LEBANON- Up to 70 percent of Syrian refugee children are being forced into child labor in Lebanon, the anti-slavery Freedom Fund group said in a report Tuesday. The report also pointed to the prevalence of Syrian refugee girls being forced into child marriage and sex slavery as their families fail to cope with economic burdens.
“Slavery and human trafficking are illegal and abhorrent. They should never be condoned or accepted as ‘the norm,’” Nick Grono, CEO of the Freedom Fund said in a press release.
“This report is a call for decisive action. Without significant and determined intervention, the situation will only worsen for many hundreds of thousands of refugees at risk of extreme exploitation.”
The report, called Slavery and Exploitation of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, estimates that 85 percent of all child workers in the country are Syrians. There are almost 600,000 Syrian refugee children in Lebanon, according to the United Nations.
In the eastern Bekaa Valley on the border with Syria, the report added, all Syrian children are put to work, with many being exposed to hazardous conditions with pay as little as US$1 a day.
An aid worker told the anti-slavery organization that an employer from a farm or a factory heads to “the mayor … and asks for laborers, who then selects who he will send to work from the camp he is running. By practice, each tent should give one laborer … The mayor can take anyone from eight years and up.”
The report also warned that child marriage is common in Lebanon among Syrian communities where families cannot afford to care for their future and see marriage as their only coping strategy.
“Child marriage is done as a coping strategy. But not only for financial security; also because they perceive the threat of their daughter getting raped if single. The threat comes from living in an environment of abandoned buildings and in tented settlements,” the report said, citing a Beirut-based journalist.
from Lebanese NGOs, Syrian organisations, INGOs in Lebanon, U.N. bodies and Lebanese government officials conducted during January and February 2016, as well as recent research and vulnerability assessments.
“We can no longer say we did not know. The exploitation of Syrian refugees in Lebanon is endemic and I encourage the Lebanese government and international community to adopt the recommendations in the report,” said Grono.
This content was originally published by teleSUR.
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