Eliminating the most hazardous forms of child labour requires a huge amount of effort and dedication on the part of non-governmental agencies. An arduous international drive by selfless charity workers and dedicated individuals in the field is required just to get governments to recognise that the problem exists. Sometimes it is surprising to find it exists in your own backyard.
The received wisdom is that child labour exists mainly in the "sweat shops" of Asia or the developing world where, in our darkest imaginings, little children are forced to work in squalid conditions by demonic parents.
A young person of school age working many hours in the kitchens at a local London restaurant or helping out his father on a building site is not usually considered to be child labour in the general sense of the term. But when the work involves long hours carrying heavy equipment or coming into contact with potentially dangerous chemicals, the hidden face of child labour and its dangerous underbelly come into sharp relief.
The legal age for children employed in part-time work in the UK is 13, and they are allowed to work up to 15 hours per week during term-time. In many cases this directive is ignored and children can often find themselves working for as many as 21 hours per week. Anecdotal evidence has discovered some children earning as little as £5 sterling per week working as a "night watchman" on a building site.
Recent figures published by the children's organisation Save the Children concluded that many employers were disregarding the legal age limit. Around 30 per cent of 12-year-olds and about 20 per cent of 11-year-olds were being illegally employed in low-paid jobs and this figure was backed by a similar survey carried out by MORI for the Trades Union Congress (TUC). Contemporary research also suggests that the figure is likely to increase by about 10 per cent each year.
Abolishing the most dangerous aspects of child labour, including the desperate circumstances of children who find themselves "employed" in the sex trade, is the subject of a directive ratified last week by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Geneva.
The ILO's directive, Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention 1999, calls on all member governments of the ILO to abolish hazardous child labour practices. Save the Children hopes that the British government, which is a member of the ILO, will adopt a broad outlook in regard to the convention and in certain cases, such as farm labour where children may be exposed to dangerous chemicals, will move to impose safe working conditions. Save the Children is urging the British government to adopt the convention into law ahead of a review of child employment legislation being carried out by the Department of Health in order to ensure speedy results. The organisation is also calling for tougher employment legislation so that employers must declare worker profiles - age, sex, number of hours employed - in order that children can be better served by safety directives and a formal complaints scheme if they feel they are being exploited.
In London, Save the Children has discovered travellers' children selling carpets door-to-door after school and Vietnamese and Bangladeshi children can often be found working long hours in restaurants and shops, which prevents them from completing homework or forces them to hurriedly finish it in the early hours of the morning. Where work harms educational, physical and psychological development, Save the Children insists the ILO Convention can protect them.
On the seedier side of child labour Save the Children's research officer, Ms Rachel Marcus, explains that the sex trade is by its nature a secretive and hidden collective. Calculating the numbers of children caught in its trap is therefore very difficult, but although the number of children being exploited in this way is thought to be relatively small, all children's agencies agree that it must be stopped.
Other children can find themselves in less harrowing but similarly exploitative situations. A case study reproduced by Save the Children found 15-year-old "Denis" working on average 18 hours a week for the local milkman, often joining him on deliveries between 2 a.m. and 7 a.m.
Denis also collected payments on Thursdays and Sundays between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. And for all his work he received just £37.
Another boy, "Alan", received just £5 a week for working 21 hours as a night watchman.