The history of the Sundarbans area can be sourced back to 200 AD, according to what’s been written in folklore.[1] It is one of the largest mangrove forests in the world, located on the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers on the Bay of Bengal. “In Bangladesh, children, adolescents and adults are trafficked into slavery in many sectors of the economy, such as fishing, domestic work, and prostitution,” writes Kari Jensen, a professor of global studies and geography at Hofstra University in New York. In her paper, “Child Slavery and the Fish Processing Industry in Bangladesh” she examines child slavery in the dry-fish industry on Dublar Char, which is a remote silt island in the Sundarbans.
She wrote of her husband, Naser Khan, who is a Norwegian freelance photojournalist originally from Bangladesh who went to this area to record information about fishing techniques that the area was notorious for. He accidentally found himself in the role of a rescuer -- he came across slavery in a fish processing camp on Dublar Char. After seeing people on the island, he decided to request to be taken there, and Naser convinced the guards that he was trying to document “the efficient work practices in order to dispel Western myths of third-world labor being characterized by low productivity, begging, stealing, and delinquency.”
What Naser shockingly discovered was that about 1,000 fish processing ‘workers’ -- boys and young men who, as it turned out, were completely unpaid laborers. He began listening to stories from the workers whenever he had the opportunity, and this reconnaissance also allowed him the space to take photographs of the fish processing operation on the island. He received requests to be rescued, and Naser told them to be at his boat prior to dawn on the day he would be leaving. Only one boy showed up, a 14-year old, and the boat took off from the shore and the rescue was a success.
“His mother had recently gotten married to a man who didn't like [the boy] and who had repeatedly beaten him, and this was the reason why he had run away a few months earlier only to be lured away by a slave recruiter. The recruiter had told him he had found a job for him with a wealthy family where his main task would be to look after the beautiful, 12-year-old daughter of the family. Not realizing it was too good to be true, [the boy] thought he had commenced on the adventure of his life and immediately started daydreaming about his life as a “prince”, only to be awakened by the stark stench of drying fish on a remote island a few days later.”
To find out more about this remarkable story, read the article in its entirety for free on Wiley Online Library.
Jonathan Blagbrough, a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Dundee and the Co-Founder and Programme Director at Children Unite, wrote in “Child Domestic Labour: A Modern Form of Slavery” that “whilst prospective employers may approach the child or her family directly, it is more often intermediaries who broker deals between parents and employers, and who transport children to their employing families. Intermediaries tend to be known in the communities from where they recruit children for domestic service. They are often local vendors or business people, with connections in both source and destination areas, but they may also be recruiters from job placement agencies, friends or even family members.”[2]
Kevin Bales, a professor of contemporary slavery and the author of Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide and the Secret to Saving the World, wrote:
“There are thousands of children enslaved in the area where Naser travelled, as well as the wider Bay of Bengal. “Some process fish, others work the shrimp farms or process shrimp in makeshift factories. Fifty years ago there were no shrimp farms or camps like his carved out of the protected forest… As demand for cheap fish and shrimp ramped up, a gold rush began in Bangladesh, Southern India, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka. ‘Worthless; swamp was converted into monoculture shrimp farms, fish processing camps sprang up, and the great freezer ships were always hungry for more. Hearing of work, poor families flooded into the Sundarban wilderness. Some people were able to make a fresh start, and some landowners working in fish and shrimp were honest and treated their workers well. But criminals were already using child slaves on fishing platforms out in the ocean, and for them it was an easy step to enslave more workers to rip out mangrove forests and farm the little wrigglers that would make such a fine profit.”[3]
In 2000, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimated that 170 million of the total 350 million working children around the world were working in hazardous jobs that had adverse effects on their safety, health, and moral development.[4] In Bangladesh, 87 per cent of the labour force is employed in the informal economy according to the 2010 Labour Force Survey. Those working in the informal economy include wage labourers, self-employed persons, unpaid family labour, piece-rate workers, and other hired labour.[4] Some 1.2 million children are victims of child slavery in its most severe forms, according to a National Child Labour Survey report, published in 2015.[5]
The National Child Labour Survey (NCLS) 2002-2003 conducted in Bangladesh found that 7.9 million children between the ages of 5 and 17 are working and that 8 percent of the working children between the ages of 5 and 17 are hurt or become sick due to work. These child workers often are found to work long hours in a variety of hazardous occupations and sectors that have the potential to seriously damage their health.[6]
“Criminals are creative and will use any available means to conceal, rationalise, and justify slavery - be it race, ethnicity, religion, gender, caste, 'custom' or any other excuse or vulnerability they can exploit,” writes Samir Majumdar.[7] Sally Atkinson-Sheppard, an ethnographer and researcher, wrote that “Hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of children live on the streets in Bangladesh and according to the Bangladesh Police Force the numbers of street-involved children are set to rise to over 1.6 million by 2024.”[8] In her article, “The gangs of Bangladesh: Exploring organized crime, street gangs and ‘illicit child labourers’ in Dhaka”, Atkinson-Sheppard goes on to talk about political violence and ‘hartals’ which means ‘enforced political strikes’, citing Bangladesh as having a chaotic political situation, with ‘hartals’ often causing the country’s various functions to come to an abrupt stop.
