Human Goods

(source: David Parker)

NEED: The Humanitarian Magazine published a gallery of photographs by doctor and photographer David Parker, who has spent 16 years raising awareness about health issues affecting the world’s 218 million child laborers.*

Parker said he first felt the pull of social justice while growing up Jewish during WWII.  His photographs holistically intertwine the complex forces that propel child labor, including lack of access to healthcare, medicine, and education, social values, unstable legal systems, and plain economics:

Typically people want to understand [child labor] in terms of economic development, but they forget that social welfare is very much related to education and economic development very much related to public health.

Dr. Parker’s work has been compiled in two collections: Stolen Dreams and Before Their Time.

*International Labor Organization

(Source: Associated Press)

The latest violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is expected to reinvigorate child recruitment efforts, IRIN reported this week.

The intensification of fighting in the North Kivu region, which resumed in August between the Congolese government and the rebel Congres National pour la Defense du Peuple (CNDP), is expected to raise the number of children fighting in the region well beyond the estimated 3,000 already abducted.

Ishbel Matheson, a spokeswoman for Save the Children, told IRIN:

Children who are forced into armed conflict suffer terrible physical and emotional damage.  They are traumatized by being separated from their families and may witness executions, beatings, and torture.  Many young girls now have babies.

Hundreds of schools have been forced to close due to the risk of abduction.  Troops have been known to attack them, raiding even primary school classrooms for fresh combatants and concubines.