Nobel Peace Laureate Calls for Global Human Compassion to Combat Child Slavery Lyndal Rowlands - Inter Press Service
go to original March 21, 2015

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Kailash Satyarthi speaks at the DPI/NGO Special Briefing: Ending Child Slavery by 2030. (UN/Mark Garten)

Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi has called for globalized human compassion to combat the global and persistent problems of child labor and child slavery.

Satyarthi, a tireless activist against child labor, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 together with Malala Yousafzai “for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”

Satyarthi said that he was confident that he would see the end of child servitude in his lifetime but emphasized that everybody had a moral responsibility to address the issue.

Child labor still remains a truly global problem hurting millions of children worldwide.

In South Asia 250,000 children, some as young as four, work up to eighteen hours a day tying knots for rugs that are exported to the U.S. and Europe.

In Haiti, UNICEF estimates that 225,000 children, mostly girls, between the ages of five and 17 live as ‘restaveks’, live-in domestic servants with wealthier families.

In the Central African Republic, the U.N. reports there are some 6,000 child soldiers, including young girls used as sex slaves.

Worldwide more than half of all child laborers work in agriculture, including in the United States where Human Rights Watch reports children working on tobacco farms are exposed to nicotine poisoning.

In total, the International Labor Organization reports that there are 168 million children in child labor, and that more than half of them, 85 million, are in hazardous work.

Read the rest at Inter Press Service

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