from "The Anti-Slaway Reportes aupt Aton
November to 16-
Frie 541/30
12 DEC 1977
few girls in Morocco can expect to do more than menial work and bear children it is considered, despite the law, wasteful to educate them.
EX
P..
made in
The Moroccan Government has established factories where carpets are ideal conditions but many private entrepreneurs have set up back-street fatties in small dark rooms. They buy looms and hire maitresses by offering them so much per square metre for completed carpets. The poorer and less profitable the story the more difficult it is to find, the less information can be discovered about production, rates of pay and other details. The team knows that many hundreds of these back- street factories exist all over Morocco where small children work for little no re- muneration.
{
In seven of the nine privately-owned factories visited the children worked in cold, dirty, dust-filled or damp and overcrowded rooms. Huddled on the floor of one room measuring seven metres by 21 metres, in an embroidery factory at Meknes, were sixty girls aged between six and twelve.
Their parents encourage the maitresses to employ the children, to keep them busy, to bring in the pitiful payments handed out by the maitresses and for the chance that the children may themselves become successful maitresses.
Although the Moroccan Government has other desperate social problems the Society considers that the Government should not turn a blind eye to this one. It recognizes that to attempt to abolish child labour in any developing country would be to discourage respect for the law. It believes, however, that publicity should be given to the conditions in which many Moroccan carpets are made in order to encourage both wholesale and retail buyers in Europe to investigate the origins of the carpets they buy, so as to avoid supporting a system under which children are exploited on so large a scale.
The Moroccan Government should, in the Society's view, be urged to abolish previous colonial legislation and to establish instead a list of lincensed employers of children who should be compelled to provide working conditions where at least mini- mum standards of hygiene, light and space prevail and to conform to maximum hours laid down for each age group. The employers should also be 'compelled to allow a minimum number of hours for the children to receive, in the factories, elementary education. This would avoid increasing the pressure on Morocco's already overcrowded school buildings.
While urbanization and the carpet trade grow the exploitation of children and of girls in particular is increasing. The Society believes that this trend, unless reversed, will have a detrimental effect on the well-being of the Moroccan people.
The Society believes that its recommendations would have only a marginal effect on the marketability of privately-made Moroccan carpets.
[The Government of Morocco has responded 'encouragingly in January 1976 to the Society's report, indicating its intention to improve conditions on the lines of our recommendations but eighteen months later little change is yet apparent. Ed.]
ANNEX E
THE TRAFFIC IN PERSONS
THE SYSTEM IN HONG KONG.
The following extract is taken from a Hong Kong Police publication: TRIAD SOCIETIES IN HONG KONG 1975.
"Prostitution
Prostitution in itself is not illegal in Hong Kong. However it is the basis of a wide field of illegal activities within which there is an organised Triad presence. Their operations are mainly confined to the recruitment of young females into prostitution, the management and control of call-girl centres and the exploitation of individual prostitutes.
11
3.
ten
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.