HOUSE-HELP: DISGUISED MODERN SLAVERY RUINING THE LIVES OF TEENAGERS

By: Mukhtar Garba Kobi (08185113672)

Children are precious gift that comfort the hearts of parents, they deserved to enjoy each stage of their lives from infanthood, childhood up to adulthood. Hence, some people are blessed with children while others are desperately praying daily to have even one but God did not grant them, it is not because they are sinful but their time is yet to come. Some parents are naturally unconcern about their children while others have the heart to uplift them their lives but do not have the means. The outweighing incidences of rapes and assaults to young girls and boys living in rich-men’s houses in the name of payable works are unarguably increasing; thereby teenagers’ constitutional freedoms, dignities and privileges are denied, abused as well as violated.

Parents in Nigeria are professionals in sheer verbal discussions about potentials and talents of their kids not harnessing them whereas Ghana, Ethiopia, Egypt and other African countries have turned similar potentials of theirs into realities. It was hardly in the past to see parents that neglect their parental responsibilities, but in our present generation, some parents are habitually lazy to the extent that they succumb to pushing their teenage children to houses of rich individuals to be doing house chores while their age mates are in schools. At times, such teenagers especially under-age girls are sexually abused, then threatened to be killed if they tell their parents or guardians; the cases always die down unheard and the abusers continue harassing other girls that fall in their traps without been punished.

Reasonably, poverty is one of the basic factors that necessitate parents to send their teenage children for house-helps; children from a family where father must go out struggle for hours before getting what to consume are easy to become victims of house-help, when those parents are some are sick, members there do not have any option than to rely on food gotten from houses where their daughters or sons are working. Negligence to parental responsibilities is the second factors for teenagers to engage in payable jobs, some lazy wives let seductively dressed maids be cleaning bedrooms while their husbands are still there; in that moment anything can happen. In other scenarios where wives are not either working or doing businesses and heads of families that go out early without giving kobo to wives make those and those heartless wives compel teenage children to work somewhere and get food in return.

Similarly, sudden death of both parents result to taking the deceased’s children to relatives homes, such orphans are end up not getting enough essentials of life like in their homes; they are commanded to work than their strengths, be resolved to working as house-helps; erranding to far places for the mistresses or their age mates. Furthermore, the old traditions in villages of sending male children far away to acquire religious knowledge without provisions like food, money for upkeep, etc make such children ultimately be washing undies in brothels or be working in houses in school free days in order to get a small amounts. Community leaders too are not helping the matter as they have right to stop the dastard act of child labour but they care not; limiting number of children to be born in each family by government in China was good initiative, as few children result to less spendings.

Suggestively, level of poverty need to be reduced by opening more avenues of employment or businesses so that jobless parents would have a means of income which at the end put an end to forcing teenagers to work. Relatives that embraced children of their deceased brothers and sisters should provide them with basic necessities of life and should treat them like theirs; this would make the children feel at home and house-help practice would be nowhere to be found or practiced. Also, when parents are sending children to far places for religious knowledge, they should be sending money to them so that they should not be begging or working as house-help for survival. Lastly, Governments, Human Commissions and activists need to be standing for the assaulted or abused children until abusers face the wrath of the law; doing this would indubitably end the molestations.