Extreme poverty and lack of livelihood opportunities result in some families sending their children to work on cocoa farms. It is reported that some children are ‘sold’ to traffickers or farm owners, paying for a determined duration of labour. Children as young as 10 years then work for 12-14 hours a day with few breaks, insufficient water and nutrition, forced to carry heavy bags of cocoa beans across long distances, and with exposure to pesticides and other hazardous agricultural chemicals without adequate protection. Almost every child on a cocoa farm will display scars and wounds from swinging the heavy-bladed machetes used to crop the plants.
To comply with international labour standards and norms, such as the ILO convention 138 on the Minimum Age for Employment and the ILO Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour, multinational corporations need to ensure that their suppliers are not involved in human trafficking and/or forced labour of children and adults. Companies should further implement monitoring systems, transparent procurement policies, regular auditing activities and training of the supply chain managers on how to detect human trafficking/forced labour or any other irregular incidents.
This discussion gives lessons learned and emerging practices to eliminate child labour within supply chains. How has public policy impacted child labour practices? Can international labour standards and norms continued to be improved? How does culture and gender impact the practices of child labour?
This documentary talks about the ten countries with the most people in modern slavery (victims of human trafficking), based on data and findings of the Global Slavery Index 2016.
Video researched, written, narrated, and directed by Bryce Plank.
...Read More
This video infographic outlines the main forms of violence which continue to affect women and children in Peru during the Covid-19 pandemic, including human trafficking and online sexual violence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8t9TliWe4w
...Read More
The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) and the Global Business Coalition Against Human Trafficking (GBCAT), two of the founding organisations of the Interactive Map for Business of Anti-human Trafficking Initiatives and...Read More
Men, women and children continue to be subjected to trafficking in human beings, as local, national and international statistics painfully illustrate. Human traffickers continue to act with impunity, as low global conviction rates sadly demonstrate. Yet given the nature of...