Breaking the bonds of Bonded Labor
In Firojpur, a remarkable group of children who were recently working as slaves alongside their parents are now learning to read and write in a simple bamboo bungalow. They are students at TEN’s Freedom School in Uttar Pradesh, India. The hands now weilding pencils held instead the tools of heavy labor, working in quarries or toiling on farms from dawn to dusk, and the future seemed devoid of other alternatives. Millions of families are enslaved in bonded labor across South Asia. They never see the benefits of their dirty, dangerous or degrading work -Instead, they are working off ‘debts’ typically less than $100, which only accumulate over time as the system is designed to keep them in bondage indefinitely. Threats of violence, or actual violence, serve to keep them enslaved, and many do not realize that bonded labor is an illegal practice.
Filed Under: Human Trafficking • Justice Issues Feed
