Children of Other Worlds: Exploitation in the Global Market

More than 40,000 children die daily in the developing world from avoidable sickness and disease. Tens of millions of children labour in factories, mines, mills and sweatshops, or scavenge for a living on city streets and dumps. In the so-called developed world, children's lives are similarly blighted by drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse and violence. Children of the rich are unhealthily obsessed with consumerist desires while children of the poor suffer from lack of opportunity. The global market is responsible for both of these ills.In Children of Other Worlds Jeremy Seabrook examines the international exploitation of children and exposes the hypocrisy, piety and moral blindness that have informed so much of the debate in the West on the rights of the child. Seabrook insists that the whole question of protecting children's rights, North and South, must take into consideration the structural abuses of humanity that are inherent in globalization. He addresses the key question of whether the West can turn its 'benevolent' attention to the evils of child labour in the rest of the world without first understanding that gross forms of poverty anywhere are part of the same global problem.

Jeremy Seabrook is a researcher and writer. He is the author of The Refuge and the Fortress: Britain and the Flight from Tyranny 1933 - 2008 (2008), Consuming Cultures: Globalization and Local Lives (2006), Travels in the Skin Trade (Pluto, 2001) and Cities (Pluto, 2007).