Life Interrupted: A stolen freedom

By Nisha Ganasen

In conjunction with World Day Against Child Labour, Taylor’s Psych Society organized an insightful and enlightening webinar on 24 June.

The society’s goal is to inspire all Taylor’s students and members to engage, empower and support each other while strengthening unity and balancing the students’ life academically and non-academically by conducting a variety of events, workshops, and activities.

Throughout this Life Interrupted series, they have successfully held six webinars including A Stolen Freedom webinar.

Brendon Ren Jie, the president of Taylor’s Psych Society explained that they conducted their sixth webinar about child labour because the issue is very prevalent but there’s low awareness about it in Malaysia.

Through the webinar participants can gain knowledge on how a child is suffering mentally and physically by being used for labour.

The organisation had been planning and preparing the event’s activities for three months.

They had invited three speakers to discuss the importance of projecting the rights of the children worldwide.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Anindita Dasgupta, the Head of School of Liberal Arts & Sciences in the opening address said,“Childhood is a gift that needs to be cherished and enjoyed by every single human being because it is the precious time of life to create unforgettable memories and experiences, which will shape the child’s future.”

Then the floor was given to Jodelen Mitra, a technical officer in the International Labour Organisation Malaysia (ILO).

Jodelen shared that 160 million children have been labourers worldwide in 2020 and 9.24 million children in Malaysia have been laborers in 2020.

ILO and UNICEF had been gathering the information on child labour worldwide and in Malaysia for past two weeks and found out that this had increased compared to 2019.

The Covid 19 crisis has push millions of vulnerable children into child labour

(Source: theguardian)

“Considering the global commitment to end child labour by 2025, this 160 million is more than seventeen times total population of all children in Malaysia last year. That is how concerning the issue is,” said Jodelen.

She also shared on recently United Nations article mentioning that globally child labor has ascended for the first time in 20 years, with one in 10 children working worldwide and millions more at risk due to Covid-19.

The second speaker Sam Jeng Mun, a Clinical Psychologist and Senior Lecturer at Taylor’s University explained that children who are suffering as child labour will potentially be affected by serious mental health issues.

Child labour is normally associated with a higher prevalence rate of mental and behavioral issues.

“Normally society will label them as ‘naughty’ or ‘having attitude problems’, but the problem is being a child labourer they tend to have low self-esteem, low self-efficacy and feelings of hopelessness had pressured them to look at the world in different perspective, which eventually makes them to behave in a particular way,” she said.

She also shared that those traumatic events do shape their brain’s function, hence as they grow older these children are often in survival mode and tend to shut down their higher reasoning area of their brain which leads them to react in an emotional rather than in a logical manner.

Evelyn Soong, a clinical psychologist and Co-founder of MPS Psychological service, was the last speaker of the day who spoke of the plight of refugee children.

For future events you can follow their official website; Facebook, Instagram page.