By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Feb 14 2000 (IPS)

The success of a media campaign against child labour and growing awareness that it is illegal are reasons for the under-reporting of the extent of domestic child labour in a new government survey in Sri Lanka, experts say.

Close to one million children between the ages of five and 17 years are working or engaged in some form of economic activity, the Child Activity Survey, 1999, a summary of which was released last week, has revealed.

But enumerators of the Department of Census and Statistics (DCS) which conducted the survey found they were stonewalled in attempts to put a figure on the number of domestic workers, a pernicious and widespread form of child labour.

“The number of domestic workers reported is 19,110 (2.1 percent of the total working children population). There is a tendency not to give proper information on children working as domestic workers,” the summary findings of the survey states.

“As such this figure could be an under estimate,” it concludes.

Jayanthi Liyanage, a senior programme officer at the UN children’s agency, UNICEF, Colombo, says the figures of domestic labour are much higher but points out the collection of data for the survey, would have been difficult.

“Households are not going to say that they employ children knowing that it is illegal and also given that there was an effective media campaign against child labour,” she observes.

She said previous studies have shown that one out of 10 working children in the urban areas are employed as domestic, while a survey, conducted some three years ago in southern Galle district, found one out of three working as domestics.

Last year, UNICEF ran a highly successful media campaign urging the public to inform the police of cases of child labour including children employed as domestics and also of child abuse.

The programme was called the “444444 campaign” — the police hotline at which the complaints had to be registered. According to Liyanage, police registered around 900 calls last year, a sharp increase from 200 the previous year.

“Public awareness is growing on child abuse issues,” she said, but noted that police lacked follow-up capacity on these complaints due to staffing and other problems.

Nevertheless the DCS Child Activity Survey highlights, for the first time in Sri Lanka, some revealing facts about the extent of children employed in and outside their homes.

It estimates that of the total 4,344,770 children in the ages five to 17 years, 926,038 or 21 percent of Sri Lankan children in that age group were engaged in some form of economic activity. Sri Lanka’s population is 18.5 million.

The survey, funded under the International Programme for the Elimination of Labour (IPEC) of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), interviewed 14,400 housing units across the island, barring the war-torn north and the east.

Apart from the economic activities of children, the survey also collected information on other activities like housekeeping, education, leisure and socio-economic conditions of families.

Working children under the survey in the age group 5-17 years were categorised as paid employees, self-employed and those who worked in family enterprises but were unpaid. This excluded housekeeping activities.

The survey is a “good starting point to assess the child labour situation in Sri Lanka in the absence of any reliable data,” said Lalani Perera, an additional secretary at the Justice Ministry who is an expert on child labour laws.

Last December, Sri Lanka amended the Employment of Women, Young Persons and Children Act (EWYPC), 1956, to raise the minimum age of employment to 14 years. Earlier children between 12 and 14 years were legally permitted to work in certain categories like domestic work.

Pearl Weerasinghe, deputy commissioner in charge of child labour issues at Sri Lanka’s Labour Department, said the changes in the law brought it in line with the ILO’s Minimum Age Convention of 1973 which puts the minimum employable age at 14.

“In addition to this change in the laws, the government has also decided to ratify the ILO convention and the process of registering the ratification instrument in Geneva is now underway,” she told IPS.

Noted child rights activist, Mallika Ganasinghe, a former IPEC-ILO national programme officer in Colombo, described the amendment and ratification of the ILO convention as landmark events in child labour legislation.

Ganasinghe said the government, by raising the minimum age of employment, was also confirming its compulsory education standards. Education has been made compulsory for children between five and 14 years.

The survey revealed that 90 percent of children are availing of either formal or informal education. Only 20 percent of those who dropped out did so for economic reasons. The majority of child workers were “unpaid family workers”.

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