{"id":15787,"date":"2020-12-11T16:02:24","date_gmt":"2020-12-11T16:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/?p=15787"},"modified":"2020-12-11T21:12:36","modified_gmt":"2020-12-11T21:12:36","slug":"child-labor-public-perception","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/child-labor-public-perception\/","title":{"rendered":"Child labor\u2019s public perception problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reid Maki is the director of child labor advocacy at the National Consumers League and he coordinates the Child Labor Coalition.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

There are a lot of obstacles to ending child labor that the Child Labor Coalition<\/a> (CLC) and its nearly 40 members confront on a daily basis. Poverty, governmental indifference, educational access, and a lack of awareness of the long-term impact of child labor on children are all big factors, but another is lack of knowledge of the scope or prevalence of the problem. The average American consumer doesn\u2019t understand that child labor is a pervasive problem affecting an estimated 152 million children in the world\u2014and that\u2019s an estimate developed before the pandemic started. We think the number has grown significantly since COVID started throwing hundreds of millions of families into deeper poverty.<\/p>\n

We became aware of the gap between the public\u2019s perception of the problem and the reality of the situation seven years ago when the group Child Fund International commissioned a survey<\/a> of over 1,000 consumers. Only one percent knew that roughly 150 million children were trapped in child labor globally. Even more disturbing: 73 percent of respondents\u2014essentially three out of four\u2014incorrectly guessed that the global total was less the one million. They were off by a factor of 150!<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to galvanize public and political opinion to confront a pressing social problem when few people realize the massive scope of the problem and instead misperceive it as a tiny, moribund problem. If we want corporations that benefit from child labor to take serious action, we need a better understanding of the problem\u2019s prevalence. Governments are not likely to act or expend financial resources on programs to fix a problem perceived as affecting very few children.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been wondering if the Internet and Twitter have helped close the perception gap in the several years since Child Fund\u2019s polling. Surveys are expensive and our budget didn\u2019t allow us to conduct a phone-based survey like the 2013 poll. So, we decided to use a Survey Monkey <\/em>internet poll to see where the public\u2019s perception levels were at. We conducted the poll before COVID struck.<\/p>\n

We gave respondents the opportunity to guess how many children were impacted by child labor and offered the following choices:<\/p>\n