This project is more than just an academic exercise for me Posted Tuesday, March 11, 2003 Getting personal about child labor By Annie Shuppy - The Daily Iowan Educating the world about the horrors of child labor is personal for one UI official, the director of a $1.2 million child-labor research project in Iowa City. Chivy Sok spent roughly three and a half years in a child-labor camp under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Between the ages of 6 and 10, Sok was separated from her family and spent her days toiling in a rice field beginning at dawn, often coming home in the evening to just a small bowl of rice. Now the deputy director of the UI Center for Human Rights, Sok is overseeing an initiative to create a comprehensive database of legislation related to child labor in 25 countries. "This project is more than just an academic exercise for me," she said. "It's a culmination of my life within the past 20 years. "It's easy to just sort of read statistics, but it's another thing to be in the markets and see face-to-face the reality of child labor," she said Monday in a presentation at the International Center. The project will also prepare a collection of essays on child-labor issues and develop a series of courses to advance understanding about child labor throughout the world. The U.S. Department of Labor has provided the project's funding, which Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, helped secure. According to an estimate by the International Labor Organization in 2000, approximately 246 million children between ages 5 and 17 work in exploitative and abusive conditions worldwide. Some of the countries targeted to study include China, El Salvador, and Sok's native Cambodia, where many poor families depend on their children for additional income, she said. At age 10, Sok was reunited with her family and relocated to a refugee camp for a year before moving to Berkeley, Calif., in 1980. She worked in her family's two restaurants while attending school, and eventually earned a political-science degree from the University of California-Santa Barbara and a master's in international affairs from Columbia University in New York City. Although she recognizes the role of work in keeping a family together and that not all work is detrimental to education, Sok said, some forms of child labor are defined as unacceptable under international codes, including slavery, pornography, prostitution, drug trafficking, and activities deemed to be hazardous. Girls as young as 5 often end up in brothels in Thailand, and some boys trafficked into the country end up in international begging schemes, Sok said. Children in Cambodia frequently make their living scouring landfills for recyclable goods, sometimes walking barefoot through garbage in their search. On her last visit to Cambodia, in December 2002, Sok said she met with government officials responsible for child labor, non-governmental organization members, legal researchers, and other children's-rights activists. Although they were forthcoming with information and seemed serious about their work, many of these departments lack both financial and human resources, she said. "Most us who do international work tend to think of New York and Washington, D.C., as the hub of international work," Sok said. "It's interesting that the UI is a major player on this international issue." E-mail DI reporter Annie Shuppy at: anne-shuppy@uiowa.edu Originally published in The Daily Iowan, March 11, 2003. Reprinted with permission. You can find the orginal article here (free registration required).
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