The law on child employment: what children of school age can and cannot do

Many people assume that the exploitation of children at work disappeared with The Water Babies and boys up chimneys! This is where I start with my own discussions with children, or with images that assume that child labour is a feature only of developing countries in Latin America, Asia or Africa. As we saw in Chapter 1, children have not always been seen as in need of any special protection by virtue of their immaturity. This was nowhere more true than in the workplaces of eighteenth-century Britain, when the Industrial Revolution led to a massive increase in the use of children as cheap labour.