Nepal's Children

Nepal is a country whose children are suffering. One such form of this suffering is child labour, which is not a new thing to this agriculture-dominated nation. The increase in child labour exploitation in Nepal is partly caused by the increasing marginalisation among the rural population, landlessness, unemployment, and unplanned urbanisation.

Child Labor
According to the ILO-IPEC (Child Labour Situation in Nepal ), the number of children working in Nepal is harrowing. Of all children aged five to fourteen, 2.6 million are regularly put to work - that's over forty percent of all children in the country. A further 36.7% of children work and go to school at the same time. Of all working children in Nepal , the majority are girls (55%).

It is also shown that girls work longer hours than boys. 88% of economically active girls work fourteen hours or more per day. There are also more children working in the mountains than in the Terai area. Work participation rate is 52.3% in the mountain region, 36.3% in the Terai region, and 45.4% in the hilly region. [1]

Types of Child Labor
Child labour can be found in many forms. Some of the most common areas of exploitation include plantation, farming, cattle grazing, and agriculture bonded labour in the rural areas. In urban settings, child labour comes in the form of construction work, transportation, factory work, domestic service, child porters, and scavenging.

Child migrants are made to work up to 15 hours per day, 7 days a week. Many children only get a 1-hour lunch break each day. Conditions are notoriously poor, and damage to health and injuries are commonplace.

Many children are also forced to work in mines and quarries, including stone quarries, coalmines, and the mining of magnetite. This work is not only physically demanding, but dangerous too. Children are subject to landslides, cave-ins, and explosions.

Children who carry out domestic work, such as fetching water, cleaning, cooking, caring for siblings, and laundry, are often more susceptible to other forms of abuse - such as sexual abuse - due to the "invisible" nature of their work, where they are kept away from the public eye. [1]

It has been shown by various studies from the ILO-IPEC that the number of children working in agriculture hovers around the 1.58 million mark. Agricultural jobs involve backbreaking work, including much manual labour not suited to the physical stature of a child.

According to the ILO-IPEC, over 127,000 children are involved in extremely dangerous or hazardous work, including some of the worst forms of child labour. The labours include 4,000 rag pickers in Nepal (88% boys and 12% girls). Rag workers generally toil for six hours at a time, and the average earning is only NRs. 87 per day.

2 Common Types of Abuse
Perhaps the worst child labour comes in the form of the 12,000 girls trafficked every year, and those involved in Commercial Sexual Exploitation. These horrendous practices include child prostitution, massage parlours, pimping, cabin restaurants, and dance bars. Over 20% of the sex workers in Nepal are under the age of 16. Unfortunately, the ongoing conflict situation in Nepal is only making child labour exploitation worse.

But those are not the only areas where children from Nepal are affected. The disturbing truth is that many children in Nepal face various forms of abuse. In Kathmandu Valley alone, almost 45% of children face obscene verbal abuse. The majority of children hear obscene language at street markets (40.4%), and at school (30.2%) - one of the places children are meant to feel safe.

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