Innocent lost: Child labor in Nepal

INNOCENCE LOST: CHILD LABOR IN NEPAL (6 min.)

About half of the population in Nepal, 11,258,000, is under the age of 18. About half of those children work in bondage, and a majority of them work regularly. Children in Nepal are working in difficult circumstances often as slaves. They work in carpet factories and at brick kilns, in domestic service and in agriculture, on plantations and in constructions, in stone quarries and in transportation, in coal mines and as migrant workers.

TEENAGE PROSTITUTION

40 thousand Nepalese girls under 16 in Indian brothels are forced into prostitution.

The trafficking of girls from Nepal into India for the purpose of prostitution is probably the busiest slave traffic of this kind anywhere in the world.

Nepalese girls as young as eleven are trafficked into India.

COAL MINES

With no opportunity for agriculture in the mountains, many ruined families that live in the hills are forced to send their children to work in the coal mines. They work long hours with little to eat or drink. Often they get only rice or clear broth to eat.

The children work in hazardous conditions.

Children are often sent to work long hard hours in factories. The conditions are often dangerous, sometimes even working with chemicals or toxic waste.

CHILDREN LABOUR IN RESTAURANTS

Approximately 80% of the children work 14 hours per day.

Many of them are forced to work a variety of jobs in restaurants.

Many children also work as servants in the homes of the wealthy, where they are often sexually abused.

FAMILIES TORN APART

Street children earn their living by selling newspapers, cleaning garbage and even begging.

In Nepal, it is estimated that there are 5.000 children who’ll laid on the streets of cities due to varied socioeconomic and sociopsychological reasons and family violence.

SOLD INTO SLAVERY

The burden of a large family, poverty, lack of awareness and the existing traditional culture are the baselines that compel and encourage parents to sell their children into slavery. And most of the time, their parents don’t even know where they are. The only time that children are allowed to go home is during annual religious holiday.

Children are not going to school due to their parents’ financial problems and are involving themselves in the worse form of child labour.

They are also compelled to work in vulnerable conditions to support their families. Parents sell their children into slavery for about 60 American dollars a year.

Economic and educational opportunities must be provided to the Nepalis.

In this way, we can return the innocence of childhood to the children of Nepal. Innocence that now is lost.