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Child labor abuse increases

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Filed: Country: Philippines
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By WILLIAM C. MANN, Associated Press Writer

Children displaced, often orphaned, by tsunami, earthquakes and other disasters made last year a particularly sordid one for their exploitation as cheap labor or sexual victims, the government said Wednesday.

In its annual report on child labor around the world, the Labor Department said millions of children were forced to work during 2005 in physically, psychologically and sexually ruinous situations.

The report, mandated by Congress and covering 137 countries on five continents, describes policies and practices in each country that eases the problem or makes it worse.

Favorable signs include a compact among nine West African countries, anti-trafficking agreements between Yemen and neighboring countries on the Saudi Peninsula, and a pact between Thailand and Laos to combat trafficking of people, especially of women and children.

"In 2005, natural disasters considerably increased the risk of child labor for vulnerable children in a number of Asian, African and Latin American communities," the report said. "In all of these instances, the natural disasters spurred new actions to prevent or withdraw children from work in the worst forms of child labor."

"Worst forms of child labor" is a category that covers four conditions:

_All forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery.

_Use, procurement or offering of a child for prostitution or production of pornography.

_Use, procurement or offering of a child for illicit activities, particularly the narcotics trade.

_Work likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children.

The report said the tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004, killed up to 40,000 school children in Indonesia and orphaned or separated 2,000 from their families. A Labor Department program, being implemented by Save the Children, targets "10,530 children working or at risk of entering hazardous and exploitative labor" in the disarray left after the wave that killed more than 100,000 people in Indonesia alone, the report said.

One of the worst examples of natural disaster fostering exploited children was in Pakistan, where an earthquake last October killed more than 73,000 people, half of them children, the report said.

"Thousands of child survivors were orphaned or separated from their families, making them more vulnerable to trafficking and other forms of exploitative child labor," the report said.

To alleviate that, the study said, Pakistan imposed a six-month ban on adoption of children and placed restrictions on their relocation from within the disaster zone.

Still, it said, child exploitation continued as a serious problem in Pakistan. Among mistreatment was the often forced recruitment of boys from certain religious schools into militant Islamic groups for fighting in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

As in next-door India, Pakistani and children from nearby countries are exported to Middle Eastern countries elsewhere for sexual exploitation and other types of exploitative labor, the report said.

In India, bonded or forced child labor is forbidden by law. Still, the report said, an estimated 20 million to 65 million people, mainly children, work under those conditions.

Commercial sexual exploitation of children also is a major problem, the report said, as the government estimates 15 percent to 40 percent of India's prostitutes have not reached their 18th birthday. Additionally, it said girls and some boys are brought in from Bangladesh and Nepal for work in brothels in urban centers including New Delhi, Mumbai, formerly Bombay, and Calcutta.

Russia has a similar phenomenon. Hordes of children of migrants from former Soviet republics in Central Asian beg in the streets. Children as young as 12 sell stolen items, narcotics and their bodies, the report said.

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