“Hartals are widely feared among Bangladeshis because they repeatedly result in violence on the streets. It is common practice for people to stay at home during these demonstrations, rather than go into work or school, to avoid the unrest. The fieldwork data illustrated that street children are hired by mastaans to work on behalf of politicians to cause disturbance at political demonstrations, burn buses and throw bombs…” [9]
During my interview with Professor Jensen, we spoke about how political protests caused her time in Bangladesh to be a major hindrance, as she stayed indoors for much of the time, feeling quite (and understandably) uncomfortable. See: The Guardian reported in 2015, “30 dead as Bangladesh political violence escalates” and “Bangladesh opposition leader Zia calls for blockade” or “Political deadlock, violence put Bangladesh on the brink of civil war”.
Interview with Kari B. Jensen
Kari B. Jensen, PhD is an Associate Professor at the Department of Global Studies and Geography at Hofstra University. According to her website, she’s a cultural geographer who has worked for the immigration authorities in Norway and for a non-governmental organization helping orphan children in Bangladesh get an education. She has also conducted research in Bangladesh intermittently for the last twenty years, mainly focusing on the lived experiences of children from low-income households. Her doctoral research focused on child domestic workers from poor, rural families who work for wealthier families in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In particular, she explored the cultural context of the children's relationship with employers and the prospects for increasing their quality of life through access to public and semi-public spaces where they can develop their social network and seek help in case of neglect and abuse. One of her more recent research projects focuses on the importance of place in the process of identity formation among young people with South Asian parents, through an analysis of Oslo as a multicultural city.
Read her article which was a main focus of the interview: Child Slavery and the Fish Processing Industry in Bangladesh
Newsbud: Greetings, Professor. How was your semester teaching at Hofstra University?
Kari Jensen: It’s been good, I’m teaching human geography, cultural geography, and a seminar on child labor which is usually only for freshmen but this semester, a misstep happened for registration, so they opened it up for everybody finally, so I have a mix of students in that seminar which is interesting. Then I teach the so called senior seminar for geography majors which is a methodology seminar where I focus mostly on qualitative methodology and on top of that I co-teach world regional geography. In other words, a teaching overload, and it’s been very busy but good.
Newsbud: As a professional ethnographer who is experienced in the field, do you have any tricks of the trade or principles that you abide by to guide your work?
Kari Jensen: Just be yourself and really delve into it. Participate in whatever you can, and always keep in mind that whatever trivial things happen can be actually quite significant in the end, so keep taking notes. I find note-taking very tedious, but I force myself to do it constantly when I’m on fieldwork because, really, what you think might not be important sometimes turns out to be significant. I got to see that, especially when I did research with child domestic workers in private homes, and their employers. Sometimes things that employers say might seem unimportant but when you go deeper into the analysis, there could be some really good examples hidden in between that you can flesh out and use for presentations or publications. That’s what I found happening to me several times at least. Often times, some people will say one thing, and then when you interact with them in daily life and they kind of forget you are there to observe, they do things that totally contradict what they’ve said. It’s easy to say that you care deeply for children’s education but when you don’t send your child worker to school… things like that.
