Revisiting the Child Labour Debate on ​‘World Day Against Child Labour’

Vijitha Rajan on the need to move the child-labour debate from scholarship to policy and practice.

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In contemporary child rights discourse, the eradication of child labour has emerged as a key focus for global and national policy frameworks. While the call to eliminate child labour is often framed as an unquestionable moral imperative, particularly within rights-based and developmental discourse, scholars have pointed out that this framing has also been contested. This article revisits some of these contestations. It begins by briefly laying out the global policy discourse on child labour and the call for its elimination, followed by revisiting the critique by postcolonial scholars and finally, highlighting implications of these debates for the problem of child labour in the Indian context.

Article 32 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989) affirms every child’s right to protection from economic exploitation and any form of labour that is hazardous, interferes with their education, or adversely impacts their wellbeing in physical, mental, or social terms. To ensure this, the Convention urges states to legislate and implement policies setting minimum employment ages, regulate work conditions, and enforce these provisions through appropriate sanctions. 

The International Labour Organization (ILO) clarifies that children engaging in light, non-hazardous tasks that do not hinder their schooling or development such as helping with family enterprises or earning pocket money during holidays can benefit from such experiences, which help them acquire practical skills and prepare for adulthood (ILO, n.d.-a). By contrast, child labour refers ILO defines it as exploitative or harmful work that deprives children of their childhood, education, wellbeing, or dignity. This includes work that is dangerous or interferes with school attendance, and the nature and classification of such labour often vary by national context and industry. Furthermore, the ILO’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) prioritises eradicating the worst forms of child labour as defined in the 1999 ILO Convention. These include child slavery, trafficking, forced labour (especially in armed conflict), sexual exploitation, involvement in illegal activities like drug trafficking, and hazardous work environments that threaten children’s health, safety, or moral development (ILO, n.d.-b).

One major line of critique of the global policy framing of child labour stems from postcolonial theory. This perspective challenges the dominant humanitarian narrative that constructs childhood in the Global South as a condition of lack or deficiency in need of rescue. Nieuwenhuys (2013) argues that child rights campaigns, such as the call to eliminate child labour, often has colonial underpinnings of ​‘the white man’s burden’ which in turn portray non-Western childhoods as incomplete or deprived. This discourse relies on the claim that Western childhoods are normative and desirable, while others are cast as primitive or needing civilising intervention. The language of ​‘stolen’ or ​‘lost’ childhoods, as seen in reports like Stolen Childhoods by Save the Children (2017), reflects these problematic assumptions. The report ranks countries based on indicators such as health, education, and labour and categorises many African and South Asian nations as places where children are ​‘missing out on childhood’. Such classifications implicitly measure all childhoods against a Western ideal and ignore cultural and historical diversity. Such portrayals reflect a legacy of colonial discourse, where the poor non-Western child symbolises developmental failure, and where childhood is treated as a homogeneous ideal already achieved in the West and absent elsewhere (Balagopalan, 2011; Nieuwenhuys, 1998).

Rather than viewing childhood in the Global South as deficient, postcolonial scholars call for recognition of multiple modernities and localised understandings of childhood. They critique the assumption that modern childhood and associated rights frameworks are neutral, universal constructs. Nieuwenhuys (2013) emphasises that both children and colonised populations were historically imagined as vulnerable and incapable of self-governance. This imagination in turn legitimises interventionist policies in the name of progress. Elsewhere, Nieuwenhuys (1998) has critiqued how dominant child rights frameworks, particularly the UNCRC, promote a singular model of childhood, largely based on Northern ideals. These frameworks assume a standardised vision of a protected, school-going, economically dependent child, which becomes the normative benchmark for defining a proper childhood. This notion not only marginalises culturally diverse childhoods but also constructs Southern children as ​‘others’ who are presumed to be ​‘outside’ of childhood and in need of saving or civilising. Aid and development discourses further commodify these representations by marketing the Southern child as a symbol of lack and deficiency and reinforce colonial tropes of the West’s moral and developmental superiority. For instance, Sinervo and Chenai (2019) observe that advertisement campaigns by global agencies often featured emotionally charged images of brown, foreign-looking children looking distressed, accompanied by vague slogans like ​‘save children’s lives’ and ​‘do something’ or ​‘give something’. These messages, displayed in public spaces along with other commercial ads, offer no concrete explanation of the children’s circumstances or what exactly viewers are being urged to act upon.

