Childrend's Right

3 Pages 657 Words

Children¡¯s Rights, You and I

When I was a child, my parents gave me a lot: the happiness, the freedom, the nice food, and the best education. When I became a father, I tried to give my child as much as I can. What about you? You may treat your children the same way I did. But, can you believe that million of children even have no food to eat and no place to live? Can you believe that million of children under 14 work as full time labor while million of others were killed by conflict and disease? I can not believe it, but it is the fact. Armed children, disabled children, refugee children¡­ as many as million of million.
Report from Child Rights Information Network: about 250 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 work. Of these, 120 million work full time and some 50-60 million work in hazardous circumstances. In India, at least 18 million children live or work on the streets, laboring as porters in railway stations or bus terminals, as ragpickers, and as vendors of food, tea, or handmade articles. These street children routinely subjected to arbitrary and illegal detention, torture, and extortion, and on occasion, murder at the hands of police.
In Manila, 13- and 14-year-old girls work 17-hour days at their sewing machines in sweatshops. The pay: 13 cents an hour. That¡¯s better than the one cent a day earned by 5-year-olds who weed the tea plantations in Sri Lanka (Michele Landsberg).
In the Ashanti Goldfields (jointly owned by the Government of Ghana and a company called Lonrho International), 11-year-old boys labor naked in pools of cyanide to extract gold from rock (Michele Landsberg).

Report from Human Rights Watch: two million children were killed in the last decade in armed conflict. Three times as many have been serious injured or permanently disabled while million of others have become refugees. Child soldiers were used in more than thirty countries around the world. Angola, Colombia, the Democrati...