DEFINING THE INTOLERABLE: Child work, global standards and cultural relativism

All over the world, work of some kind is (and has always been) part of most children’s lives, as may be seen from the Introduction and many articles in this special issue of Childhood. At certain times and places, and in certain forms and relations of work, the exploitation and abuse of children’s capacity for work becomes a serious social problem. It is in this sense – the abuse of children in work, rather than the fact of their involvement in work – that the ‘child labour’ problem should be understood. Although this statement may seem obvious and uncontroversial to many readers, most public discourse and policy intervention on the child labour problem has in fact started from a different set of assumptions, which define the problem (in this author’s view incorrectly) as one of work itself, rather than of the various kinds of abuse or harm that may stem from BEN WHITE Institute of Social Studies, The Hague