ABSTRACT
Child labour remains a serious problem in the world today. According to revised estimates by the International Labour Organisation’s Bureau of Statistics, the number of working children between the age of 5 and 14 is at least 120 million. As may be expected given the prevailing economic conditions, the overwhelming majority of these are in developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, but pockets of child labour also exist in many industrialised countries. Numerous children work in occupations and industries which are plainly dangerous and hazardous. Child labour is a serious violation of children’s rights, and may well represent the single most common form of child abuse and neglect in the world today. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the issue of child labour began to receive public attention, it became increasingly evident that there was an urgent need, first, to better understand the critical and complex issues inherent to child labour and, second, to develop and implement creative new strategies to address the diverse problems related to this area.
