By Raffique Shah
July 19, 2021
Every so often, and since Covid-19 struck, maybe all too often reporters in the mainstream media assail us with heart-rending stories of families living in abject poverty—you know the kind: mother with three-to-ten urchin-like children, no resident father or no explanation of his or their absence, crammed into a dilapidated shack that looks like it will collapse if you sneezed in it; the little faces staring into the cameras are poster-images for strife and famine in some God-forsaken distant land; and the cries are always the same… my children will starve to death… if only I had a house… no, I can’t afford to send them to school… we need food, clothes, books, electricity… and so on.
Continue reading Make poverty a punishable crime
The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) defines child labour as work that exceeds a minimum number of hours, depending on the age of a child and on the type of work. Such work is considered harmful to the child and should therefore be eliminated. There remains no official statistics on the magnitude of child labour in T&T. However, rapid assessment studies conducted by the International Labour Organisation, (ILO), in 2002, uncovered some alarming facts.