The exploitation of children: past and present.

Since the beginning of history, children throughout the world have been exploited by adults. They continue to be brutally exploited in many countries around the world. The exploitation of children was also common practice in the United States. From the late 1600s until the American Civil War,

countless African American children worked inhumanely as slaves on Southern plantations. And from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s until the passage of the first national child labor laws in 1916, over two million children at any one time worked from dawn until dusk under appalling conditions in the sweat shops, factories and mines of America. Their ranks included orphaned or abandoned children and the children of poor European, Asian and Hispanic immigrants.

Today, an estimated 250 million children throughout the world are forced to work, many as slaves, prostitutes and menial laborers. And in the U.S., despite stringent child labor laws and compulsory education regulations, the young are still being exploited for their labor by fast-food chains and other industries.

The following literature for young adults offers an up-to-date, in-depth look at the history and present-day status of child labor and exploitation in the U.S. and around the world.

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Cheap Raw Material: How Our Youngest Workers are Exploited and Abused. Milton Meltzer. A survey of the history of child labor from ancient times to the present and the ongoing exploitation of young U.S. workers today. Concludes with a discussion of what government and the educational community can do to re-establish education as a priority and to improve the working conditions and compensation for young workers.

Child Labor and Sweatshops (At Issue series). Mary E. Williams, ed. Seventeen essays by a variety of writers, including human-rights activists, journalists, and teachers, present a variety of viewpoints on child labor around the world. Includes bibliographies and an annotated list of relevant organizations.

Free the Children: A Young Man Fights Against Child Labor and Proves That Children Can Change the World. Craig Kielburger & Kevin Major. In 1995, at the age of 12, Craig Kielburger read about the murder of Iqbal Masih, a Pakistani boy who had been forced into slavery and later spoke out against child bondage. Spurred to action, Craig formed a group called Free the Children in his native Canada to advocate for children's rights, and he toured cities in South Asia along with a human rights worker to see the plight of child workers there. This inspiring book, written when Craig was 15, tells of his activism and what be witnessed on his trip.