[nasional_list] [ppiindia] The Immorality of Child Labor in Arab Countries

From: "Ambon" <sea@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <"Undisclosed-Recipient:;"@freelists.org>
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2006 10:09:11 +0100

** Forum Nasional Indonesia PPI India Mailing List **
** Untuk bergabung dg Milis Nasional kunjungi:
** Situs Milis: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia/ **
** Beasiswa dalam negeri dan luar negeri S1 S2 S3 dan post-doctoral
scholarship, kunjungi
http://informasi-beasiswa.blogspot.com
**http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=75730&d=4&m=1&y=2006&pix=opinion.jpg&category=Opinion

Wednesday, 4, January, 2006 (04, Dhul Hijjah, 1426)

The Immorality of Child Labor in Arab Countries
Fawaz Turki, disinherited@xxxxxxxxx

When we read bad news about an Arab country, it is, as a rule
of thumb, unspeakably bad. And the country de jour is Morocco.

In a 60-page report titled "Inside the Home, Outside the Law:
Domestic workers in Morocco," released the last week of December, Human Rights
Watch revealed that tens of thousands of Moroccan girls, trapped by family
poverty and lack of schooling, endure widespread abuse as maids toiling out of
sight in the privacy of their employers' homes.

The girls, many as young as five, work as long as 100 hours a
week with no rest or days off, for as little as 70 cents a day. Current and
former child domestics have described to the New York-based organization's
field researchers how they have had to face frequent physical and verbal abuse,
denial of adequate food and medical care, as well as sexual harassment by
employers and their families.

Most do not attend school, rarely go out except for brief
errands and rarely get to see their families. These girls, often illiterate,
lack the know-how to seek help in leaving abusive workplaces, and end up having
to endure the abuse because they fear getting lost or attacked if they run away
on their own.

Morocco has, on the books, a Labor Code that bans employment
of children under 15. But the code does not regulate domestic work, and labor
inspectors are not authorized to enter private homes to check for violations.

"There is a myth that these girls are improving themselves by
working," said Clarisa Bencomo, children's rights researcher at HRW. "The
reality is that too many girls end up suffering lasting physical and
psychological harm." The report details several testimonies from these child
laborers - all of them gut-wrenching. I choose one at random: "If something
happened - if I broke something or did something badly - they would beat me
with a shoe or a belt on any part of my body. I couldn't leave the house - they
would lock the door when they left. Both the husband and the wife hit me.

"My family saw me twice in the year that I worked there. They
came to visit me at the house but the employer sat with us during the visit and
had told me not to say anything bad or she would beat me more.

"When my mother came the last time to visit, I told her I
wouldn't stay at that house anymore. I said, 'either I go with you or I will
run away or kill myself.'"

The Moroccan government does not deny the existence of its
child labor problem. In June 1999, it released a report admitting that as many
as 600,000 children under the age of 15, more than half of them girls, worked
rather then went to school, with many of them employed in rural areas, where
they followed the tradition of toiling in the fields. But tens of thousands are
sold by their parents as domestic servants in the cities, tied to their jobs in
what the BBC correspondent in Morocco, Nick Pelham, said at the time "amounted
to near slavery."

Child labor is rampant in some of the poor countries in the
Arab world, but nowhere near as extensively as it is in Morocco, where it has
become a tradition, accepted as a norm, encoded in the culture, as it were. And
you take that tradition with you, even after you've emigrated, say, to the
United States.

Last week, the News Tribune, in Tacoma, Washington, published
a news report about the arrest of Abdel Naser Ennassine, 47, and his wife Tunia
Ennassine, 41, both Moroccan immigrants, with one count of "forced labor" and
one count of "concealing an alien." The alien in question was a 17-year-old
girl who had arrived from Morocco, and stayed in the US illegally, to "get a
good education and become a dentist," but ended up being forced to work long
hours at the cafe owned by the Ennassines, who were her relatives, without
being paid or allowed to keep the $5,000 she had earned in tips.

She had been taken out of the ninth grade last year and
threatened with deportation "if she did not work harder and longer,"
prosecutors say. (The girl, whom the Tribune did not name because of her age
and because she is considered a "crime victim," was taken away from her abusive
relatives and is now in protective custody.)

It is a vicious circle. About 60 percent of Moroccans cannot
read and write. And as industries try to cut costs by replacing adults with
child workers, unemployed parents send their children out to work, and the
cycle is repeated. According to the International Labor Organization, Morocco
is hardly alone in facing the problem. In Africa as a whole, two in five
children under 15 work. And in poor countries around the world, the total is
roughly 250 million.

This tragedy is clearly a function of underdevelopment, but
underdevelopment itself is a function of the lack of fundamental freedoms in
society, and the rule of law, in these countries. And that includes those in
the Arab world. As the much publicized human rights report, sponsored by the UN
Development Program and prepared by 50 Arab scholars, revealed in July 2002,
the slow human development in our region, involving the key areas of education,
technology and economic progress, is directly correlated to the absence of
"fundamental freedoms." And what is a more seminal freedom in social life than
the entitlement of a child to basic education, to protection against
exploitation and abuse? An educated youngster goes on to become an asset to
society, just as conversely his uneducated counterpart goes on to become a
burden on it.

It is to everybody's benefit in those Arab countries, such as
Yemen, Egypt, and Sudan, along with Morocco, that seem to condone, or turn a
blind eye to, child labor, to rescue these children from bondage (for what
other word will do here?) and put them in schools.

The United Nations Literacy Decade, which began exactly two
years ago this week, has not left a dent on countries in the Arab world that
refuse to acknowledge the magnitude of their problem.

Unless our children are rescued from degradation, as
domestics, carpet weavers, field pickers and the like, and placed in schools
where they belong, the Arab world, which as a whole suffers a 40 percent
illiteracy rate, will never move on.

Developed countries moved on only when education was seen as
a fundamental human right, laws were legislated - and enforced rigorously -
against child labor, and the freedom to live in dignity was institutionalized
as the birthright of every man, woman and, yes, child.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
Clean water saves lives. Help make water safe for our children.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/CHhStB/VREMAA/E2hLAA/BRUplB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->

***************************************************************************
Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. Menuju Indonesia yg
Lebih Baik, in Commonality & Shared Destiny.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia
***************************************************************************
__________________________________________________________________________
Mohon Perhatian:

1. Harap tdk. memposting/reply yg menyinggung SARA (kecuali sbg otokritik)
2. Pesan yg akan direply harap dihapus, kecuali yg akan dikomentari.
3. Reading only, http://dear.to/ppi
4. Satu email perhari: ppiindia-digest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
5. No-email/web only: ppiindia-nomail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
6. kembali menerima email: ppiindia-normal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
ppiindia-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

[nasional_list] [ppiindia] The Immorality of Child Labor in Arab Countries

Other related posts: