More girls to work, stop schooling due to crisis

Their parents lost jobs in massive layoffs

The global financial crisis is expected to push a huge number of children, particularly girls, to drop out of school and become laborers, according to a study by the International Labour Organization (ILO) released Monday.

This development could erode the progress in fighting child labor in the past decade, said the report, called “Give Girls A Chance: Tackling Child Labor, A Key to the Future?”

These prospective child-laborers are children of parents who lost their livelihood due to the massive layoffs in companies worldwide.

“Although processes has been made in reducing child labor during the course of the past ten years, the onset of the global financial crisis threatens to erode recent advances,” said Michele Jankanish, director of the ILO International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor, in his foreword on the study.

The report said that young girls are more prone to become victims of child labor because there is evidence that in many countries families give preference to boys when making decision on which children should get an education. Families affected by the crisis, the study said, may have to make choices as to which children stay in school.

Boys stay in school

“When families are pushed deeper into poverty and have to choose between sending their sons and daughters to school, it tends to be daughters that lose out,” Jankanish said.

The Geneva-based organization estimates that around 100 million girls are engaged in child labor around the world, with 53 million of them involved in hazardous work.

Linda Wirth, director of ILO’s subregional office in Manila, said that while the school dropout rates among Filipino boys is higher than the girls, there is still need to focus on the effect of crisis on child labor among girls because most of them have “double burden.”

“They may be working outside, but there are also expected to do domestic duties at home,” Wirth told reporters on Monday. She said working and security risk posed by travelling great distance to school may result in low attendance in school among girls.

The ILO report, meanwhile, also said that most of the type of work of young female child workers—like domestic work, work in small-scale agriculture, and  home-based workshops—are  “less visible” than their male counterpart.

“Girls working in many situations also have little contact with others outside the immediate work environment, thus giving rise to concerns for their safety and welfare,” the report said.

Sent to Middle East

Cecil Flores-Oebanda, head of the anti-trafficking group Visayan Forum, said that child labor in the Philippines has evolved in the past 10 years.

“Before, the focus was child labor in the communities. Now, we intercept cases of young child workers with fake documents that are recruited as domestic workers in the Middle East,” Oebanda said. “As long as we do not realize that it (form of child labor) is evolving, it will remain a big problem.”

A 2001 Survey on Children by the National Statistics Office (NSO) showed that there were 4 million working children aged 5 to 17 in the Philippines. Of this figure, 2.4 million are in dangerous work and around 18,000 engaged in mining and quarrying.

Oebanda said that despite the presence of the anti-child labor law, Republic Act 9231, a conviction has yet to be made.

Experts from groups advocating child rights, meanwhile, said that implementation of  the law is hampered by the difficulty of monitoring and lack of efforts from the local levels.

Lawyer Anjanette Saguisag of the United Nations Children’s Fund said there is a need to review existing policies in labor inspection.

“Child labor is not consciously monitored by labor inspectors,” Saguisag said.

Amihan Abueva, head of the End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT)-Philippines said that there is a need to strengthen local efforts in addressing the surge in number of dropouts and child laborers in the community.

“While there are laudable programs at the national level, some municipalities just take the number of dropouts,” Abueva said adding that local staff of the education department should ensure that the child workers and dropouts can still study through alternative learning system. –Jesus F. Llanto, Newsbreak