Term Paper on "Child Labor in Istanbul"

Term Paper 7 pages (1850 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Child Labor in Istanbul, Turkey

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, child labor still remains a serious problem in much of the world (International pp). According to studies from the late 1970's, more the fifty million children under the age of fifteen were working in various jobs under hazardous conditions (International pp). Most of these children live in underdeveloped countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia (International pp). Living conditions for these children are crude and opportunities for education minimal (International pp). However, their income is necessary for the survival of their families, providing the basic essentials of life, such as adequate food, decent clothing and shelter, and even water for bathing (International pp). Industrialization in many countries has created working conditions for children that equal the worst features of the nineteenth century factories and mines (International pp). Much of the effort to eliminate child-labor abuses throughout the world has come from the International Labor Organization, ILO, which was founded in 1919 and is now a special agency of the United Nations (International pp). The ILO has introduced several child-labor conventions, including a minimum age of sixteen years for admission to all work, a higher minimum age for specific types of employment, compulsory medical examinations, and regulation of night work (International pp). During the latter part of the twentieth century, the ILO added slavery, prostitution, debt bondage (the practice of requiring children to work off loans made to their parents), and forced military service to this list the worst forms of child labor (International pp).

According to the International Labor Organization, in 2003, there were 246 million child laborers in the world, with seventy-three million of them below the age of ten years (ILO pp).

In 1998 the Child Labour Survey estimated that there were more than three million children working in Turkey (Worst pp). In 1999, out of 12,065,000 children in the six to fourteen year age group, 4.2%, 511,000 were economically active and 27.6%, 3,329,000 were engaged in household related activities (Worst pp). The International Labor Organization estimated that for the year 2000, there would be 452,000 economically active children between the ages of ten and fourteen, 190,000 girls and 262,000 boys, representing 7.78% of this age group (Worst pp). A 1996 estimate of Turkey's Child Workers Bureau indicated that 32% of the total workforce is between six and nineteen years age (Worst pp). Three percent of the workforce at home level and work sites are children, and the total number of working young persons is 3.5 million, with 45% of them under the age of sixteen and 14% under the age of ten years (Worst pp). In fact more than half, approximately 54.43% of child laborers in Turkey in 1995 were between the ages of twelve and fourteen (Worst pp). Of the six to fourteen age group, some 8.48% of the children work in the business sector which amounts to 4.94% of Turkey's total workforce (Worst pp). Approximately 1,008,019 children are working in the business sector, while 2,839,811 children work in family enterprises (Worst pp).

Many small enterprises are completely dependent on child labor with the bulk of child labor occurring in rural areas and usually associated with traditional family economic activities, such as farming or animal husbandry (Worst pp). General observations indicate that girls are rarely seen working in public, yet many are kept out of school to work in handicrafts, particularly in the rural areas (Worst pp). Tasks performed by children include auto repair shops, carpet weaving, forestry work, street peddling, bakery work, brick factories, and the metal, shoe, woodworking, and agricultural sector (Worst pp).

There is an estimated 60,000 female child prostitutes between the ages of twelve and seventeen years (Worst pp). Turkey is a major destination and transit country for trafficking of persons, mostly women and girls from Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Russia, and the Ukraine (Worst pp). However, there is almost no trafficking of Turkish women or girls, moreover, there were no reports of trafficking in children for the purpose of forced labor, according to a 2000 report from the United States Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (Worst pp). Yet there remains a growing problem of trafficking women and girls to Turkey for the purpose of forced prostitution, according the report (Worst pp).

The International Labor Organization found that rural children constitute the overwhelming majority, some 79.4% of the child workforce, with the urban child workforce approximately four times smaller (LFPR pp). In urban areas the male child workforce was recorded at 5.3% and the female child workforce at 1.7%, while the gap in participation rates between genders is relatively smaller in rural area, 16.5% male and 13.3% female (LFPR pp). The labor force participation rate also shows variations across the age groups: "Dividing the 6- to 14-year-olds into two-year age categories, the lowest rate of participation is observed for the youngest age group, 6- to 7-year-olds, at 2.2% and the highest rate for the 12- to 14-year-olds at 19% which marks the end of compulsory education" (LFPR pp). The discrepancy observed between urban and rural children increases with age due to the higher rate of increase of rural children as they move into older age categories (LFPR pp). There is a 4.4 percentage point difference between urban and rural children in the six to seven-year age category, yet this rate becomes 5.8 percentage points for those in the eight to nine-year age category (LFPR pp). However, despite the smaller discrepancy observed regarding the younger children, it is important to note almost no children were employed in the six to seven-year age category in urban areas, while in rural areas, 5% of the children in this age group are employed (LFPR pp). This indicates that the child labor among young children is more common in rural areas compared to urban sectors where child labor is more of an issue for older children (LFPR pp).

This same pattern of variation across age groups is also observed for both the male and female children (LFPR pp). The male-female variation in the urban and rural regions arises because of the differences in the participation rates of older children (LFPR pp). There is on average, one and a half percentage point difference in the participation rates of eight to nine-year-olds, however, the difference increases to 8.6 percentage points for the twelve to fourteen-year-olds (LFPR pp). The fact that only 12.2% of the male and none of the female children in urban areas are found to have irregular or mobile workplaces suggests that children working on streets is probably underestimated (Working pp).

Of the children experiencing work-related accidents, more than half of the urban children reported burns and infections (Working pp). One hundred percent of female urban children reported burns as the only occupational hazard they experienced, while in the case of male children, 27.5% reported infection, and another 18.8% physical injury and the rest were twists, sprains, bruises, and burns (Working pp). The majority of the children reported that they have received some treatment as a result of a work-related accident, of these 57.2% of the urban male and all of the urban female children reported that they had received treatment for less than five days and none were treated for more than ten days (Working pp). Due to the fact that most of the children work in unregistered establishments, it is the families of the children who are paying for the medical treatment, in fact, urban male child workers constitute the only group, 29.4%, of whom were treated with the financial contributions of their employers (Working pp).

The International Labor Organization has recently directed special attention to one of the most intolerable and abusive forms of child labor, that of juvenile prostitution (Kuntay Pp). A recent study, published in 2002, focused on this problem in Turkey's largest commercial, industrial, financial and cultural metropolitan area, Istanbul, population 9,057,747 (Kuntay Pp). Due to massive migration since the 1950's, Istanbul's population expansion has been haphazard, and thus has given way to environmental degradation and has imposed great pressure upon public services (Kuntay Pp). According to the study, "The most severe consequences of accelerated population growth is seen in the sharp differences in income, housing facilities, access to municipal services and the general quality of life" (Kuntay Pp). As in any developing country, the rate of urban expansion is not in harmony with economic growth, and this is why the population explosion in Istanbul has created serious employment and housing problems (Kuntay Pp). Thus, new comers and the Turkish female sex workers are relentless brutal portraits of urban depravity (Kuntay Pp). Most pictures depict women who have been beaten up, "derelict, collapsed, gnarled teenagers, fourteen-year-old alcoholics and dope addicts" against a hideous squalor background (Kuntay Pp). Observed within this picture are clues from other sociological variables related to migration, urbanization, family and patriarchal norms, and perhaps most important of all, education and health (Kuntay Pp). Many of the immigrants brought skills, educational backgrounds, and… READ MORE

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