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Education, Age and Gender: Critical Factors in Determining Interventions for Child Brick Workers in Pakistan and Afghanistan

Working in factories fashioning bricks by hand seems the epitome of hazardous child labor. Yet, efforts to remove children from this work have shown little success; impoverished families balance the value of their children’s contribution against the risks they see. Unfortunately, psychosocial impact...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Pellenq, Catherine, Lima, Laurent, Gunn, Susan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9180764/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35682380
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19116797
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author Pellenq, Catherine
Lima, Laurent
Gunn, Susan
author_facet Pellenq, Catherine
Lima, Laurent
Gunn, Susan
author_sort Pellenq, Catherine
collection PubMed
description Working in factories fashioning bricks by hand seems the epitome of hazardous child labor. Yet, efforts to remove children from this work have shown little success; impoverished families balance the value of their children’s contribution against the risks they see. Unfortunately, psychosocial impacts are often not visible, and are rarely taken into consideration when designing interventions. A comprehensive occupational health study of children working in brick factories included a module on psychosocial risks and impacts. This analysis reports on the Pakistan and Afghanistan portion of the study which was administered to 450 child brick workers and 486 controls, aged 11–17. Factorial ANOVAs confirmed that working in brick factories was the strongest predictor of respondent’s psychosocial health. However, they also identified subgroups of children that escape this prediction. Older girls, for example, actually felt better when working, compared with staying at home. Schooling had positive associations, especially in younger boys and adolescent girls. In fact, the results of this study showed that those who are at greatest psychosocial risk were girls who do not go to school. These findings underscore the importance of assessing psychosocial impacts and tailoring policy and interventions to specific gender and age categories of young workers.
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spelling pubmed-91807642022-06-10 Education, Age and Gender: Critical Factors in Determining Interventions for Child Brick Workers in Pakistan and Afghanistan Pellenq, Catherine Lima, Laurent Gunn, Susan Int J Environ Res Public Health Article Working in factories fashioning bricks by hand seems the epitome of hazardous child labor. Yet, efforts to remove children from this work have shown little success; impoverished families balance the value of their children’s contribution against the risks they see. Unfortunately, psychosocial impacts are often not visible, and are rarely taken into consideration when designing interventions. A comprehensive occupational health study of children working in brick factories included a module on psychosocial risks and impacts. This analysis reports on the Pakistan and Afghanistan portion of the study which was administered to 450 child brick workers and 486 controls, aged 11–17. Factorial ANOVAs confirmed that working in brick factories was the strongest predictor of respondent’s psychosocial health. However, they also identified subgroups of children that escape this prediction. Older girls, for example, actually felt better when working, compared with staying at home. Schooling had positive associations, especially in younger boys and adolescent girls. In fact, the results of this study showed that those who are at greatest psychosocial risk were girls who do not go to school. These findings underscore the importance of assessing psychosocial impacts and tailoring policy and interventions to specific gender and age categories of young workers. MDPI 2022-06-02 /pmc/articles/PMC9180764/ /pubmed/35682380 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19116797 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Pellenq, Catherine
Lima, Laurent
Gunn, Susan
Education, Age and Gender: Critical Factors in Determining Interventions for Child Brick Workers in Pakistan and Afghanistan
title Education, Age and Gender: Critical Factors in Determining Interventions for Child Brick Workers in Pakistan and Afghanistan
title_full Education, Age and Gender: Critical Factors in Determining Interventions for Child Brick Workers in Pakistan and Afghanistan
title_fullStr Education, Age and Gender: Critical Factors in Determining Interventions for Child Brick Workers in Pakistan and Afghanistan
title_full_unstemmed Education, Age and Gender: Critical Factors in Determining Interventions for Child Brick Workers in Pakistan and Afghanistan
title_short Education, Age and Gender: Critical Factors in Determining Interventions for Child Brick Workers in Pakistan and Afghanistan
title_sort education, age and gender: critical factors in determining interventions for child brick workers in pakistan and afghanistan
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9180764/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35682380
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19116797
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