Child Labour: Five Fascinating Facts and the Legacy of Iqbal Masih

At school for our final project of the year, we have something called Five Fascinating Facts where we get to choose a topic and find five facts about it and present them to the class in a interesting way. For my project I chose to do Child Labour because I feel very passionate about that issue and I want kids to learn more about the challenges that kids face in the world. I think that it’s quite cool that tomorrow I am presenting about Child Labour and today it is World Day Against Child Labour.  The International Labour Organization (a specialized agency of the United Nations) launched the day in 2002.  To honour this day I wanted to share my presentation with you.

To be creative I am presenting it in the voice of Iqbal Masih.

On April 19^th, 1995 the headline in The Toronto Star read: “Battled Child Labour, Boy 12 Murdered.” They’re reporting the news about me. My name is Iqbal Masih and I was 12 years old.

I was 4 years old when I was sold into child labour because my family had to pay for my brother’s wedding and they didn’t have enough money.  I was forced to work in a carpet factory and I sat at a carpet weaving loom and I tied tiny knots for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. I had only a 30 minute break each day. I wasn’t fed well, I wasn’t healthy, I didn’t go to school, I didn’t play with friends. I worked in all kinds of different temperatures – sometimes it was too hot and sometimes it was so so cold. When I was 10 years old I escaped and began speaking out about child labour and telling the world about my life. I thought that if people really knew what was going on, it would stop. I was angry that kids like me had to stay and work all day and sometimes never escaped.  I did many speeches to schools and spoke to a lot of students and anyone that would listen. When I was 12 years old I went back to my home in Pakistan and I was shot and killed. It might have been people from the carpet factory angry at what I was saying – speaking out and telling the world what was happening to me and so many other kids. Maybe they thought I had to be silenced.

photo from Free The Children

Today I am here to tell you Five Fascinating Facts about Child Labour

1. Reading about me after I was killed for speaking out against child labour,  Craig Kielburger was inspired by my story and created Free The Children. You see, Craig was 12 years old at that time,  just like me. He couldn’t believe that other kids in the world his own age were living like this. I was silenced but Craig vowed not to be silent.
2. According to the International Labour Organization (specialized agency of the United Nations) there are 215 million children between the ages 4 and 14 in labour. Their life is nothing like yours.
3. Children in child labour don’t get proper nutrition and medical care, they are not fed enough and work in very hard places. They also don’t get to go to school or play with friends, they don’t get a room of their own to sleep in, and they don’t live with their family because they work and work and work.
4. Some of the jobs that child labourers have include: farming, making instruments, sport balls. A lot of factories they work in are not safe, especially for children: like mining, making clothing (that can hurt yourself with the needle) and one that is extremely hazardous is making fireworks.  Some children are sent to live and work  with families where they work and clean around the house. Sometimes they are abused. They have to wake up at 6:00 am and work until 12:00 am. These children are called domestic workers. I have a very difficult job, I work in a carpet factory, I get cuts and burns making the rugs and my clothes are ripped and torn.
5. Parents sell their children into child labour because in developing countries like India, Pakistan and Kenya people do not have a lot of money. Sometimes they don’t have enough money to take care of their whole family so they end up sending some of their own children away to work in factories or in other people’s homes. Children are sold around $16 or $14. I was sold for 12.

I hope that you have learned more about Child Labour and the lives of children like me. Yesterday, June 12 was the International Day Against Child Labour Day. Days like that help to educate and inform the world so that we have a voice. There are many organizations like Free The Children, International Labour Organization and Save The Children that work to help children like me get out of Child Labour, get medical help and education. There is even an foundation named after me: The Iqbal Masih Shaheed Children Foundation.

 

Note: Annie, who writes the blog PhD in Parenting, went to Bangladesh last year with Save The Children and wrote many posts about her experience. She wrote one about Child Domestic Workers where she writes about what she saw and learned while in Dhaka, Bangladesh. If you want to read about her trip, visit her blog.