In Aid of

Child rights and child domestic workers

by Stree Jagruti Samiti and Sichrem

Stree Jagruti Samiti

For over 15 years, this non-profit organisation has been involved with issues of violence on women, children and young girls in the unorganised sector. Efforts have always been made to break the silence these women are conditioned to, through programmes that provide life skills education as we!l as a holistic development. Stree Jagruti Samiti is part of a child labour programme that focusses on the rescue, rehabilitation and integration of the domestic child worker into society - the first of its kind in the country. The organisation is also involved in running day care centres and residential schools for these children.

SICHREM

(South India Cell for Human Rights Education and Monitoring): Founded in 1995, SICHREM was the answer to the growing insensitivity to the supremacy of the rule of law. Founders of SICHREM reckoned that the best way to build a responsible civil society would be through a process of education, sensitisation and intervention. Their core activities include promotion of human rights through workshops, certificate courses and teaching seminars. Networking and advocacy for the eradication of child labour occupies a central part of SICHREM's activities, it acts as a central reference point to over 300 organisations all over Kamataka on the issue of child labour, and the rehabilitation and restoration of their fundamental right to childhood.

Witness For The Prosecution
-a play in support of
Child rights & child domestic workers.

At the age when most children are reading fairytales and going to school, there are a handful who put their growing bodies through a hard day's work as domestic help. Estimates cite figures of between 60 and I i 5 million working children in India - the highest number in the world (Human Rights Watch 1996, I). A good number of them are employed in homes, because the labour comes cheap.

Ask any one of these children, and you'll know that their dreams are no different from those of a child leading a normal life.

Remember, every little
gesture counts.
In Aid of Child rights and child domestic workers