Sacred Trust

There is no trust more sacred than the one the world holds with children.
There is no duty more important than ensuring that their rights are respected,
that their welfare is protected, that their lives are free from fear and want
and that they can grow up in peace.
– Kofi Annan

For the past three decades as I traveled the world on assignment I
 have witnessed children working in fields, factories, ditches, tunnels,
mines, and ship-breaking yards.

The scope of the problem is vast.
Hundreds of millions of children spend their 
childhood working and do not have an opportunity to
play, go to school, or live in a healthy environment.

Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins
from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
– Anna Quindlen

Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together,
and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the
social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor
to the end of time.
–  Grace Abbott

The object of employing children is not to train them,
but to get high profits from their work.
– Lewis Hine, 1908

Child labor perpetuates poverty, unemployment, illiteracy,
population growth, and other social problems.
– Kailash Satyarthi

The International Labour Organization (ILO) defines child labor as work that is
mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children;
and interferes with their schooling by: depriving them of the opportunity to attend school;
obliging them to leave school prematurely; or requiring them to attempt to combine
school attendance with excessively long and heavy work.