Did you grow up in a house with live-in help?
How many?
How much do you remember about how they were treated?
How much about them did you know?
When did they finally leave?
Did they run away?
Here’s the thing, UNICEF considers domestic work to be among the lowest status and reports that most child domestic workers are live-in workers and are under the round-the-clock control of their employers.
According to one of its reports, “A staggering 15 million children under the age of 14 are working across Nigeria”.
These children are generally children from very poor homes, whose parents cannot afford to send them to school or train them in a particular profession or trade. And so they are usually “kept in the care” of distant “relatives”, or sometimes even strangers, who they hope will raise these kids in exchange for “helping out” around their homes.
The weird but not so surprising bit though, is that Nigeria’s laws regarding the minimum age of employment are pretty inconsistent, where the Child Rights Act prohibits those under 18 from working, yet the Labour Act sets the minimum age of employment at 12.
Weird.