A child works at a brick kiln. Phan Hien for the ILO/Flickr. Creative Commons.
The first modern international convention specifically for the protection of children appears to have been the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Minimum Age (Industry) Convention, no. 5, of 1919. It applied internationally what had been a primarily European standard against child labour, a legal minimum age below which children were forbidden to be employed as industrial workers. It was widely believed by many educated Europeans that childhood everywhere should be privileged, devoted to play and school and separated from adult cares and responsibilities. Serious work was thought to harm children by robbing them of their essential innocence, an idea that lingers today.
Over time, the idea that children should be protected from work was increasingly applied to non-Western societies that had not yet industrialised. Many of these societies thought children should be prepared for adulthood rather than buffered against it, and considered children’s family and social ties to include obligations as well as privileges. Hewing to its global north ethnocentrism, the ILO gradually expanded the scope of prohibitions on child work until, in 1973, it passed the Minimum Age Convention (no. 138). This broadly sought “the effective abolition of child labour” and obligated ILO member countries to legislate age limits for which “no one under that age shall be admitted to employment or work in any occupation”.
