Children of Chinese migrant workers alienated
Children of migrant workers are routinely denied basic health care and education because of the added cost to local government, a worker’s rights group has said. The news comes after China announced on Monday that 20 million migrant workers have now lost their jobs because of the recession.
Workers are now also growing angry at the alienation they and their children face, suggests a report from worker’s rights group China Labour Bulletin. Many migrant children have turned to crime and drugs because of their exclusion from society. Between 2000 and 2005, the proportion of crimes committed by juvenile migrants grew from 40 per cent to 70 per cent.
Lots of these children are left behind in the villages while their parents go away to work in the cities. Compared with other children, those left behind by migrant worker parents are more likely to be victims of crime and a significantly higher proportion suffers from psychological and behavioural problems caused by long-term separation from their parents.
In the cities, for those not left by their parents, many migrant workers’ children are forced into sub-standard schools. As their parents have to work excessively long hours in tough jobs leaving little or no time for their families, migrant children in cities develop psychological problems disturbingly similar to those left behind.
Until recently, even if rural migrant children could get into urban state schools, they could not take part in extracurricular activities or join social organisations, neither could they be nominated as ‘outstanding students,’said Aris Chan, who wrote the Labour Bulletin report. “This sent a clear signal to these children that they were inferior and outsiders,” she said.
It was only in the early 2000s that Beijing started to encourage local governments to recruit migrant children into the communist youth league. “However, little actual improvement has been seen, partly because financial difficulties have limited the ability of migrant children to participate in social activities,” said Ms Chan.
But there is other evidence of a two-tier system. Websites have sprung up with slogans condemning migrants and blogs are filled with messages boasting about the local culture.
Each year between five and seven million new workers from rural areas come to China's biggest cities looking for work. They join a migrant worker labour pool of about 130 million. Migrant workers’ salaries contribute about 40% of rural families' income, so losing jobs means they could face the loss of a bulk of their income.
SOS Children has been working in China since 1986 when the first children's community was built in Tianjin (also known as Tientsin), a large city about 100 km south east of Beijing. There are now nine SOS Children communities in China, which between them are home to more than 1000 children.
Written by Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children
Share: