Free the Children

Lorraine Douglas is the youth services co-ordinator at the Winnipeg
Public Library.

In 1995, 12-year-old Craig Kielburger of Thornhill, Ontario, read the
story of Iqbal Masih in the newspaper. As a young child, Iqbal was sold
into child labor in Pakistan and with the assistance of a human-rights
organization he was able to escape. After he began to tell his story to
the world, he was murdered while riding a bicycle with his cousins.
Shocked by Iqbal’s story, Craig resolved to find out more about child
labor. His research led him to making speeches to his classmates and
within a short time forming the human-rights organization Free the
Children.

Craig set out to tell the stories of the children who are laboring in
countries around the world. This book concentrates on his journey to
South East Asia in 1996. Accompanied by a Canadian human-rights worker,
Alam Rahman, he traveled to Bangladesh, Thailand, India, Nepal, and
Pakistan. The stories are chilling. Especially tragic are those
concerning children involved in Bangkok’s sex trade and the very
dangerous work children undertake in Sivakasi’s fireworks factories.
During the tour, Craig became very media-savvy and participated in a
press conference, a meeting with Jean Chrétien, and the freeing of
children from a carpet factory. He and Rahman also met Iqbal’s mother
and tried to clarify some of the mysteries surrounding Iqbal’s death.

The authors argue that children in developed nations suffer from
“affluenza” while their counterparts in Third World countries are
enslaved by poverty. They call for a new kind of activism in which
children are recognized as having rights, including the right to
advocate on their own behalf. They also stress that children should be
involved in making decisions about children; at present, many
policy-making bodies that are supposed to act on behalf of children
ignore them completely.

This clearly written and well-organized book will be of particular
interest to students and adults who are concerned about human rights.