VATICAN (CNS): “Sadly, too many small hands are busy ploughing fields, working in mines, travelling great distances to draw water and doing work that prevents them from attending school, to say nothing of the crime of child prostitution, which is robbing millions of children of the joy of their youth and their God given dignity,” the pope wrote in a message to the fifth Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour, held from May 15 to 20 in Durban, South Africa.
Addressed to Guy Ryder, director-general of the International Labor Organisation, the letter said, “Since poverty is, in fact, the chief factor that exposes children to labour exploitation, I am confident that your deliberations will not fail to address the structural causes of global poverty and the scandalous inequality that continues to exist among the members of the human family.”
Sending his “warm greetings and prayerful good wishes” to those attending the conference, the pope said, “While significant progress has been made in eliminating the scourge of child labour from society, this tragedy has been worsened by the impact of the global health crisis and the spread of extreme poverty in many parts of our world where the lack of decent work opportunities for adults and adolescents, migration and humanitarian emergencies condemn millions of young girls and boys to a life of economic and cultural impoverishment.”
“The way we relate to children, the extent to which we respect their innate human dignity and fundamental rights, expresses what kind of adults we are and want to be and what kind of society we want to build,” he wrote.
The World Day Against Child Labor will be marked June 12 and have the theme, Universal Social Protection to End Child Labour.
