To combat exploitation of child labor, The World Bank with UNICEF, International Labour Organization and Understanding Children's Work Initiative to bring awareness of the scope of the problem. The World Bank estimates that there are 218 million children who are victim to unfair child labor practices. The children's ages range from five to seventeen years of age. The handmade rug industry is one of industries involved in exploitation of child labor. The World Bank works with country-based and non-governmental organizations in an effort to "combat child labor." The United Nations and the International Labour Organization consider child labor exploitative, with the UN stipulating, in article 32 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child that:
...States Parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development. Although globally there is an estimated 250 million children working.
According to the census in 1990 nearly 18% of all the children in America are working in different organizations. The Supreme Court banned child labor in 1916 but the law became visible in 1941. The labor department is also not paying attention to the child labor in USA therefore children are still employed in the organizations. The age of the children who are employed is between 15 years to 17 years. They are nearly 3.7 million children who work in different factories. There is an interesting fact that more than 600 children died in work related accidents.
Exhibit
U. Roberto Romano, a photographer, filmmaker and humans right activist, traveled to India, Nepal and Pakistan to record the plight of child laborers in the handmade rug industry. He also gathered photographs and stories of children who have been rescued by the GoodWeave organization, previously known as Rugmark. The Faces of Freedom exhibit is a collection of photos by U. Roberto Romano that provides insight into the lives, poor living conditions and faces of child rug-weavers of South Asia. Messages of hope are portrayed in the photographs and stories of children that were assisted by the GoodWeave program to attain school education. A selection of handmade rugs made without child labor is also exhibited. After initial showings in San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C., the collection has been exhibited in major cities across the United States since 2009.
News media
In late 2010, the Faces of Freedom exhibit was featured the ABCtelevision network show Good Morning America. On April 18, 2011, Faces of Freedom was covered in CNN Freedom Project’s of modern slavery. The piece appears on CNN with a slideshow of images of GoodWeave’s Faces of Freedom photo exhibition.
Related projects
U. Roberto Romano is an investigative filmmaker, where he has been director, director of photography, still photographer and/or producer in the following efforts: The Harvest Dark Side of Chocolate Fields of Peril Children in the Fields Stolen Childhoods
