It's time for action

By Feizal Samath

Child labour and child abuse are serious issues in Sri Lanka but in the absence of proper data, planners have not been able to ascertain the extent of the problem to formulate proper and practical strategies to tackle these issues.

There have been various figures on child labour, particularly the number of child domestics employed, but these have often been "guesstimates" with figures ranging from the thousands to more than 100,000.

The debate however on the extent of child labour should stop, now that the Government has completed a fairly comprehensive survey on these issues.

The survey, released to the media on February 8, reveals that close to a million children between the ages of five and 17 years are working or are engaged in some form of economic activity. But the survey, carried out last year by the Department of Census and Statistics (DCS), has under -reported the extent of domestic child labour, where the majority of child abuse cases occur.

"The number of domestic workers reported in the survey is 19,110 (2.1 percent of the total working children population). There is a tendency not to give proper information, on children who are working as domestics by some of the responding households. As such this figure could be an under- estimate," a report on the summary findings of the survey, says. Jayanthi Liyanage, a senior programme officer at UNICEF, Colombo, said the figures of domestic labour were likely to be much higher but acknowledged that collection of data could have been difficult under the survey.

"Households are not going to say that they employ children knowing that it is illegal and also given that there was an effective media campaign against child labour," she told The Sunday Times.

She said there have been past studies showing that one out of 10 working children in urban areas were employed as domestics while a survey, conducted some three years ago in the Galle district, found one out of three working as domestics.

Last year, UNICEF ran a successful media campaign urging the public to inform police of cases of child labour including children employed as domestics and also of child abuse. Aptly called the "4 campaign" - denoting the telephone number of the police hotline for complaints -, Liyanage said as a result of the campaign the number of complaints to the police rose sharply to around 900 last year, from 200 in 1998 and much fewer in previous years. "Public awareness is growing on child abuse issues," she said but noted that police lacked follow-up capacity on these complaints due to staffing and other problems.

Nevertheless the DCS Child Activity Survey highlights, for the first time in Sri Lanka, some revealing facts about the extent of children employed in and outside their homes.

It estimates that of the 4,344,770 children between the ages of five to 17, living in Sri Lanka at the time of the survey, 926,038 or 21 percent of them were engaged in some form of economic activity. Sri Lanka's population is 18.5 million. The survey, funded under the International Programme for the Elimination of Labour (IPEC) of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), was carried out among 14,400 housing units across Sri Lanka except in the north and the east where the war made it impossible to collect data.

Apart from the economic activities carried out by children, the survey also collected information on other activities like housekeeping, education, leisure and socio-economic conditions of families.

Working children under the survey in the age group 5-17 years were categorized as paid employees, self-employed and those who worked in family enterprises but were unpaid. This excluded housekeeping activities.

"This is a good starting point to assess the child labour situation in Sri Lanka in the absence of any reliable data," said Lalani Perera, an Additional Secretary at the Justice Ministry who is an expert on child labour laws.

Last December, Sri Lanka amended the Employment of Women, Young Persons and Children Act (EWYPC) of 1956 to provide for a minimum age of employment of 14 years in all categories compared to earlier when children between 12 and 14 years were able by law to work in certain categories like domestics or other light work.

Pearl Weerasinghe, Deputy Commissioner in charge of child labour issues at Sri Lanka's Labour Department, said the changes in the law brought it in line with the ILO's Minimum Age Convention of 1973 in which the minimum employable age is 14 years.

"In addition to this change in the laws, the government has also decided to ratify the ILO convention and the process of registering the ratification instrument in Geneva is now underway," she said.

Child rights activist, Mallika Ganasinghe, a former IPEC-ILO national programme officer in Colombo, described December's amendment to the EWYPC Act and ratification of the ILO convention as landmark events in child labour legislation.

"This is quite a significant development. In fact the Act prescribed 14 years as the minimum age at the outset but in 1956 it was lowered to 12 years through a gazette notification to allow the employment of domestic servants," she said.

Much of the child abuse has been reported in urban households in Colombo, which employ children as servants. Cases of assault, torture, rape and even death have been reported amongst child domestics who come from plantation areas where their parents are unable to feed, clothe or send them to school. Ms. Ganasinghe said the government, by raising the minimum age of employment, was also conforming to its compulsory education standards which became effective last year, in which education is compulsory for children in the 5-14-year age group.

Under current laws, the definition of a child is a person under 14 years and a young person between 14 and 18 years. Ms. Ganasinghe said ideally the minimum age of employment should be 16 years as "vocational training and membership in trade unions start only at 16 years."

The Child Activity Survey of 1999 also found that the number of working children in the 5-14-years category - when they should be at school - was 25,533.

It found that 90 percent of the 4.3 million children were attending school or some other educational institution while amongst the working-children population, 74 percent were getting some kind of education - at school or outside.

The survey noted that 20 percent of 85,906 children dropped out of school to do a job; 12 percent stopped schooling due to financial and other difficulties; 11 percent didn't continue schooling due to the uncertainty of higher education while 38 percent of dropouts cited other reasons.

"Of the 926,038 working children, 214,266 work for pay or profit. Out of them, 26 percent earn less than 2,000 rupees a month and more than half earn 1,000 rupees or more a month," it said.

Child activists said that with such a range of fairly reliable data now available to government planners on child labour and international and private agencies involved in child welfare work, it was hoped that all these groups would combine to work out a common strategy to help children in need.

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