Slaves of the underground

“We work to survive” is a standard apology offered by most “street children” in the Donbas area, many of whom are increasingly forced to earn a living doing hard labor that is more often than not illegal. Notably, minors often take up such jobs involuntarily, as many of them are virtually enslaved by adults and forced to perform the hardest and most exhausting of jobs that can be too strenuous even for an adult. Employers do not handle such children with kid gloves either: every fifth child works longer hours than the daily norm under law, every sixth child works at night, on weekends, and on holidays, and every third child never undergoes medical checkups. Children are not always paid on time, and they are almost never offered convenient vacation time.

This worrisome data was recently publicized in Donetsk oblast during a meeting of the Donetsk Press Club of Reforms, which addressed the problem of child labor in the Donbas. According to Liudmyla Kuzminova, chief of the Service for Minors at the Donetsk Oblast State Administration and head of the Regional Action Committee to Eradicate the Worst Forms of Child Labor, exploitation of underage children in various forms of mostly illegal labor is an urgent problem for both Ukraine and countless other countries. According to the International Labor Organization, globally over 250 million children aged from 5 to 14 are earning their own living doing hard labor. Meanwhile, according to the State Statistics Committee of Ukraine and the International Labor Organization, our country has over 456,000 such children, every tenth of whom resides in the Donbas area.

The involvement of children in illegal labor is taking place on a disturbingly growing scale in the coal miners’ region. Minors most often perform the hardest forms of labor at “coal digs” — illegal, makeshift coalmines. To work in them is not simply illegal, but also very hazardous. Such practice is most widespread in the oblast’s depressive towns — Snizhne, Torez, Shakhtarsk, etc. Statistics show that occasionally the children’s own parents force them into such coal digs.

In a recent mind-boggling case, parents in a coal miners’ village in the Donbas forced their three underage children to dig for coal after nightfall. They accessed the coal dig from the cellar of their building. Aside from the fact that working conditions were hazardous for the young miners (even adults often die in coal digs, succumbing to backbreaking labor or underground dangers — collapsing rocks, methane explosions, fires, flooding of mines, etc.), the children received little food while being forced to produce ever increasing amounts of coal. Sometimes the parents would not allow them to come out unless they fulfilled the day’s quota. Eventually, the youngsters took sick, while their parents’ criminal activity was exposed only after one of the children almost died, and the wretched parents had to call in the rescue team and the paramedics.

Children who are forced to work at coal digs are not the only ones who face hard working conditions. As of Jan. 1, 2006, only a little more than 1,500 underage children in Donetsk oblast were officially employed at various enterprises with clearly regulated working conditions. The other children work unofficially and cannot even complain about their unfortunate situation — they simply do not know who to turn to. In the meantime, such children are not even aware that their lifestyle is abnormal. Moreover, they consciously take up hard jobs because they are forced to leave their homes where life becomes unbearable. Specialists who work with minors in Donetsk oblast have even compiled an index of illegal children’s occupations. This list is topped by work in illegal coal mines, where children are also forced to gather and sift coal as part of a very hard and tiring procedure.

This is followed by work on the street in what is known as “tertiary occupations” (panhandling, petty theft, selling newspapers, collecting and selling scrap metal, waste paper, bottles, and similar types of work). The third place in this list is occupied by such jobs as washing cars, work at landfills, menial jobs at recreational establishments, as well as a special kind of employment — exploitation of child labor in agriculture (weeding, harvesting crops, work at sawmills and in slaughterhouses, treatment of animal skins, etc.). In this connection experts also say that even when parents demand that their children weed the vegetable garden under scorching sun or spend the entire day hoeing seed plots, this smacks of exploitation of child labor, to say nothing of processing animal carcasses and hides in a harmful environment. However, parents have no qualms about using their children in this way, since for many of them children are merely free workforce, who only need food and clothing as payment for their work.

According to Liudmyla Kuzminova, the most appalling form of exploitation of children involves sexual abuse: minors are often used in the making of adult movies or in the sex industry. In recent years such cases are no longer rare in the Donbas: children are lured virtually “for a chocolate bar” or several hryvnias for trivial expenses. Unaware of the dangers of such work, they simply perform all demands of their “employers” as an unpleasant but quite profitable job. Even in the most well-to-do families parents may not immediately guess that something like this happened to their child.

