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Child slavery means that children have to work under slavery conditions. Even though-slavery has been Abolitionism, there are still many children with this fate. Many of them live in developing countries. The enslavement of children can be traced back through history. Despite the fact that slavery has been abolished, children continue to be enslaved and trafficked. Particularly in developing countries, this is a problem. Like other forms of modern slavery, child slavery is also often linked to poverty: Families "sell" their children, because they are poor, and often do not see other options. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about a man who bought a slave woman, just to bear children, which he could then sell as slaves.
The duties that child slaves were responsible for performing are disputed among scholars. A few representations of the lives that slave children led portrayed them as, "virtually divorced from the plantation economy until they were old enough to be employed as field hands, thereby emphasizing the carefree nature of childhood for a part of the slave population that was temporarily spared forced labor". This view also stated that if children were asked to perform any duties at all, it was to perform light household chores, such as being "organized into 'trash gangs' and made to collect refuse about the estate". Opposing scholars argued that slave children had their youth stolen from them, and were forced to start performing adult duties at a very young age. Some say that children were forced to perform field labor duties as young as the age of six. It is argued that in some areas children were put to "regular work in the antebellum South" and it "was a time when slaves began to learn work routines, but also work discipline and related punishment".
A degree of self-possession was present in some degree to adults, but "children retained the legal incapacities of dependence even after they had become productive members of households". It was reported by scholars that, "this distinctive status shaped children's standing within familial households and left them subject to forced apprenticeship, even after emancipation". There were slave owners who did not want child slaves or women who were pregnant for fear that the child would have "took up too much of her time".
The conditions of slavery for pregnant women varied regionally. In most cases, women worked in the fields up until childbirth performing small tasks. "four weeks appears to have been the average confinement period, or 'lying-in period', for antebellum slave women following delivery in the South as a whole". Slaveholders in northern Virginia, however, usually only permitted an average lying-in period of about "two weeks before ordering new mothers back to work". The responsibility of raising and tending to the children then became the task of other children and older elderly slaves. In most institutions of slavery throughout the world, the children of slaves became the property of the owner. This created a constant supply of people to perform labor. This was the case with, for example, and American slaves. In other cases, children were enslaved as if they were adults. Usually, the mother's status determined if the child was a slave, but some local laws varied the decision to the father. In many cultures, slaves could earn their freedom through hard work and buying their own freedom.
In Ukraine, a survey conducted by the non-governmental organization (NGO) La Strada-Ukraine in 2001–2003, based on a sample of 106 women being trafficked out of Ukraine found that 3% were under 18, and the US State Department reported in 2004 that incidents of minors being trafficked was increasing. In Thailand, NGOs have estimated that up to a third of prostitutes are children under 18, many trafficked from outside Thailand.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography estimates that about one million children in Asia alone are victims of the sex trade.
Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Save the Children, World Vision and the British Red Cross have called for an immediate halt to adoptions of Haitian children not approved before the earthquake, warning that child traffickers could exploit the lack of regulation. An Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesman said that child enslavement and trafficking was "an existing problem and could easily emerge as a serious issue over the coming weeks and months". Call for halt to Haiti adoptions over traffickers, The Times, January 23, 2010.
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