Domestic help
Many recent articles, including quotations from conferences on the subject, have spoken of the importance of 'changing attitudes towards child domestic help' but how long can such children wait?
I know, from conversations with school children in Moral Education (or PSHE) classes on child labour, that attitudes are indeed changing. Some of the new generation of children are shocked at how their own families treat their maidservants and tell me so. I even remember one girl telling me she spent over an hour a day teaching her maidservant Bengali and English! So we may be able to hope for better things twenty years hence - but what do we do in the meantime?
Am I just a mad foreigner or is compulsory registration of child domestic workers quite impossible? I imagine a reputable Bangladeshi NGO, including lawyers - and maybe connected with a Law School whose members could do a period of compulsory work with it - being authorised to do this work. It would need certain legal rights and initial funding to set up a number of offices with a computer or two, and interviewing rooms, where future employers and the children concerned, with their guardians, should go for registration. A short training session, maybe on DVD, is surely needed, for all the members of the family - and maybe it should be shown regularly on television? Firm guidelines should be specified, including, for both parties, suggestions on hours, payment procedures, clothes, free time, duties - and procedures for either party if they wish to end the agreement. Occasional visits to the employer's home should be made by the officials, with or without the guardian (and with or without notice) to ensure all is well.
Especially important are guidelines for appropriate behaviour, on both sides, including the sort of comments that are 'out of bounds'. No sensitivity should be shown to those who may not want to discuss such matters. For example, it is not acceptable for a male member of the family, when alone in the house with a teenage maid, to ask anything suggestive! On one such occasion, the terrified Garo maid, went to her room, packed her bags and fled the house and Dhaka. The deeply offensive question (also a favourite for boys making anonymous phone calls) was put by an old man of the family……...
Would a lower age limit work? I doubt it. I know of good families who take in a young child almost as an adopted child. It is what was going on in my (Victorian) reverend grandfather's day when, in the slums of Merseyside, my grandmother always had some little girl from a poor family 'living in'. I am told she was usually more trouble than she was worth to start with but, by the time she left, had received a modicum of education and was competent to run her own home and life! Done with genuine care and respect for the child, this can still be a major act of charity.
Such a programme need not cost an arm and a leg. Bribery and corruption by employers intending to be abusive should be minimal……And would any decent employer refuse to go through such a procedure? I think not.
The key question is surely, “Doesn't this society owe any obligation to child domestic workers when the situation of many of them, according to the evidence, needs to be regularly and carefully monitored and their guardians are usually in no position to do this?”
All arrangements, in any case, will only be needed for a few decades as child labour should disappear altogether, God willing, as the country becomes like other developed countries where those who want domestic service have to pay a decent wage for it to some adult for whom it is a proper career that carries a lot of respect. It is good to see that happening here already, in some households.
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