The question of impoverished children living in third world countries is often investigated by non-governmental organizations such as World Vision and UNICEF, but rarely does the public have the chance to see hard physical evidence of child exploitation violations.
Julia Dean, a Venice-based photographer, journalist and social change leader, is the director of JD&A (Julia Dean and Associates), a group of photographers that is collaborating to document the lives of working children worldwide.
JD&A began the project, titled Child Labor and the Global Village: Photography for Social Change, three years ago after conducting a workshop in Malibu. It is the largest collaborative photo project organized around a single issue since the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA’s) campaign in the 1930s.
Dean’s group hopes the photographs will have a cathartic effect on viewers, and that the pictures will help explain the intricate set of social circumstances that can lead to a society that allows its children to pick through garbage heaps in Cambodia and elsewhere. There are an estimated 250 million child workers between the ages of 5 and 14 working part-time and full-time around the world.
“Our mission is to educate people about the complexity of the issue, to move people to emotion and to motivate people to action,” explains Dean.
Eleven photojournalists are scheduled to document the living situations of children in countries from India, Burundi and Cambodia to the United States.
Eventually, the photographs and written stories will be published in a book. The organization hopes the public will be motivated to contact humanitarian groups and become active in helping to improve the conditions of child labor.
So far, only five photojournalists from the organization have traveled abroad to take pictures because it takes two to three years to research a location and raise the necessary funds. Each photographer spends close to a month in the selected country.
Sarah Bachman, who will author the project’s book, thinks that photographs are powerful because they can show a side of an individual’s humanity that cannot be adequately described by words alone.
“People respond to individuals,” said Bachmann.
Even as a writer, Bachmann agrees the photographs are a key to increasing child labor violations awareness.
Photographer Clarence Williams, a Pulitzer Prize winner for the Los Angeles Times, photographed child soldiers in Burundi, a country that lies next to Rwanda. For 10 years, Hutu rebels have been fighting a civil war against the controlling Tutsi army, and both sides have run out of legal-age men to fight.
As the conflict continues, young Burundi teenagers lie and join the army to escape poverty. The country’s economic woes, a direct result of its ethnic problems, lead young boys toward the prospect of a stable command, with a pair of army boots serving as a major incentive to join.
“At one training camp, every boy (that we talked to) had been born in 1980,” said Williams. “That meant they were old enough to be soldiers, legally. Of course, it wasn’t true, but that’s what they said.”
Burundis carry no proof of birth; instead, they apply for papers when they need to show proof of age. Through the lens of his camera, Williams captured a striking picture of a proud young man standing above a crowd of soldiers, clutching a homemade gun.
The new army members face an uncertain future. With only three weeks of training before they are sent to fight, they lack experience and can fall victim to a simple land mine.
Judy Walgren, also a Pulitzer Prize winner, documented the story of Nepali girls who were trafficked across the border into India, to the brothels of Bombay, where they were forced into prostitution.
She photographed a woman who was sold to a brothel owner when she was 11 years old, and who was tortured with hot water until she agreed to work.
“The villages in Nepal are unworldly, they don’t understand evil,” said Walgren.
Families send their daughters away, expecting they will be house servants in affluent Indian homes. Instead, the young girls become instruments of income for brothel owners, developing HIV and AIDS after having sex up to 35 times per day.
In Nepal and India, poverty is a major contributor to the state of affairs. “The only thing the families have to sell is their daughter,” explained Walgren.
Child labor violations are not as remote as they may seem. The United States, and California specifically, has labor problems in the agricultural sector. In Napa Valley, migrant workers, which include young teenagers, will sleep in cars at night because they are not paid enough to secure temporary lodging.
Education is fundamental to the eradication of child labor violations. JD&A hopes to help the world’s poor learn how to provide other services so they have alternatives to their current lifestyles.
“Education is a very big issue within child labor,” said Bachmann.
Grade school teachers in Northern California have begun to implement a number of Dean’s photos into their curriculum to help educate children about the problems experienced by peers outside of their fields of experience.
The Photography for Social Change Exhibit is ongoing. More information can be obtained by calling 310.821.0909 or visiting the studio at 3111 Ocean Front Walk, Suite 104, in Marina del Rey.