Newsbud: You have been to many places in Bangladesh where you’ve conducted ethnographic studies on diverse peoples and environments. To date, what research site or place you’ve travelled to has had the biggest effect on you?
Kari Jensen: The specific site that made the biggest impression on me was when my husband and I visited a village in Bangladesh where the whole village was a brothel. Seeing people there, knowing things they are going through; I got to interview a woman there who totally blamed herself for what had happened, and was talking in terms of, “Oh, god will never forgive me” and “I am an evil person” and things like that. That’s very hard to listen to and so I would try to console her in a language that is not my own. I speak Bangla (Bengali), but I’m not fluent, so when really intricate things like that are communicated, I have to talk through an interpreter. Trying to explain to her that things are not her fault, as she was basically lured into prostitution; she was lured to get engaged with a guy who made her believe that he loved her, and then he just sold her to a brothel, and since then she has been in different brothels for 15 years or so. Sometimes I tell my students of human geography -- we talk a lot about terms such as sense of place, or feeling out of place -- that that was a place where I felt the most out of place in my life.
Also, at that point I was quite used to Bangladeshi culture; I had been back and forth by then maybe 8 times, by now 10 times, and usually I stay between a month or three; sometimes longer. I felt that I knew Bangladeshi culture, which is much more reserved when it comes to females and males interacting in public spaces, and then suddenly being in a place where those norms don’t exist. That was very weird, and made me feel out of place. I should maybe add to that story that we did see some really good, more positive things too. We did visit a project that was initiated and funded by Save the Children Australia in that village where they had built almost like an orphanage for daughters of the sex workers, so they could go to school and have a somewhat normal childhood. Unfortunately, there was no equivalence for the sons, though, so they faced a hard time. That village was certainly a site that made a big impression.
Newsbud: The International Labour Organization published a report in 2013 that said that the global number of children in child labour has declined by one third since 2000, from 246 million to 168 million children. More than half of them, 85 million, are in hazardous work. How accurate are these numbers, realistically?
Kari Jensen: I always take such numbers with many, many grains of salt. I mean, it’s great to be able to tell my students at the seminar who I feed so many depressing statistics; not only statistics, but depressing stories and facts, to say that actually, the overall trend is that it’s going in the right direction, there are less children who work full-time and who are doing exploitative and hazardous jobs. However, I’m reluctant to even put those numbers up on the board, because how do we even measure child labor and what is considered child work? For instance, a lot of work done by children, usually girls, in private homes may not be recognized at all. I’m skeptical, but I hope they [researchers in the ILO] are right, and I think at least that they are right about the trend, that it is going in the right direction, because if Bangladesh can be used as an indicator, which I hope it can, it is telling: Today, almost all children do at least enroll and go to school a few years, and more girls than boys attend primary school in Bangladesh, and if you compare it to a couple of decades ago, there’s been tremendous change in a positive direction, so youth literacy in Bangladesh is much higher than adult literacy and female youth literacy is actually higher than male youth literacy. Of course, there’s also a correlation between child labor and lack of education, so yes, that gives me hope. I don’t even memorize such global numbers though, because I see them as very unsure.
Newsbud: How does it make you feel when you go to Bangladesh? Is it a mixture of work and pleasure, or just one?
Kari Jensen: No, it’s definitely for work, but even if it’s work, it’s just so different than teaching or doing research here or in Norway, so although it never really feels like vacation, it feels different and it gives me a lot of flexibility. A good change, I would say. However, you ask how does it make me feel. Last time we went, which was two years ago, it was the first time that I did not feel comfortable in Bangladesh, and that was because of the political situation, which was very tense at the moment. We were very unlucky, we were there for exactly those three months when there was a traffic blockade instilled by the political opposition.
The government had refused the main opposition party to have a national gathering. They wanted to gather to commemorate that it was one year since they had walked out of the parliamentary election in protest because they saw what the governing party was doing as killing democracy, because they refused to instill a transition government, like a neutral caretaker government, which is usually what’s happened in Bangladesh during the time of the elections, so they have a supposedly neutral caretaker government leading up to an election, in order to avoid the usual corruption. The political party in power refused to do so, and therefore, the election was boycotted by the main opposition party. They wanted to commemorate one year since killing democracy day, and they were refused to get the permission to have such a national gathering, and therefore declared a transportation blockade, and more complicated than that was they also apparently paid people to make homemade bombs which they would just throw at random people who did not follow their transportation blockade.