The category of the child was fluidly defined based on the administrative needs of the state; and age and childhood were strategically mobilised to discipline bodies, reproduce labour, and maintain social hierarchies. 

- Balagopalan (2014)

Balagopalan (2014) extends this critique by interrogating the liberal embrace of ​‘multiple childhoods’. While the concept challenges monolithic constructions of childhood and validates non-Western child-rearing practices, it also risks reifying cultural specificity in ways that isolate these lives from the broader workings of power, such as state policy, market forces, and global development agendas. The danger, Balagopalan argues, lies in the depoliticisation of cultural difference, where respect for diversity becomes a liberal act of tolerance that conceals underlying universalist assumptions. This framing casts children in the global South as inhabiting ​‘culturally rich but politically disconnected’ spaces — respected yet not emulated.

The prevailing binary that positions schooling as the natural antidote to child labour has come under critical scrutiny from scholars who question its historical and structural underpinnings. This dichotomy, particularly in postcolonial contexts like India, overlooks how modern schooling was historically complicit in managing and reproducing labouring childhoods under colonial rule (Balagopalan, 2014). Far from being a neutral, liberatory force, schooling was often aligned with the colonial state’s agenda to normalise child labour, especially for children from marginalised castes and classes. Balagopalan shows how the category of the child was fluidly defined based on the administrative needs of the state; and age and childhood were strategically mobilised to discipline bodies, reproduce labour, and maintain social hierarchies. Nieuwenhuys (1998) similarly has critiqued the romanticisation of schooling as a saviour and argues that formal education often delegitimises other forms of knowledge and labour. Furthermore, child labour is not merely a by-product of poverty, as mainstream policy narratives often suggest. Myron Weiner (1991) shows that in many societies, including colonial and postcolonial India, cultural attitudes and political decisions, rather than economic necessity, have shaped child labour policy. The belief that poor children should work to support their families is deeply entrenched and has even been endorsed by state actors. Thus, the assumption that the school is a natural solution to child labour is not only historically flawed but also ideologically fraught. Schooling is often presented as a quick-fix solution which in turn masks the structural inequalities and obscures how education itself is implicated in the reproduction of social hierarchies and labour regimes.

India’s legislative framework around child labour reflects a tension between protection, regulation, and differential aspirations for different childhoods. The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986 marked a significant step by prohibiting children under 14 from working in hazardous occupations. The 2016 Amendment to the Act introduced further measures to mitigate the problem. Yet, it still permits children below 14 to work in family enterprises after school hours or during holidays, and allows adolescents (14 – 18 years) to work in non-hazardous sectors. While this amendment ostensibly seeks to balance cultural and economic realities, critics argue it reopens the door to exploitation and undermines earlier protections and the global call to eradicate child labour (see The Hindu, 2016; Balagopalan, 2018). 

Debates around child labour often remain confined to academic circles, marked by heated exchanges but with limited tangible impact on the lives of children who are actually labouring. It is crucial to ask what relevance do these discussions hold for them? There are important lessons to be learned. We must not delegitimise children’s lives simply because they do not conform to an idealised notion of childhood where labour is inherently seen as problematic.  At the same time, glorifying children’s labour and their cultural contexts can be equally troubling as it does not take into account larger structures of exclusions within which children’s lives are situated. It is high time these discussions move beyond scholarship into policy and practice. In the post-pandemic era, as social protections remain poor, livelihoods seem to have become increasingly precarious, and marginalised communities continue to face multiple exclusions across education, health, and employment, the question of child labour remains an urgent issue. 

On this World Day Against Child Labour, let us be reminded that every child deserves a life of dignity and freedom and that this ultimate goal must not be lost in the rhetoric of the child labour debate.

References

About the author

Vijitha Rajan is a faculty member at Azim Premji University. Her interests lie in areas of Sociology of Childhood(s) and Education, Childhood(s) in Global South, Educational Inequalities, and Migration and Education.