It is difficult to overstate how important the Global Estimates on Child Labour are for the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) campaign against child labour. For more than two decades they have stood at the centre of both mainstream discourse and the global policy agenda on this topic. It’s easy to understand why: the headline number is enormous. The declaration that 160 million, or around one in 10, children were working in 2020 is a powerful tool for mobilising political will and resources. But the ways in which the global estimates are acquired, presented and instrumentalised unfortunately mislead at least as much as they enlighten. The picture they present is warped. Here’s why.
The allure of outrage
The first publicly promoted estimates of child labour, produced by the ILO in 1996, were substantially higher than they are today. Part of the report ‘Targeting the Intolerable’, they put the figure at a quarter billion. They were also produced for a purpose, namely to help provide a rationale for the adoption of the 1999 Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention (C182). C182 qualifies practices such as child slavery, bondage, trafficking, soldiering, and prostitution as the worst forms of child labour and prioritises action against them.
To bring this ‘dry’ number of 250 million to life, campaigners also released shocking images and narratives of children in these kinds of work. The result was a hugely effective media campaign. As Frans Röselaers, the director of the ILO’s International Programme on Child Labour (IPEC) at the time, noted:
