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. Norca, now 14, was trafficked to Cusco to work as a domestic servant several years ago. Luckily for her, her mother came to Cusco and Norca now lives with her instead of the family that purchased her in the first place. She currently works in a restaurant where she makes 100 Soles per month, or about $33. She works 10-12 hours per day. 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, Peru · 2009
(location generalized to protect survivors) Response & intervention
Law enforcement in Peru pays lip service to anti-trafficking messages and child labor laws, but little enforcement actually takes place. Many street children and aid workers report multiple instances of abuse of street children and child workers that include torture, shootings, incarceration and general harassment.
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. Norca has now been in school for two years and is learning at a fast pace. She hopes to leave the restaurant for a better job, but is fortunate to have a relative to go home to each day.
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.