Ending child labor requires rights for all people, teen advocates say

Oct. 20, 2004

STAMFORD, Conn. (UMNS) - Two teen delegates to an international conference on child labor shared their passion for that issue with directors of the Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church’s missions agency.

"There are 250 million children working worldwide in everything from the sex trade to soldiering," said Kim Hallowell, 17, of Hayward, Calif. "We learned from the people who actually are child laborers. We’d read about them, but to sit down at a table with a boy who actually worked in the carpet industry, who was kidnapped at age 7 and forced to work, made the stories real."

Hallowell and Emily Oliver, 16, of Newton, Conn., spoke during the Women’s Division’s Oct. 15-18 meeting in Stamford. The division is a unit of the Board of Global Ministries.

Hallowell and Oliver met as members of a six-person U.S. delegation to the first Children’s World Congress on Child Labor in Florence, Italy, May 10-13. Hallowell represented the Women’s Division at the event, which brought together 200 student activists and former child laborers from around the world. Oliver attended the conference through the Child Labor Coalition.

Hallowell and Oliver unfurled a large, rainbow-colored flag with PACE - Italian for "peace" - printed on it, which they said summarized what they learned at the international gathering

Congress participants modeled the peace that will end child labor, Hallowell said.

"There was no conflict at the conference with 200 kids there the whole time," she said. "I think that says a lot."

She and Oliver said ending child labor can be done, but it will require hard work to ensure rights for all people.

"Human rights are what we should focus on, but that will not happen without peace," Oliver said. "In a war situation, all human rights are gone."

Before the event, Hallowell organized an anti-child labor club at Capuchino High School in San Bruno, Calif., after reading a book on the subject for school. She got the book through United Methodist Women’s Reading Program. Meeting child laborers in person made the figures and stories she’d read take on new meaning, she said.

She told of a South African teen at the congress who had entered the sex trade at 9 years old to earn money to buy AIDS medication for her mother. She told of another girl who worked to help support her family after the death of her mother.

"She made $4 a day making flowers for wedding cakes," Hallowell said. "This was a kid we hung out with at the congress."

Many of the youth delegates have kept in touch with one another by e-mail since the meeting. Hallowell and Oliver learned through that network that their friend who made wedding-cake flowers had run away from home and was living in an abandoned shelter.

This and other experiences since the congress have made both young women more determined to mobilize their peers to work against child labor - a task that’s not always easy.

"Kim and I talk about different ways to get kids to come to the meetings we have about child labor," said Oliver, who is organizing students at Newtown (Conn.) High School. "Some say, ‘That’s interesting, but I have soccer.’"

Hallowell and Oliver are not deterred. Going class to class to make presentations on the subject, the club at Capuchino High School has raised nearly $1,700 for an international anti-child labor campaign.

Participants at the congress drafted a statement on child labor. Oliver was on the writing team.

"I was working on the declaration draft committee sitting next to kids from Nepal, Japan, all these different countries, all speaking different languages and working together," she said. "You can’t help but be hopeful."

The declaration calls for:

• Peaceful living environments for youth.
• An international minimum age for work.
• Greater youth participation in government.
• Compulsory education, including for girl children.
• Elimination of the worst forms of child labor, including sex trafficking.
• More opportunities for exchange and networking between Third World youth and youth in the West.

The Women’s Division represents United Methodist Women, a 1 million-member organization that fosters spiritual growth, develops leaders and advocates for social justice. Members raise more than $25 million a year for programs and projects related to women, children and youth in the United States and more than 100 countries.

*Moore is editor of Response magazine, published by the Women’s Division of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries.

News media contact: Linda Bloom, New York, (646) 369-3759 or newsdesk@umcom.org.

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