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The Right of Children Laborers to Protection From Dangerous Activities
What are the dangerous activities?
By dangerous activities we mean those which negatively affect children's growth and health conditions, particularly when using toxic substances. Such activities may lead to children being prone to disease and disability or other side effects related to vision or other body functions, depriving children of normal growth.
Do the children in Egypt work in dangerous industries?
Unfortunately, the children laborers in Egypt in villages or towns work in dangerous industries like crop dusting, quarries, manufacturing workshops, oil stations, leather dyehouse or house keeping for long hours. The children work in such industries while they are less than seven years old without any protection from industrial accidents.
What protection is required?
In fact, the best way to protect children at the age from five to eighteen is to prevent child labor in dangerous activities. For such activities could have dangerous consequences on mature workers themselves, which of course could be even more detrimental for children. Actually, industries of such kind can lead to sudden death among children or at least incurable disease, including cancer and deafness. Therefore, the charter of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and other agreements ratified by Egypt, specify the age of work in dangerous industries at 16 or 18 years old. But practically, all laws, life and children safety are ignored that the children laborers work in dangerous industries deserted by adults.
What is the solution?
The only solution is to prevent children under eighteen years from working in dangerous industries. Essential to explaining this demand is to answer the question; what are the dangerous industries in Egypt? This requires that NGOs, researchers and governmental institutions should survey the industries using child labor and their impacts on the health of children. In this way, we may be able to classify dangerous industries in which children should be prevented from working. The process, of course, requires coordinated efforts by all those concerned with children health, including parents, clinics, ministries of health and agriculture, researchers and NGOs. We should keep in mind that if our children are forced to work because of poverty and harsh living conditions, they should not work in dangerous industries that may lead to their death because of negligence and exploitation by employers.