World
Academics slam UN ban on child labour
Child labour
London: A group of international academics has condemned the UN convention banning child labour as “harmful”, saying the policy ignores benefits and reflects Western prejudice.
In a letter to The Observer newspaper, they argued that allowing young children to work could have positive effects which were not being taken into account, the Guardian reported on Sunday.
The researchers, who work in the fields of child development or human rights, said the UN committee has ignored available evidence in favour of “outdated and ill-informed Western prejudices”. They said the UN policies could have a negative impact on the ground.
One of the signatories, Dorte Thorsen of the school of global studies at the University of Sussex, said: “Banning children from work doesn’t bring them back into school. “In fact, it might do the opposite if they were working to pay their school fees,” the Guardian quoted him as saying.
He pointed at India and Africa nations and said: “We are seeing collectivization movements of child workers, a unionization where they are trying to participate in politics, be heard, as opposed to this being a story of victimization and oppression.”
Richard Carothers, a Toronto-based child development expert at the International Child Protection Network, called the UN policy “hard-headed attitude of the big bureaucratic international agencies”.
“Children need to be protected from nasty situations, and there is a debate about whether the percentage of working children in nasty situations is a small percentage or a very small percentage,” Carothers said.
Thorsen also criticized Britain’s Department for International Development Minister Priti Patel for pressuring British companies to scrutinize their supply chains for evidence of child labour.
The experts also pointed at children, who were forced into hazardous, dangerous or illegal work because more regulated employment became closed to them.
Around 193 countries have committed to ending child labour by 2025 under the UN’s sustainable development goals. The academics want the existing minimum age (15 in some countries, 18 in others), to be abandoned, arguing that “age-appropriate” work could be beneficial for children in both the developing and the developed worlds.
Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.
Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai
Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.
Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.
Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.
WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.
Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.
Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy
Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.
The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.
Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.
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