Untitled - Terre des Hommes

households with child domestic labourers, indicating that this type of exploitation persists, but also
that there is a growing collective awareness that it is unacceptable. After all, as mentioned above,
domestic labour has been added to the list of sectors where child labour is prohibited.
A nationwide study on child abuse in India, prepared by the Ministry of Women and Child
Development (MWCD, 2007), found that 23.2% of working children were child domestic workers.
Due to the study’s research methodology that required a certain number of children from specific
groups: children in family environment, not attending school; children in schools; children in
institutional care; working children; and street children, these findings cannot be taken as a precise
reflection of the real situation, but rather indicative of the extremely widespread nature of child
domestic labour. Among child domestic workers, an overwhelming majority of 81.6% were girls.
Trafficking for labour in various sectors
The government’s recent focus on urban development and its subsequent neglect of agricultural
areas, coupled with increasing rural poverty, is resulting in high levels of rural-to-urban migration.
This movement towards the cities includes children being trafficked from rural areas to work in
various employment sectors, such as the construction and domestic sectors, as well as in restaurants.
More than 400 children were rescued from domestic work in Bangalore from 2004 to 2008; 70% were
from distant districts and states and many had been trafficked for the purpose of labour. Some
examples of recent cases, dealing with vulnerable and exploited children, reported by NGOs are:
BOSCO, an organization working with street children, recently rescued a group of twelve-year-old
girls that had been trafficked from outside districts into Bangalore to work in factories and brothels;
Jagruthi, an organisation working with sexually exploited children in Bangalore, has been in contact
with children trafficked into Bangalore for commercial sex work; Society for Human Education (SHE)
tells of children sold and trafficked from the Madurai area to northern India as bonded labourers;
and, according to UNICEF, there are high trafficking rates both into Villupuram in Tamil Nadu and
from Tamil Nadu, especially from the southern part of the state around Madurai, where boys are
trafficked to other states as child labourers.
North-to-south trafficking is apparently on the rise in India. The United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime (UNODC) has reported that, over the last five years, 700 girls have been reported missing from
northern states. These girls are believed to be sold to brothel owners in towns and cities like New
Delhi, Pune, Mumbai and Kolkata. Police estimate that around twenty percent of the girls in India's
big city brothels come from the northeast (humantrafficking.org, 2006). The MWCD (2007) report
affirms that Andhra Pradesh is the state with the highest incidence of trafficking for commercial
sexual exploitation of children.
b. Involvement of children in prostitution, production of pornography or pornographic
performances
Child sex workers in urban areas
The commercial sexual exploitation of children is more of an urban problem in southern India.
Children will travel to the cities for greater employment opportunities or as runaways from abusive
situations, but they often end up in sex work. Other children have been trafficked to the cities
precisely for this purpose. 82
82
Ms. Renu Appachu (Jagruthi)
40