Child Labour and Child Rights Policies in Bangladesh: Looking at the World of Children through the Eyes of a Child

Child labour has currently been a cutting-edge and perhaps the most visible global issue generating the debates how children’s rights can be perceived. It also challenges how society thinks/defines children and childhood in... [ view full abstract ]

Child labour has currently been a cutting-edge and perhaps the most visible global issue generating the debates how children’s rights can be perceived. It also challenges how society thinks/defines children and childhood in general and about child work in particular in terms of age, socio-cultural, economic and political history of a particular society or community. Similarly, mounting controversies are revolving around a couple questions of who should decide what is best for children, and determine the policies and programs intended to protect them and what criteria accordingly. Most of the agencies and instruments of child protections such as United Nations Child Rights Conventions (UNCRC), International Labor Organizations (ILO) treat children and childhood as a multicultural/global integration, biological homogenization even though it is outright different from developing societies to developed societies, rural to urban, and in terms of political nature of state, kinship and family ties and ontological experiences of children. As a signatory country ,  the reflections of the reality of Bangladeshi children in case of labour and rights is not beyond questions. By the same token, adult-centric agency or/and epistemology of childhood in one hand , on the other hand the policies driven by Eurocentric ideas, adult value-laden, and constructed through discursive process of inclusion/exclusion may overestimate or underestimate the real conditions or experiences of working children of Bangladesh.  This paper examines how the living reality of working children in Bangladesh are constructed in the UNCRC, ILO and National Child labour Elimination Policy (2011) of Bangladesh. Moreover, having applied poststructuralist insights based on a Foucauldian discourse analysis ,this  paper also unmasks how the discursive formation of child rights and child labour is constructed in the policies, asking-which perspectives of children and childhood are legitimised and which are not/silenced?