The child workers of Peru face an incredible number of dangers as they make their ways from the rural villages to the city. These children are often bought or lured from their families with promises of good jobs and education in the city. Most of these children will never see their families again and in some cases, may be too young to even remember where they came from in the first place. Maria, 13, is currently being exploited by her sister. She was brought to Cusco as an unpaid domestic worker at age 7, but eventually managed to leave her employer. She now lives with her sister working in a local tienda 10-12 hours per day before attending school for four hours at night. Her sister takes all of her income. The most common scenario is that wealthy families from the city of Cusco or Lima will travel to remote villages to recruit children as domestic servants. These children will end up working 15-20 hours per day, often with no pay whatsoever. The promise of education is only sometimes fulfilled. The families are not above beating the children if they step out of line or become rebellious and female children are often subject to sexual abuse. Within Peruvian society, these are the invisible children.
Location
Peru · Cusco · 2009
(location generalized to protect survivors) Response & intervention
Law enforcement in Peru pays lip service to anti-trafficking and child labor messages, but actual enforcement is very negative. If children are told not to work, they end up on the street where they face harassment and incarceration from the same authorities who "liberated" them in the first place.
Despite the travails as a domestic worker, a job with no description or boundaries, there are organizations such as Yanapanakusun in Cusco working to ensure that domestic worker children have access to education. Traditional education is closed to them, but the Yanapanakusun organization has managed to create a night school for these children who are able to get off work around 4 pm and go to school until 8:30 pm. Many of these children, however, must then return to the same household in which they are exploited. The purpose of the education is to allow them to move out of those settings and into other work. While the idea of a 12-year-old child worker is not ideal, it is a fact of life in Peru where many, many street children must find a way to persevere through a life on the streets. Maria has been at the Yanapanakusun school for two years and is doing well with her studies. She's vivacious with a wide smile and bright eyes, though she tends to be shy around strangers.
Yanapanakusun and Quzco Maki are two organizations in Cusco determined to help the street kids and child workers not only understand their rights, but provide clean housing, job training, psychological care and key assistance with obtaining missing documentation such as birth certificates (which many of the children do not have) and other permits enabling the children to move to a better job that might give them opportunity over some of their less fortunate peers.
Investigators from Not For Sale Georgia located these victims and interviewed them.
Documented on the original SlaveryMap (2008–2016). We don't have a verifiable source on file yet — use “Report a problem” below to add one.