In Harm's Way: Children's Work in Risky Occupations in Brazil

Abstract

There were large numbers of child workers in domestic services, street work, construction and selected areas of agricultural production in Brazil at the turn of the century. These kinds of occupations are often problematic for youth. We show that children engaged in these risky categories of work are more disadvantaged than other employed children and non-employed children. Results from a large representative survey show that children in 'risky' work are more likely to have parents also engaged in hazardous activities or be living without both parents, characteristics that may be useful for targeting policy.

Suitability of Measurement Tools for Assessing the Prevalence of Child Domestic Work: A Rapid Systematic Review

“…One study was based directly on census data for several countries [ 20 ] and one study used an Injury Surveillance System (ISS) to capture CDW [ 21 ]. The studies were mainly conducted in Ethiopia [ 14 , 15 , 17 ], Haiti [ 11 , 13 ] and Bangladesh [ 10 , 21 ], followed by Brazil [ 22 ], South Africa [ 18 ], Cambodia [ 19 ], Vietnam [ 16 ], Indonesia [ 12 ]. Two studies included multi-country samples [ 7 , 20 ].…”

“…Overall, two studies were rated to be of good quality [ 11 , 17 ]. Five studies were of moderate quality [ 10 , 12 , 13 , 19 , 21 ], while seven were poor quality [ 7 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 18 , 20 , 22 ]. Importantly, the identification of child domestic work was unclear in all studies.…”

“…Prevalence estimates varied widely, and the lack of information on denominators means that some studies only provided weighted estimates for geographic areas rather than as a proportion of all children by age groups, or proportion of CDW among all child labourers or all domestic workers ( Table 1 ). In nationally representative surveys, 17% of females and 12% of males aged 13–24 reported ever being a CDW in Haiti [ 11 ], while 2% of children aged 10–17 in Brazil and 4% in Paraguay were estimated to be CDWs [ 7 , 22 ]. Ten percent of children aged 7–17 were estimated to be CDW in Phnom Penh [ 19 ].…”

Child labour

“…To this aim, conditional cash transfer programs give poor families additional resources for sending their children to school, and are an effective way to both reduce the direct cost of education (cover the costs of enrolment, books, uniforms, transportation, etc.) and to limit the indirect cost of the forgone earnings related to child work (García and Saavedra, 2017[98]; De Hoop and Rosati, 2014 [99]; Fiszbein et al, 2009[100]). For instance, programmes like Mexico's Progresa have been shown to substantively alter child time allocation, increasing schooling and sometimes decreasing child employment at the same time.…”

Parental Absence and Agency: The Household Characteristics of Hazardous Forms of Child Labour in Nepal

“…To my knowledge, DeGraff, Ferro and Levison (; ) is the only paper that has studied household characteristics of children working in risky industries using a large‐scale representative data set. They investigate the children in several hazardous industries using the Brazilian national representative survey Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicilios .…”