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This chapter deals with child domestic labour, focusing on detailed evidence from such countries as Peru, Togo, Tanzania, and the Philippines. Many employers of child domestic workers are cruel or highly exploitative, and unlike many child labourers, child domestic workers start work at a very young age. The hidden nature of the work makes interventions difficult, and the chapter argues that many of these interventions should be targeted at employers, requiring them to improve the conditions under which children work. In particular, employers should allow children access to education, recreation, and contact with their peers. The impact of family poverty is significant in driving children into this kind of work, often serving wider family needs. The growth of the middle classes in hitherto very poor countries has led to increased demand for cheap servants. This demand is often highly gendered, with an emphasis on girls, who are seen culturally as more expendable, fulfilling roles culturally sanctioned as ‘women's work’.

This chapter examines one aspect of child trafficking: fostering. It considers the practice of fostering in the West African context, and the extent to which fostering overlaps with the phenomenon of child domestic work, which is very extensive in many cities of West Africa. The chapter argues that current child-labour policies and interventions, which focus primarily on the nature of the work those children undertake, fail to properly take into account the nature of domestic work. This work, often undertaken under the guise of ‘fosterage’, frequently but not necessarily through kinship networks, is a common cultural phenomenon. Failure to understand how this operates and overlaps with child domestic work more generally reinforces the exclusion and exploitation faced by African child domestic workers. Traffickers can take advantage of this system to place children in exploitative situations, for example. Because children then lack supportive networks, they can be open to horrific abuse. Unlike most other forms of child slavery, there is yet no convention explicitly targeted towards child domestic labour.

This chapter discusses child slavery in South Asia and South East Asia, focusing on the Philippines. It examines structural factors driving the existence of child slavery, and shows that child slavery is facilitated not by a lack of legislation – laws banning child labour do exist in the Philippines, for example – but by weak political will and, in many instances, poor governance or ineffectual implementation by those charged with acting on anti-slavery laws and policies. The chapter notes that internal migration and migration to other countries – the Philippines being a prominent exporter of labour – are of such a scale that child labour is seen as an almost ‘normal’ process; with agents willing to manipulate, deceive, and coerce young people, tens of thousands find themselves in situations of debt bondage or being sexually exploited (or both). It looks at the initiatives of the Visayan Forum Foundation to fight for the rights of child domestic workers in the Philippines.