In the daily news on TV, we would see hospitals filling up with people who were burned terribly, and according to mainstream media in Bangladesh more than a hundred people were killed in the span of two or three weeks. Things like that don’t get international media coverage, you don’t really hear anything from Bangladesh unless maybe if there’s an election, or if a hundred
thousand or at least some tens of thousands of people die in a flood or a cyclone, or if hundreds die in a clothing factory -- then Bangladesh is in the world news, but otherwise… I was discussing with colleagues back in the US, “We haven’t heard anything,” they said. We would hear bombs go off at night, but there were also bombs going off anytime, any part of the day, and we didn’t want to risk our lives. We pretty much spent our days inside at home. I’ve been thinking about it a lot afterwards, that we could probably have done a little more, been a bit more courageous. At least I did get to still do my research with people in households that I would just visit within the different neighborhoods we stayed in.
Our plan was to travel to Dublar Char, and to travel to several places within rural areas where former child domestic workers who are now married with kids are living so that I could do a “ten years after” kind of interview follow-up with several young women who I had interviewed when they were teenage girls working in private homes in Dhaka ten years earlier. Several people warned us from travelling, so we decided not to take the risk. Dhaka is very stressful, very polluted, overpopulated but coming out to the rural areas is always a pleasure! So we were sorry to miss out on that. People are overall very nice in Bangladesh though; friendly, very curious to get to know foreigners because there are not very many foreigners there, and the few foreigners who are there often don’t mingle with the locals much, because they stay in the embassy areas. That’s not what I do when I go there, I spend my days with middle-class and low-income people.
Newsbud: That sounds like a hazardous experience with the bombings. Was it resolved when you left?
Kari Jensen: No, it was not resolved. Actually when we arrived in Bangladesh, the worst part had not started. There was a hartal - general strike - the day we arrived, and that was declared in advance, so we were aware of it, so we actually got help from a contact in the military, to greet us at the airport and escort us to his home so we could stay there for the first night, he would also escort us to the place we were going to stay the next day. When we left Bangladesh almost three months later, the situation had still not calmed down. It was the same thing, we were lucky we got the same military escort also back to the airport. A few weeks later, gradually, it became sorted out, so yes, just bad timing!
Newsbud: Do you there’s a reason for the lack of media coverage - is it entertainment value, or maybe freelance journalists are not as present in Bangladesh?
Kari Jensen: I think it’s a combination of those factors. I think too many journalists are in the field for sensational stories, but even then… I’m just very frustrated with the media overall. Even National Public Radio, I have listened a lot to NPR over the years, and I feel like they are becoming more and more sanitized, kind of wanting to please everybody, afraid to step on anyone’s toes, because ‘after all, we need their donations to our radio station’ kind of thing. Foundations and private donors, private people. I still prefer listening to NPR over, let’s say, watching CNN. Those entertainment news channels are just, I don’t know, I can’t stand it. I wish we had more news coverage like Democracy Now.
Newsbud: You should check out Newsbud! Human trafficking and sex trafficking. How do you explain human and sex trafficking to people who aren’t familiar or acquainted with the subject?
Kari Jensen: : I recently did, and I look forward to reading more!
Newsbud: Human trafficking and sex trafficking. How do you explain human and sex trafficking to people who aren’t familiar or acquainted with the subject?
Kari Jensen: I say things like: “What are you supposed to do if you have nobody to help you? Are you going to starve to death or are you going to do something that you otherwise wouldn’t have done? It’s not like these children who are working don’t want to go to school. If you ask them, they are kind of puzzled by your question because of course they want to go to school, what kind of question is that? It’s like asking: Do you want an ice cream or not? But that’s not an option for many of them, it’s not an option. If it were an option, they would go to school. We just have to keep in mind that people do what they can to survive. Concerning human trafficking, people are often naive and gullible and they believe people who are well-dressed coming into their village saying ‘hey why don’t you come with me?’, ‘Hey why don’t you send your daughter with me, I have this really nice friend or relative in Dhaka who runs this successful restaurant and she can work there as a waitress and make tons of money and send money home and come home for the holidays’ and so forth. Many people actually believe such stories.