For example, quite recently a small town in the region was rocked by a shocking revelation. Several young girls, second and third graders at a local school, were used in the production of child pornography by their own school teacher. He invited the girls to his own home under the pretext of “additional classes,” where he got them interested in pornographic photographs, treated them to wine, and gradually made more and more revealing photographs and videos with their participation, which he later sold to his regular overseas “clients,” who then posted them on the Internet. The children themselves hardly suspected that they were part of something abnormal. According to them, their teacher enjoyed respect at school, and they trusted his judgment. For this reason the children kept it a secret from their parents, who never questioned the nature of such extracurricular classes. One of the mothers became suspicious when her daughter let it slip that she had to undress at her teacher’s home. The concerned parents reported the enterprising teacher to the police, who soon caught him red handed on the scene of the crime.

However, quite often such “photographers” escape punishment because children deliberately keep the source of their income secret: while some are ashamed, others do not consider it to be something out of the ordinary. This is why quite often such episodes are uncovered only by accident.

With such facts in mind, experts in Donetsk oblast have been long making efforts to expose and prevent cases of exploitation of child labor and especially its worst forms. As The Day learned from Svitlana Hordiychuk, senior expert of the sector of extracurricular educational establishments and educational work at the Education and Science Department of the Donetsk Oblast State Administration, currently a whole number of child protection programs and projects are being implemented in the oblast. They include such projects as “Peer to Peer,” “Knowing and Exercising Your Rights,” and a project to educate the region’s pedagogues entitled “SCREAM: Stop Child Labor. Protecting Children’s Rights Through Education, Arts, and the Mass Media.”

Special attention in this respect is paid to orphans and pupils at boarding schools of the Donbas, who are specifically informed about all the dangers awaiting them on their way to adult life and taught about the UN Convention on Children’s Rights. They also meet with representatives of the law enforcement agencies, who inform children about their rights and responsibilities.

In addition, as part of the International Program to Eradicate Child Labor (IPEC) of the International Labor Organization experts in Donetsk oblast are implementing several projects to monitor employment of minors. These projects cover six cities and towns in the oblast: Horlovka, Donetsk, Snizhne, Torez, Khartsyzk, and Shakhtarsk. They are coordinated by a number of regional services for minors. According to Liudmyla Kuzminova, as part of these projects experts have revealed 4,000 beggars, homeless, or abandoned children who were involved in illegal labor in Donetsk oblast. All of them were transferred to shelters, where they received the necessary medical assistance and special rehabilitation courses.

Child experts in Donetsk oblast are only starting to implement a large-scale project “Eradicating Labor of Street Children,” as part of which a special program to monitor the hardest forms of child labor will be developed and implemented in Donetsk oblast. In the future this system will serve as a basis for a similar nationwide project. According to Oleksandr Bratanov, deputy head of the Donetsk Oblast State Administration for humanitarian issues, it will be a stringent mechanism for controlling the legality of the labor market, which will enable experts to use all kinds of measures to protect every child’s rights. The project envisions 53,000 hryvnias of financial aid for orphans and abandoned children as well as vocational training courses for 150 such children along with psychological, legal, and social assistance.

Similar attempts to monitor child labor in Donetsk oblast are not new. For example, the Territorial State Labor Inspection in Donetsk oblast is staging regular crackdowns and surprise checks to expose cases of illegal use of child labor. According to the inspection’s head, Maryna Hurtova, surprise checks have been conducted at 66 enterprises that employ minors, and 26 executives of such enterprises have been brought to administrative account for violations of labor legislation. Overall, 328 inspections were conducted in Donetsk oblast in 2005, during which officers uncovered 58 violations of labor legislation. Aside from imposing fines, labor inspectors have referred 45 cases to court.

On top of these inspections, the oblast’s child services jointly with the law enforcement services regularly stage preventive crackdowns with a variety of code names: “Street Children,” “Railway Station,” “Vacations,” “Family,” etc. According to Liudmyla Kuzminova, to date almost 3,000 such crackdowns have been conducted in the region, during which child services found more than 5,000 minors involved in hard labor and inspected nearly 4,000 problem families.

The region’s child services are also prepared to assist those children who insist on earning their own living. Such young enthusiasts are enrolled in vocational crash courses, after which they are officially employed at the region’s enterprises. During the period from Jan. 1, 2006, to date, enterprises in the Donbas have hired 1,530 minors (versus 1,390 in all of last year). Thanks to these efforts the number of child vagrants in the region has declined by 23 percent, and over 17,000 children received financial aid. Child services in Donetsk oblast intend to further improve these indicators this year because they are certain that, as a rule, children should not work, much less unofficially, in difficult and hazardous conditions while doing backbreaking labor only to survive.