In Morocco there are girls as young as
8 years old that are being used as domestic workers. These young
girls work for long hours with very little pay, and it is not
uncommon for them to endure physical abuse from their employees or
their employees family members. In a 73-page report done on the issue
it was found that some domestic workers, who are typically girls,
work for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for as little as 11 US dollars
a month. It was said that some girls even frequently beat and
verbally abused while working, are often denied education and
sometimes were even refused adequate food. Even though the Moroccan
government has worked to reduce the child labor issues and to
increase school enrollment over the last decade there are still
loop-holes and ways for people to get around it that should be better
paid attention to. Jo Becker, who is the children's rights advocacy
director at Human Rights Watch said, “Girls are being exploited,
abused, and forced to work long hours for extremely low wages.
Morocco has taken important steps to reduce child labor, but it needs
to take targeted actions to protect these child domestic workers and
enforce the law.” One report done on the issue showed that fifteen
out of the 20 girls interviewed had all began working before the age
of 12 and all but four of the girls were still under 18 at the time.
These girls work for horrible pay under
even more horrible conditions. And the majority of the time the money
they work for they do not even get to keep, it goes straight to their
parents or guardians. Even though Morocco's Labor code says that 44
hours a week is the most a worker can work, these girls often work
over 100 hours a week, and many don't even receive one day a week to
rest. The way these girls are treated is most certainly unfair to
them, especially being that some are as young as 8 years old. Here we
aren't allowed to work until the age of 15 and sometimes older, but
there it starts much younger and has little to no regulation of the
way they are treated.
http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/11/15/morocco-abuse-child-domestic-workers
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