Also, I tell my students to not believe what the media is usually saying about trafficking, which is “Oh, so and so sold her daughter into bondage for $5! They don’t know the value of life, like how can they let their children go like that?! Evil people...” That’s not how it is, because what they do, I mean, most people in this world love their kids to death, but you know, often times if a recruiter comes and says, “Here’s an upfront payment, I see you’re in a desperate situation, let me give you some of her salary upfront, here you go, and you will get much more, you will get twice as much next month,” that’s what it is. It’s not like you’re selling your child, you’re letting your child go with somebody who you actually believe will make things better for your child and yourself.
Newsbud: Do you think that there are any accurate depictions in popular culture about what’s happening in South Asia? Are any movies that may be misrepresenting the truth, or have any actually impressed you? I enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire.
Kari Jensen:
Since you mentioned Slumdog Millionaire; I don’t mind about following social norms and being politically correct and all of that, so I don’t mind saying that I liked that film. It reminded me a lot of my own fieldwork in the slums of Dhaka as a student at the University of Oslo. I was walking around in different slums for several months and interviewed people in more than a hundred households, seeing their life right in front of my eyes. Not only that, but the kids being blinded or maimed to go begging in the streets for the mafia or whatever. I’ve seen that too; I’ve not seen the actual process of branding them, but I’ve seen cases of children begging in the streets where you think to yourself, I wonder whether that was really an accident or whether that was done on purpose to make money. I’ve certainly heard that that’s happened in Bangladesh. I actually showed Slumdog Millionaire to some of my students when it was quite new and not many people had seen it yet. Some students were shocked. One student actually decided to major in geography and global studies because of it - she realized she had no clue about the world. There was a lot of entertainment in that film and the overall story was unrealistic, winning all of that money and all that, but the depictions of slum life and the communal tensions were accurate. Fortunately, communal tensions are not as prevalent in Bangladesh as in India, but they seem to be on the rise, and that’s very disturbing.
When it comes to depicting slum life, Katherine Boo also did a good job with her “Beyond the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity”. When I teach Geography of South Asia the students have to write an essay based on that book, and they seem to get a lot out of it. It’s a non-fiction novel, but it’s written in a way so that it has the feel of fiction. It’s just mind-boggling to know that all the stories in there are true. Boo spent over three years with her research subjects, and did a lot of research of public records and so on, too. Her depiction of corruption is quite powerful.
Another popular culture contribution about South Asia that I like is Arundhati Roy’s novel “The God of Small Things”. That novel is fiction, but still it depicts aspects of South Asian culture that seem authentic from what I can tell based on my own experiences there, and readings and documentaries. The post-colonial inferiority complex vis-a-vis the colonial master culture is something I’ve seen first hand in Bangladesh, and it’s so sad, and annoying at the same time. As an example, I can mention an incident where I and other members of the Norwegian Bangladesh Association were invited to an upper-class club in Chittagong, where there was a sign near the entrance mentioning what types of clothing that were not accepted in the club. It was basically a list of all traditionally Bangladeshi/Indian garments! So I asked one of the leaders of the club what they would do if Muhammad Yunus would come visit. Because, you know, Yunus always dresses in Bangladeshi-made kurtas. His answer was that Yunus is a VIP so for him they would of course make an exception! So, in other words, in order to be allowed to use your country’s traditional garments, you have to be a VIP! I wrote in the club’s guest book what I felt about those rules, but I doubt it had any effect. A rule like that may sound innocent and silly, but I think it’s important to consider what it says about the mindset of some very powerful people.
Roy also covers the caste system, which, well…the caste system may not feel important to all Hindus, but it has caused and still is causing serious problems for many people. For instance, a huge proportion of victims of contemporary slavery in South Asia are Dalits. Roy writes in such a way that you get drawn into the story. I’ve read the book several times and deeply recommend it.
Newsbud: What’s your life philosophy that guides you?
