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 well-known journalist and writer. He is a frequent contributor to, amongst others, New Society, New Statesman, the Guardian and the Independent. and the the author of Notes from Another India (Pluto Press, 1994), Victims of Development (Verso, 1994), Travels in the Skin Trade (revised edition, Pluto, April 2001) and co-author (with Trevor Blackwell) of The Revolt Against Change (Vintage, 1994). He has written widely on aspects of social injustice, from housing to workers in the sex trade.