Working Children Around the World: Child Rights and Child Reality edited by G.K. Lieten, New Delhi: Institute for Human Development, 2004, 200 pages, ISBN 81-88315-08-7.

It is widely acknowledged that the phenomenon of “child labour” is complex, multi-faceted and resistant to simple remedies. While many in the developed world might argue in favour of abolishing child labour altogether, more recent analyses make clear that a more nuanced approach – taking into account the relative dangerousness of the work, the age of the child and the social context – is necessary. Virtually no one considers it likely that under-18 employment will vanish anytime soon, and many advocate putting resources in eliminating the “worst forms” of child labour, while striving to improve the conditions under which less burdensome forms of child labour are carried out. In this regard, a book of this kind, consisting of a collection of essays on various aspects of child labour, is useful insofar as it assists us, through empirical data, in identifying concrete features of the reality of contemporary child labour. I must confess at the outset to some scepticism as to the value of essay collections in general, particularly where there is internal disharmony as between a broad brush versus a detailed approach, and where there is a failure at the outset to identify recent thematic “headlines” that might help to capture the essence of major debates in the subject. In any case, it certainly could be argued that publishers rely too heavily on essay collections, as opposed to treatises. The challenge for a collection such as this one on child labour is to do justice to a culturally and geographically diverse subject, while still allowing the reader to come away with some sense of a coherent topic, with sufficient internal links to make the idea of a collection meaningful. It is relevant to ask, does the collection work as a collection, and can a reader come away from the collection with a better sense of the subject as a whole? This particular collection of papers on child labour, deriving from social science, politics and law, purports to emphasize the empirical side of the issue, by presenting objective contemporary research into “how working children live.” The first two papers set out views of the role of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in dealing with the global problem of child labour, presumably to situate the reader in what we might call the international legal context. The next two papers aim at social context, by attempting to sort out the main causes and characteristics of child labour today. The final contribution in this introductory/contextual set of essays concerns the participation of child labourers in ngos, a familiar theme of “child empowerment” in the field of children’s rights, containing a message that might be described as, “All is not lost, however bad things might look.” Although not articulated as part of a global debate, this essay reflects on ongoing conversation as to whether children in difficulties ought to be considered as dependent or powerful, in other words, as capable of participating in decisions about their own circumstances and future. What makes this collection more interesting than most is the final set of essays, all centred on case studies of children working in a particular location, with little in the way of context or evaluation, but much detail on the traditions that create the working conditions under examination. This section is valuable in that while many theorize on the subject of child labour, the embeddedness of this phenomenon in family custom and social class makes its “reality” often distinctly inaccessible. To this extent, the final section containing these studies makes the implicit statement that there is meaning in allowing …