicians should be asked what they have done all these years to obviate the factors that have brought about this unfortunate situation. The root-cause of child labour is abject poverty, especially in the plantation sector, and it has gone unaddressed all these years. Have the politicians who go places thanks to the poor plantation workers’ votes ever taken up the issue of child labour, in Parliament or elsewhere? They seem to have refrained from improving the plantation community’s lot lest they should lose a block vote. One’s gorge rises when these politicians pretend to be the saviours of the plantation workers and their children, and stage protests. They must be ashamed of themselves.

The same goes for other political parties and their leaders who are beating their chests in public. A prominent local government member of the ruling SLPP is among those who raped an underage girl recently. The present-day leaders also have a history of shielding rapists and other such anti-social elements. One of the first few things the UNP did after its mammoth electoral victory, in 1977, was to grant a presidential pardon to a convicted rapist serving a jail term for harming a teenage girl. The JVP, which is demanding stern action against those who employ children as domestic workers, had no qualms about using children in its abortive uprising in the late 1980s. Children were made to deliver ‘chits’ with which the JVP had shops closed, and many of them perished at the hands of those who unleashed state terror. Some TNA politicians have also demanded justice for Ishalini, but they unflinchingly supported the LTTE, which forcibly recruited children, who ended up serving as cannon fodder.

Besides the underage domestic workers, there are tens of thousands of forgotten children suffering in silence. They have dropped out of school due to poverty and are helping their parents eke out a living. These children, too, must be traced and looked after.

A country study conducted by UNICEF on the out-of-school children (OOSC) in Sri Lanka has revealed that the lower-secondary-school-age children at risk of dropping out are more likely to be boys than girls. Involvement in child labour, the UNICEF report says, puts children at risk of dropping out; however, by this age, many working children have already become OOSC. “There are more overage boys than girls in lower secondary school and repetition rates are higher for boys than for girls. Current dropout rates for lower-secondary-school-age children climb from 1.0 percent for 10-year-olds to 5.1 percent for 13-year-olds.”

Thus, it may be seen that the efforts currently being made to tackle the problem of child labour amount to only scratching the surface of the problem, and they are also likely to be abandoned when another mega issue crops up, eclipsing that of Ishalini’s tragic end. What is urgently needed is to prepare a national strategy to remove the scourge of child slavery. This is what Parliament should be doing at present. Instead, it is expending its time and energy on other matters such as the recent no-faith motion and a bill to be taken up soon to promote private university education.