Saturday's Child (5 page)

If children are “our tomorrows,” then we're warping the future in the image of the present. Even a quick scan of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is alarmingly educative, because there's never a need to articulate rights unless they've already been ignored or violated. Everywhere, children lack basic civil and political rights: free speech, free assembly, privacy, suffrage, and the right not to be categorized in many legal systems along with convicted felons, the mentally ill, slaves, animals, and inanimate property. Children, together with women, constitute 90 percent of all refugee populations on the planet as well as the vast majority of those living in absolute poverty; the “feminization of poverty” means that children are poor, too, since most parenting is done by mothers. In both the so-called developing and developed worlds, little girls are tortured and maimed by genital-mutilation and genital-amputation procedures rationalized by religious or customary “law,” while little boys are circumcised—a less severe form of mutilation, but mutilation nonetheless—with the same excuse. Child prostitution, child pornography, and the trafficking of children for sexual-exploitation purposes are all growth industries on the rise, and children are the preferred prostitutes in much of Asia, and parts of Africa and Latin America. Child marriage is still prevalent in many cultures, with the tiny bride sent off to her husband's family as early as age two, to live in servitude for the rest of her life (unless
she dies for lack of sufficient dowry in one of those suspicious kitchen accidents more accurately termed “bride burnings”). Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland, in parts of Central America, in theocratic Iran, and during the recent attempted genocide in Rwanda, little boys as young as eight have been recruited for missions ranging from errand running (with live munitions) to mine clearing (they walk ahead of the army and get blown up since they're regarded as dispensable) to outright assassination. Modern, lightweight weapons have expanded the involvement of children: many “seasoned” Khmer Rouge soldiers in Cambodia were all of fourteen years old; recent civil wars in Uganda and Sudan kidnapped and armed ten- and twelve-year-old boys for their militias.
There are approximately 250 million children in the world's labor force
, primarily in developing countries in Asia and Africa—and this is
without
counting (just as it's not counted for women) bonded labor, prostitution, pornography, domestic servitude, subsistence farming, child-rearing (of younger siblings), water hauling, fuel gathering, animal husbandry, and hidden-economy sweatshop labor. Tuberculosis, body lesions, malnutrition, and venereal disease are rife among the world's 80 million homeless street children—an estimated 30 million of whom roam in packs through the midnight streets of Brazilian cities alone.
³

Not surprisingly, there's a gender differential. In some societies a female child is more likely to be denied food in favor of a male child; she must eat last if at all, and fish, eggs, meat, and other protein foods may be considered taboo for her. She joins her mother as part of the female two-thirds of all illiterates on the planet, and is more likely to be denied education as well as most forms of basic safety and health care. She often carries or births a child while still a child herself. She risks not surviving infancy in China, where female infanticide is still epidemic, because of the government's one-child-per-family policy and its failure to educate the rural populace against a preference for sons, or in India, where amniocentesis misapplied for sex selection has now created a serious imbalance in the birthrates of male and female infants. Because she is female, a little girl can suffer doubly, from sexism
and
from being a child. Sometimes the work she's forced to do links the two oppressions neatly and appallingly. In 1984, on the resort island of Phuket, Thailand, there was a fire in one of the many brothels patronized by international visitors, primarily though not exclusively from Japan. The charred skeletons of six female humans were found, chained to their beds for fear they might escape from what its defenders outrageously claim is valid, voluntary “sex work.” They were all between the ages of ten and twelve.

