Child Workers and Child Abuse in Pakistan and Bangladesh

The New York Times just published a heart-wrenching piece on the death of an innocent 12-year-old girl in Pakistan who worked as a servant in the home of a wealthy lawyer.  That poor child, little Shazia Masih, might have died from injuries sustained from vicious physical abuse from her employer.   Now, simply switch the name of the country in which this brutal story occurred–from Pakistan to Bangladesh– and this piece could readily run as an indictment of child labor practices in Bangladesh.

The story is the same. Unable to feed a growing family, desperate parents farm out their children to affluent homes to serve as servants, maids or nannies (child-keepers is the more proper sense in which these children are employed in those house-holds).  These children then become, effectively, the wards of their employers and are often treated like personal property.   The birth parents remain out of sight, perhaps hundreds of miles away, unaware that their babies are just so much flesh and burdened bone for the caprice and rubbed temper of their unbecomingly unkind lords.

Justice has been put aside for these children.  They are the flotsam of unsettled poverty and the repackaged gifts of unhinged circumstances.   Opportunity does not avail them; outcomes remain unmarked and the appropriate ends to which they might be working are unknown to them.  Justice is for these children an inattentive teacher.

So we have the following write up: 

“The root of the problem is poverty, Pakistanis say, and a law would do little to stem the tide of desperate young people from the countryside looking for work.

“You can’t imagine the poverty,” said Muhamed Sharif, an employment agent who supplies maids, gardeners and security guards to wealthy residents of Lahore. “Sometimes they come in hungry. They will do anything for work.”  One might be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Sharif is tending to his own cause.  But he is not lying.  People in Pakistan and Bangladesh travel from villages to put up their children in the homes of distant wealthy relatives as servants, just so they might have a bit more money toward the monthly rent.   Of course without legal contracts, monthly wages are seldom paid at the agreed upon time, at the agreed upon sum.

Moreover, “as the poor get poorer in Pakistan, a job as a maid is a valuable commodity, even for a child. An estimated 40 percent of the population [in Pakistan] now lives beneath the poverty line, far higher than 30 percent in the 1990s.

“Inflation, now around 40 percent, according to the Social Policy and Development Center, an economic policy organization in Karachi, has caused prices for electricity, gas and food to spike, pushing millions more into poverty, economists say.”

“A British Council report last fall estimated that Pakistan’s economy would have to grow by 6 percent a year to keep up with the expanding population, which over the past 20 years has been growing at twice the world average. The economy grew by 2 percent in 2008, the last year for which the government has statistics.”

Compared to these numbers Bangladesh and its people are doing well.  The rate of inflation has gone down in Bangladesh to under 10% while GDP growth in 2008 was 6%, according to IMF data. Food prices are high but not prohibitively so.  At least, not quite yet.  The baseline wage in Bangladesh is lower than in Pakistan as is the baseline per capita income.  But the constraints on the economy and individual purchasing power are less stringent.  The government of Bangladesh has fewer anchors to lift up, even if while raising the fortunes of its people it has to unlock many more shackles and chains.

There are many more victims of circumstance and incaution like Shazia Masih in Bangladesh.  Nevertheless, I hope the sitting government in Bangladesh will help children like Shazia move out of the work-force and back into the home, the hearth, ready to tackle a heavy school work-load.