2021 is the UN International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour, but that is not going to happen. Not this year, not by 2025 as stipulated by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and probably not ever. There are simply too many children in this world with compelling reasons to work for that to be, or to have ever been, a reasonable goal. Bans on child labour may reduce numbers in some areas or push child workers deeper into the shadows in others. But they cannot eliminate them from the world once and for all.
But if bans don’t work, what does? And if elimination cannot be the goal, what should be? As the guest editors of the special feature now rolling out on Beyond Trafficking and Slavery, we submit the motto of ‘empower and protect, rather than prohibit’ as a better approach to child work. To understand what this might mean in practice, we’ve asked our contributors – researchers, practitioners, NGO staff, and working children from around the world – to first tell us what we can learn from the strategies, initiatives, programmes and frameworks currently being used to mitigate the hardship many working children experience. We’ve then asked them to explore ways that practitioners and policymakers might build on these lessons to structurally help working children improve their lives.
What do we mean when we say child labour?
But first, we need to make clear what we talk about when we talk about child labour.
