CHILDREN OF OTHER WORLDS - Softcover

Seabrook, Jeremy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745313914 ISBN 13: 9780745313917

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2001

Synopsis

More than 40,000 children die daily in the developing world from avoidable sickness and disease. Tens of millions of children labour in factories, mines, mills and sweatshops, or scavenge for a living on city streets and dumps. In the so-called developed world, children's lives are similarly blighted by drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse and violence. Children of the rich are unhealthily obsessed with consumerist desires while children of the poor suffer from lack of opportunity. The global market is responsible for both of these ills.In Children of Other Worlds Jeremy Seabrook examines the international exploitation of children and exposes the hypocrisy, piety and moral blindness that have informed so much of the debate in the West on the rights of the child. Seabrook insists that the whole question of protecting children's rights, North and South, must take into consideration the structural abuses of humanity that are inherent in globalization. He addresses the key question of whether the West can turn its 'benevolent' attention to the evils of child labour in the rest of the world without first understanding that gross forms of poverty anywhere are part of the same global problem.

About this title

About the Author

Jeremy Seabrook is a journalist and writer who has written for the New Statesman, Guardian, Time, and Independent. He writes plays for stage and TV and is the author of many books, including Pauperland: Poverty and the Poor in Britain and The Song of the Shirt: The High Price of Cheap Garments, from Blackburn to Bangladesh.

From Publishers Weekly

London-based journalist Seabrook (Travels in the Skin Trade), who has written widely on labor, Asia and the sex trade, compares child labor in contemporary Bangladesh with that of industrial Britain in the 19th century. By including extensive testimonials from Bangladeshi children, he illustrates many disturbing similarities in the mills and factories of the two nations in the exodus to the city, social attitudes to poverty, and the absolute necessity of child labor to supplement inadequate family income. Seabrook describes the work of nongovernmental organizations in Dhaka, which envision a gradual elimination of the need for child labor and educate (with the cooperation and involvement of their employers) children under the age of 15 who work long hours. Seabrook questions whether the need for child labor will ever be eliminated in this part of the world, given that the region does not have the same historical means of creating wealth that the industrialized world had. The author poses many questions: Are we imposing normative or subjective values? Does a child really need an education? Can the South increase its wealth without slavery and colonialism? But he fails to answer any of them himself; instead, he relies on broad generalizations ("the disregard in Bangladesh for the individuality of children is a mirror image of our own excessive concern with individualism. It seems that human societies are destined to oscillate between extremes, neither of which brings satisfaction or fulfillment") to make sense of the phenomenon of nine- and 10-year-olds working 12-hour days and earning some 100 taka, or $2, each week.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0745313914
• ISBN 13: 9780745313917
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176