Male children are exploited sexually, too, although their labor is more often of a different sort. Not long ago, a twelve-year-old boy riding his bike on a bright April day was gunned down in his village near Lahore, Pakistan. His name was Iqbal Masih. In a six-paragraph story buried on a back page, the
New York Times
reported his murder as described by activists with the Bonded Labor Liberation Front (BLLF), a Pakistani organization opposing child labor. Iqbal, who had worked as a carpet weaver under horrifying circumstances for half his brief life, had dared to speak out about the conditions child workers face. Because he was brave, smart, articulate, and lucky enough to get heard by sympathizers, Iqbal was freed. The BLLF brought him to speak at an international labor conference in Sweden, Brandeis University offered him a full scholarship when he was ready for college, and Reebok awarded him its Youth in Action Prize (U.S.$15,000—relative to the profits of their sweatshop factories in Asia a pittance, but one slickly transformed into a public-relations gesture). Iqbal's dream was to use the money to get an education, then become a
lawyer when he grew up, to continue his fight for children's rights. Although he was the target of numerous death threats from people in the carpet industry who were angered at his visibility and volubility, he persisted in his campaign. So did they. Now both the little boy and his dream are buried. He had been sold by his parents at age four, and had been shackled to a carpet loom for six years. When he was freed, he still owed his boss 13,000 rupees. Iqbal had earned one rupee a day.

These children are not abstract statistics to me. I've talked with them and listened to them. I've seen the fourteen-year-olds pouring out of factories run by international corporations in the “free-trade” zones of Central America and South Asia, where women and children are the preferred labor: cheap, marginal, desperate, nonviolent. Or the migrant-worker kids in the agribusiness-owned fields of the United States, their fingers flashing as they pick fruit for growers who don't care that their pint-sized labor force has seen the inside of a school for an average of only five years. Or the four-foot-tall child laborer in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal, carrying six bricks in a sack on her head and a baby brother slung on her hip. Or the ten-year-old bar girls in the former R & R towns of the Philippines that once catered to the U.S. Navy—flat-chested little girls wearing push-up bras stuffed with rags, neon-red lipstick outlining their fixed grins. Or the “pre-teen” prostitutes sold by their villages in Laos or Cambodia to brothel keepers in India or Thailand—sent back home, HIV-infected, to die before their thirteenth birthday. Or the six-year-old peddlar boy, one of many who accost your every step in Giza, Egypt, offering to sell anything: sight-seeing maps in different languages, dirty postcards, drugs, camel rides, his sister—”A virgin, I promise!”—and, with a wink, himself.

I've seen these children.

Such a sight forever changes the way one looks at childhood.

The way I look at childhood had been perforce skewed since well before I encountered such children. Yet I cannot conscience this book existing without acknowledging their shadowy presence, although I know that the inclusion of the above-mentioned statistics risks heightening the contrast between such children's situations and anything approximating what was
my own. I can hear a reader gasp, “How can you possibly compare …,” and indeed, I am not comparing. It's always a failure of ethical nerve to settle for compare-and-contrast-oppression competitions. Instead, the challenge is to use one's own suffering as a skeleton key to gain access to the suffering borne by others. This does
not
mean arrogantly assuming one
understands
anyone else's pain; it simply means acknowledging it, with empathy and respect—not pity—
and
offering active support toward trying to heal it.

At first glance—certainly as measured against the hideous situation of a child worker in, say, the carpet factories of Nepal—a child performer in Europe or the United States can appear incredibly privileged, to herself/himself as well as to others. After all, the basics—water, food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education—are firmly in place; in addition, sometimes there's wealth, fame, adulation. Yet these promised or actual privileges make any idea of revolt more indefensible, in turn making the distress and anger more bewildering. The wounds are different, the scars less visible.

Although the hardships of child labor can differ dramatically in
degree
, they are intimately related in
kind
. The premature violation of innocence is the same, as is the loss—lifelong—of truly comprehending what “play” is. Accelerated maturation, inflicted responsibility, imposed discipline: the same. The boil of emotions confusing the child—fear, rage, sadness, and an odd, indomitable pride—is the same, and so is the deeply embedded ignorance of how to be idle. The fantasies of rebellion are the same, as is the guilt at entertaining such thoughts, because rebellion would violate the trust and respect adults have bestowed on you by giving you such responsibility: you learn to mistake their requisitioning of your labor as “trust” and “respect” for your sanity's sake—denial as a survival tool.

Interestingly, whether in a hill village in South Asia, a London music conservatory, a Russian athletic gymnasium, or a Hollywood film set,
the adults' justifications are also the same
, giving a new meaning to the term “labor relations.” Their repertoire includes the following:

You're lucky. I never had the chance to improve
my
family's life, but
you
do
.

