Child labor and victimization: An Empirical Study at Tongi, Gazipur

Author: Alam, Mohammad Ashraful & Hossain, Iqbal

Abstract: The Child Labor issue is one of the great concerns throughout the world. It is quite common for children of all types of developing societies are engaged in some forms of occupation depending on their economic condition. Child Labor has been generally perceived more as a problem of poor developing countries like Bangladesh which is consistently facing challenges against poverty, high population growth, rising unemployment, natural disaster accordingly. Children are more at risk for victimization than are adults, for several reasons. The study was intended to find out why and how the children were victimized. Most of the respondents come from very poor families (50%, Save the Children, May 2009); their family status is very low, respondents about 38.2% working child aged between 11-13 years, 74.5% respondents join work for poverty and about 49.50%of respondents work in hazardous condition whose about 39.8% get salary below 1500 taka, they do not like study and are not interested to going to school where86.4% do not get schooling opportunity. Maximum respondents are working for long time which is very dangerous for children. Most of the respondents’ master and others and sometimes their parents torture (physical torture 64.1%, sexual harassment 20.4%) them for work. They are depriving from basic human rights and for fulfilling their basic requirements and do not get other facilities they needs as a social being. Regarding the issues employers and their families should take more responsibility to reduce this problem; state should have taken the indirect or direct responsibility to increase the awareness about the child rights and their protection in the society by creating proper job or work description, education and training in the leisure period with proper law.

Keywords: child labor, child victimization, child abuse, awareness building, job description, protection and poverty