violence against children WORLD REPORT ON - CRIN

266Violence against children in places of workThis may not be in the child’s best interestsif social stigma and rejection are likely to bethe outcome; or the child will be again sent towork, or re-trafficked. In the case of girls rescuedfrom the sex industry, there is likely to beheavy stigma from families and communitiesto whom they are returned, and they may belooked upon as carriers of HIV. 175 Cases of retrafficking,for example, from Nepal to India,are common.Improved data collectionMuch progress has been made since the mid-1990s in developing methodologies to obtainreliable data on child labour. A major initiativeto improve understanding on the hidden,illegal and often criminal abuse of childrenin the workplace has been through the jointdevelopment by ILO and UNICEF of a RapidAssessment methodology. 176NGOs have played a major role in uncoveringsome of the worst abuses of children in the workplace.For example, Anti-Slavery Internationalled initiatives on children in domestic labour,initially focusing on simple research methodologiesfor local NGOs to use as a basis foradvocacy. 177 Subsequently, an active network ofpractitioner NGOs working in the field of childdomestic labour was developed, and throughthis, consultations were conducted with childdomestics which shed much insight into theviolence and abuse they suffered. Since this is anotoriously difficult group of children to reach,much can be learned from these experiencesabout how to contact invisible child workersand collect data with and from them. 178Much more is known about street children; asthey are visible and accessible, children workingin streets and public spaces have been studiedin a number of settings, and even thoughnumbers are usually estimates, a considerablebody of information about them now exists.Some street child programmes now includecomponents for monitoring, verification andtracking. 179 Far fewer extended surveys havebeen conducted into bonded child labour inSouth Asia, or into traditional forms of slaveryor forced labour affecting children inAfrica and Latin America. Those studies thatexist have mostly been conducted by NGOsand, with some notable exceptions, are relativelysmall-scale. Very little is known aboutviolence within a family work setting (mostlysmall-scale agriculture), which is where mostchildren work.Action research and monitoringEffort has recently been invested in researchmethodologies that aid in designing interventionsor monitoring the impact of existinginterventions in order to improve them. Forexample, action research on boys and girlsinvolved in drug trafficking has been conductedin Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, 180 andBrazil, with an emphasis on collecting dataabout these children that is of direct use indeveloping interventions. One study by IPECon drug use and trafficking in Estonia illustratedthe difficulties of obtaining informationon the experiences of children in extreme situations,concluding: “Violence is one of the fewtopics which young drug users do not want todiscuss with strangers. It seems that the topic