ABSTRACT
Child domestic workers are children ‘under the age of 18 who work in other people’s households doing domestic chores, caring for children, and running errands, among other tasks’ (UNICEF 1999: 2). They can be paid in cash or kind and are employed by (and usually live in the homes of) adults who are not their parents (Kifl e 2002: 3-4). Domestic work undertaken by children (abbreviated here as CDW) is particularly prominent in Majority world countries where it thrives because of its informal and unregulated nature. Although child domestic workers are usually employed in urban areas, their lives represent a face of rural childhoods in the Majority world because most are born, socialized, and educated in rural areas, and it is the poverty of this rural ‘lived space’2 that overwhelmingly drives them into child labour.3