Kari Jensen: My life philosophy. Wow… hmmm… I’m just laughing because consciously I don’t really have a life philosophy. I’m just an eclectic person who feels very strongly that we need to be guided by our hearts much more and just do what is right and not think about making money. Yes, I need an income, but you still have to think about the higher principles that you want to be in place in your society, right? I would say I’m guided by trying to be nice, trying to be kind, focusing on social justice, trying to see the good in people, although sometimes that’s difficult. Trying to not be judgmental, that’s even more difficult.
It’s so crucial to have dialogues, not only dialogues but friendships across these terribly artificial boundaries we have built for humankind. It’s like, ‘you are Jewish’ or ‘you are Buddhist’ or ‘you are Christian’ or ‘you are this’ or that. It seems like many people feel they have the only right answer and everyone else is wrong and therefore don’t even deserve their time. I see that so much. I feel really lucky to have been brought up without a lot of such prejudices. I think it’s a combination of being lucky with teachers and my parents, relatively speaking.
Newsbud: What kind of social justice issues do you like to follow?
Kari Jensen: Poverty, powerlessness, vulnerability, all kinds of discrimination. I think that pretty much covers it.
Newsbud: Which countries do you think have the worst social justice problems?
Kari Jensen: We have so many grave social justice issues right here in our own country, although if you look at the poverty here, it’s of a very different character than the poverty in South Asia, where a lot of children are actually starving to death. We don’t hear about that either but they are. It’s terrible, the hunger and malnutrition in South Asia, including India and Bangladesh, where we hear that the gross domestic product is so fantastic, it’s been growing by five to six percent every year over the last twenty years, but still there’s terrible poverty and a big percentage of children don’t have enough food, and they are dying from easily preventable diseases due to their vulnerabilities caused by hunger. Also, many children are born with mental disabilities caused by the mother’s malnutrition during her pregnancy.
First, when you asked your question I was going to mention several other far-away places, with victims of wars and other serious situations that are instigated and perpetuated by powerful people’s hunger for profit, resources and even more power. But I want to get back to our problems right here in the US: Uma Narayan, who is a philosopher and feminist, puts it very clearly in her book titled “Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism”. She compared data from India and the US: we like to focus on those kinds of exotic domestic violence things we find in India, such as staged kitchen fires, where young brides get maimed or killed because the groom and his family are pressuring them for more dowry and so on. Uma Narayan compared numbers of such killings by domestic violence in India to killings by domestic violence in the U.S., and percentage-wise they were the same! So, as a woman, you are as likely to be killed by an intimate partner or other household member here in the US as in India. It’s just that here, women are basically killed by guns, and there, they are killed by other methods. I try to keep that in mind; it’s so easy to see the thorn in the other person’s eyes and not your own.
*For more of Professor Jensen’s work, check out her website.
# # # #Erik Moshe is a Newsbud journalist. He lives in Northern Virginia and is currently studying writing and rhetoric at George Mason University. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 2009-2013 and he can be contacted at emoshe@gmu.edu.
NOTES
[1] Bandyopadhyay, K. (2016, August 01). Civilisation in Sunderbans traced to Mauryan era - Times of India. Retrieved May 18, 2017, from http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Civilisation-in-Sunderb…
[2] Blagbrough, J. (2008, April 07). Child Domestic Labour: A Modern Form of Slavery. Retrieved May 18, 2017, from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1099-0860.2008.00149.x/abs…
[3] Bales, K. (2016, January 14). How Hunger for Shrimp and Slavery Destroy Mangroves [Excerpt]. Retrieved May 18, 2017, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-hunger-for-shrimp-and-sl…
[4] http://www.ilo.org/dhaka/Areasofwork/informal-economy/lang--en/index.htm
[5] http://www.ilo.org/dhaka/Areasofwork/child-labour/lang--en/index.htm
[6] Ahmed, S. Health consequences of child labour in Bangladesh. Demographic research. (01/01/2014), 30 p. 111 - 150.
[7] Majumdar, Samir. Slavery in India. Alive, Mar 2015, Issue 389, pp. 56-58.
[8] Huebler, F. (2006). Child Labour and School Attendance in Developing Countries: Empirical Evidence from National Household Surveys. PhD Thesis. New York: New School University, New School for Social Research.
[9] Atkinson-Sheppard, S. (2015). The gangs of Bangladesh: Exploring organized crime, street gangs and 'illicit child labourers in Dhaka. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 16(2), 233-249.