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Documented on the original SlaveryMap (2008–2016). We don’t have a verifiable source on file yet. Know one?
What happened
Of sorts.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. In this case, Janet was 7 years old when a family from Cosina Olympia recruited her to work as an unpaid domestic servant. Her family was eager to give her up in the first place as the family was prone to domestic violence issues. She was later employed in a factory stamping chocolates for no compensation and was sexually abused by the son of the owner of the factory. 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.
Response and intervention
Despite a myriad of laws, some very new, governing the rights of the child worker, enforcement is lacking in training and will. Many such children face being told not to work, but to do so brings the prospect of starvation, homelessness and incarceration by the same authorities telling them not to work. 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. 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 and interviewed these trafficking victims.