(Or, conversely:)
I was working at your age. Why shouldn't you?

How can you be so selfish? Do it for me/us
.

Look what I've/we've sacrificed for your sake; you owe us
.

It's the way out, don't you see?
(Out: of poverty, the village, the working class, the projects, the ghetto …)

You should be honored to be given so much responsibility at your age
.

You have a God-given talent/gift/skill/opportunity, and it would be a sin to throw it away
.

The child reels at the clutter of such multiple messages, because the child hears all at once how the justifications range (and overlap) from the hypocritical (
You
have
to love doing this or you couldn't be so good at it!
) to the brutally frank (
It's not a choice; we need the money
).

A child contributing financial support to her/his family is in a very different situation from a child doing household “chores,” which is in turn distinct from a child helping out on the family farm or in the family store (albeit too often with little or no wages and little or no respect). Being a breadwinner child is qualitatively as well as quantitatively different. Being the
sole
breadwinner is a terrifying assignment—because under all the adult propaganda runs a core message:

Without your labor, the family will starve. Then who will care for you?

You are literally fighting for their lives—and thus for your own. This realization invests every action with inappropriate significance. Having such power while simultaneously knowing yourself to be powerless creates a vertigo about capacity. Furthermore, if your family depends on you, you're trapped. Escape is impossible, so, like the prisoner of war, kidnap victim, or battered woman, you come to identify with your captor: Stockholm Syndrome. It's crucial to make that captor your friend; if that captor is
not
your friend, your death is likely. But
if
you can believe you're on the same side (and these are your
parents
, after all, this is your
family
), then love
must
prevail: your love for them (
See how obedient and good I am? See what I've accomplished?
), and their gratitude, expressed as love, for you. This means you get to stay alive—contingent on their approval, of course.

The illogical logic of such a universe is hermetically sealed, a tautology. And this belief system was devised by people with the power to enforce it, people who are larger-bodied than you—who literally loom over you, who can pick up your entire self or knock you down, lock you places, hurt you, exercise control over your body, daily life, and perceptions of them, the world, yourself.

Moreover,
this is the only life you know
. You might hear of or witness children living in other ways, but you have no experiential grounds for comparison. So while intellectually you might realize yours is an unusual way to live, what you
feel
is normalcy—the normalcy of existing in a state of emotional tuberculosis, where your spirit can never quite draw one deep breath.

Is this a state of privilege?

All the clichés about child performers who grow into neurotic (or worse) adults have been sadly validated for too long by too many survivors—and by quite a few who didn't survive.

Midori, the violinist who made her debut with the New York Philharmonic at age ten, had severe “digestive problems” as a child, and is rumored still to suffer eating disorders as an adult. Eugene Fodor, another child-prodigy violinist, was arrested for heroin possession as a grown man. Ruth Slenczynska, a child-prodigy pianist, suffered a total breakdown and reclaimed her adult career only after years of refusing to perform publicly. There are others. …

Child athletes and young dancers face a shorter career span than musicians, so the race is on: gymnasts trying to stunt their growth, skaters who fight weight with anorexia, teen ballplayers plucked from schoolwork to earn billions for a franchise owner (and millions for themselves, to be lost on booze, drugs, and fees for criminal lawyers defending them against rape, assault, or murder …). There's a gender differential here, too, as Joan Ryan noted in her prize-winning book,
Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters
(Doubleday, 1995; Warner Books, 1996); girls must race the clock against puberty, but boys peak athletically
after
puberty, when their muscles strengthen. For girls, agility, lightness, and pliability (emotional and physical) are paramount. Olga Korbut, the former Soviet gymnast and Olympic gold medalist, began smoking at age ten to keep her weight down, and has openly accused her trainer of physical and sexual abuse, claiming that many female gymnasts were treated like “sexual slaves as well as sports
machines” by their trainers.
⁴
Young tennis stars like Jennifer Capriati have discussed the damage caused by relentless pressure to succeed. Finally, in 1996, the Women's Tennis Association ruled anyone age fourteen or under ineligible to play professionally at any level; as of the same year, Olympic gymnasts have been required to be at least sixteen years old.