Friday, November 16, 2012

Blog 12 : Morocco: Abuse of Child Domestic Workers

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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