تحليل جغرافي لظاهرة عَمالة الأطفال في مدينة كربلاء المقدسة

Ihsan Khudair Tayih Al Ma'mouri

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The current study is interested in shedding the light on the child labor phenomenon in Child Labor in Holy Kerbala City from a geographical side. It focused on knowing places of its spread and its spatial distribution among the three city sectors. These are the old city sector, Al Jazerah sector, and Al Haideriyah sector and in accord with the city administrative division. child labor is considered one of the dangerous phenomenon due to its negative traces on the children in specific and on the whole city community in general. Therefore, studying it is a must to stop at the most important factors and styles that participated in its spreading and pushed many children to the kids market in an earlier age.
The current study relied on the geographical analytic approach beside describin this phenomenon through a lot of procedures and approached ways. Due to the shortage of data and formal statistics about child labor and then relying on the field study represented mainly by a questionnaire form when the number of working children in holy Kerbala was counted by the age class ( 5 – 15) years old. Through the comprehensive field survey to all commercial markets and streets, industrial districts, and traffic intersection that those children work in who were about ( 509) working kids; this number was distributed between the male and female kids. Male labor children were 451 and 58 female labor children.
Based on this, the researcher designed a questionnaire form for this purpose in a way that suits the study plan which aimed at knowing the size of this phenomenon, its distribution, and differences among city sectors. In addition to knowing the demographic and social properties of the laboring children and knowing the influential factors in it and traces resulted from it. The study reached the following results:
1.There are many international, Arabic, and Iraqi agreements, laws, and legislations that emphasizes the children protection and never exploit them, but no one consider them and they are not applied in most countries including Iraq; the matter that led to negligence and trespass on the children rights.
2.Describing of the educational level of the laboring children’s fathers and mothers and spreading illiteracy among them especially among their mothers and this make them unaware of the early work dangers to the children. Thus, decreasing the educational level of laboring children’s families gas a negative impact on the child concerning his learning and his going to the work. Thus, whenever the level of laboring children’s families increased, the laboring children phenomenon decreased, and vice versa.
3.It was clarified that whenever the families number living in one house, number of the laboring children increased, and this belongs in turn to the increase of the requirements and the financial needs of these families.
4.The study stated that most laboring children living in rented houses, confiscated, or inherited from the house owners. There is a relation between house ownership and laboring children. So, whenever the child lives in a house that its ownership belongs to his family, his stress decreases from his family to go to the working market.
5.It was clarified that there were many influential factors affecting laboring children such as the economic factor which is regarded the first cause to spreading this phenomenon, as well as the social, demographic, and educational factors.
6.It was clear that the immigration factor has explicit impact on spreading laboring children phenomenon in holy city of Kerbala due to the last events happened in Iraq represented by ISIS entrance in 2014 when Kerbala became a shelter for many displaced families due to its religious and social status that helps to be a safe city as well availability of many working opportunities which encourage to attract man laboring hands.
7.It was discovered that laboring children has many traces; some of them are positives and others are negative, whereas the negative traces was dominant on the positive traces concerning the laboring children. The negative traces of the laboring children represented by the economic traces including the daily earning of the laboring children, the health traces represented by the wounds, burns, backache, and legs pain, the social traces represented by insults, beating, car turning over, police chase, and the educational traces represented by regret, sadness, and sorrow, all these factors have negative impact on the laboring children.
8. The study showed that the majority of the laboring children in holy Kerbala city do not legally work in this age due to their ignorance about their rights which were warranted by legislatives, laws, and agreements that were issued about their right