“Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.”
– Grace Abbott (American Social Worker & Child Labor Reformer Director, Children's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor 1917,1934)
The roots of poverty run deep into the social history and framework of many cultures, however if these taboos are not addressed, the cycle of poverty cannot be broken. Millions of parents across the globe feel the burden of poverty heavily weighing on their shoulders on a daily basis. Soon one finds these same families turning to their children as a tool to escape the desperation of hunger and the feeling of hopelessness. Children are turned out to work for the survival of the family, often they are sent to the fields, into brick factories, on to the streets to beg, to the mines, or to the lakes to fish, and even worse many are literally sold into slavery. Children are sold every day as if they were open market commodities; sold into the seedy world of commercial sex or other situations of domestic or physical labor.
The entry of a child into the labor market leaves a child bound by the chains of poverty, most often giving them no chance at an education. The denial of an education to a child thus only fuels the cycle of poverty, which is the root cause of all most all of children's rights violations, such as; access to healthcare, malnutrition, abuse, child marriage, child trafficking and slavery. Therefore if the global community is to truly strive to end global poverty, one must unbind the ties of child labor and ensure that children across the world are given access to an education.
