 There are still
about 300,000 children ages 6 to 14 who are performing economic activities
in Turkey (children participating in household chores are excluded), and
the 2012 survey reveals that there has been no decline in this number when
compared with 2006. The percentage of working children in Turkey's
corresponding child population was almost 6 percent in 2006, and it still
remains at the same level in the 2012 survey. Let me note that boys
constitute the majority with 185,000 workers; the number of girls working
is about 108,000.
The question we
should ask, quite naturally, is why the ever-so-praised economic growth of
recent years did not have any positive effect on the number of working
children. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. When we look at
the details of the survey, a more nuanced picture appears. Majority of
these working children (68 percent) work in Agriculture and 76 percent has
the status of “unpaid family workers”. Considering the dominance of the family mode of production in
Turkish agriculture, these high percentages are not surprising.
Nevertheless, what does stick out is the increase of working children in
agriculture. In 2006 there were 152,000 children in the fields. This number
rose to 200,000 in 2012, while the number of children working in industry
and services declined from 113,000 to 92,000.
In fact, the
increase observed in agriculture is not a surprise since the agricultural
employment of adults (ages 15+) has increased remarkably during the
2008-2011 period, almost by 800,000. The real surprise in this increase
still constitutes a semi-puzzle. I am saying “semi-puzzle” because we
hopefully have partly explained the unexpected increase in child
agricultural workers through the impact of rising agricultural prices
during the considered period (see the Center For Economic and Social
Research's [BETAM] working paper “Why is Agricultural Employment Increasing
in Turkey?” April 2012). However, further investigation is necessary in
order to uncover the unexplained part.
The evolution of the
number of working children went in opposite directions regarding the
urban-rural dichotomy. The number of working children in urban areas
decreased from 120,000 to 79,000, and the percentage of them went from 1.6
percent to 1 percent. But in rural areas, the number of working children
reached 214,000 and the percentage of them rose from 4.4 percent to 5.6
percent. So we can easily assert that the working children phenomenon in Turkey is
largely an agricultural-rural one. This does not mean, of course, that the
problem should be taken lightly, but we should admit that as long as family
production is alive in Turkish agriculture there will always be children in
the fields.
The picture is more
nuanced, as I predicted, but what about the schooling of these working
children? From 2006 to 2012 the child population of Turkey
(ages 6-14) remained almost fixed at a little less than 11.5 million, while
the percentage of children going to school increased from 92 to 97 percent.
The percentage for urban and rural areas, respectively, increased in the
same period from 94 to 98 percent and from 89 to 96 percent. So, it should
be underlined that school attendance has increased in rural areas more rapidly
than in urban areas. The number of working children not going to school in
rural areas declined from 60,000 to 37,000. Obviously, the increase in the
number of working children in rural areas did not prevent them from
pursuing their education. Conciliating work and school could have an
adverse effect on the academic performance of these working children, but
the evidence for this possibility is lacking at the moment.
To sum up, the fact
that the number of working children did not decline during high growth
years (including the crisis period) does not indicate impoverishment;
families do not send children to work because they have been empowered. On
the contrary, most of these children are from families in the agriculture
business -- an increasingly attractive sector -- and they simply help their
parents.
The increase of the
number of working children is limited to rural areas, particularly to
agriculture. It appears that the increasing attraction of agriculture from
2008 to 2011 has dragged some number of children to the fields along with
their parents.
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