The article claims:
> In 1993 Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act, which would have banned imports from countries employing children. In response, that fall Bangladeshi garment companies let go approximately 50,000 children. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, "It is widely thought that most of them have found employment in other garment factories, in smaller, unregistered subcontracting garment workshops, or in other sectors."2 That makes the introduction of the bill seem simply ineffective. The Department of Labor is sugarcoating the situation. Paul Krugman summarizes what happened more bluntly: "The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets—and that a significant number were forced into prostitution."3
And footnote 3 cites the Paul Krugman Op-Ed[1] and a UNICEF report that 404s. Looking at Wayback[2] I think it linked to the 1997 State of the World’s Children[3] report. The Krugman Op-Ed makes the same Oxfam claim with no further citation. But the UNICEF report does say:
> The Harkin Bill, which was introduced into the US Congress in 1992 with the laudable aim of prohibition the import of products made by children under 15, is a case in point. As of September 1996, the Bill has yet to find its way onto the statute books. But the mere threat of such a measure panicked the garment industry of Bangladesh, 60 per cent of whose products - some $900 million - were exported to the US in 1994. Child workers, most of them girls, were summarily dismissed from the garment factories. A study sponsored by international organizations took the unusual step of tracing some of these children to see what happened to them after their dismissal. Some were found working in more hazardous situations, in unsafe work-shops where they were paid less, or in prostitution.
I’m unable to find the Oxfam study I assume both Krugman and UNICEF are referring to but I do think it’s of note that UNICEF writes “some” children worked in prostitution, while Krugman writes “a significant number”.
Regardless, for all the fear-mongering CATO neglects to mention two key pieces of information about the bill: (1) it never became a law and (2) it’s introduction did ultimately have a positive impact. Continuing from the UNICEF report:
> This, then, was a classic case of good motives gone wrong. However, not all was lost. A ground-breaking agreement was reached to protect the affected children (Panel 12).
For some reason the report currently on UNICEF’s website is incomplete and doesn’t contain panel 12 but the report is available in full here[4] and panel 12 is on page 60. It describes an agreement between UNICEF, the International Labor Organization, and Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers providing for:
> • the removal of all under-age workers — those below 14 — within a period of four months;
> • no further hiring of under-age children;
> • the placement of those children removed from the garment factories in appropriate educational programmes with a monthly stipend;
> • the offer of the children’s jobs to qualified adult family members.
The panel concludes with “The jury is still out on the long-term effectiveness of the Memorandum of Understanding...” which prompted me to search the outcome of this agreement. I found an ILO follow-up report[5] where I (finally!) got some actual data beyond “some” and “a significant number” being forced into prostitution. I’d encourage you to go read the whole of Section 7.1 Hazardous Work yourself but here’s the relevant part:
> The vast majority of children reported that retrenchment has an adverse impact on them, six per cent said that they were forced into hazardous work20, such as brick chipping, pushing carts and rickshaw pulling. Of this six per cent, more boys than girls reported going into hazardous work. Similarly, children who did not go to a MOU school or who dropped out were more likely to go into hazardous work. Of those girls surveyed who did not enrol in a MOU school or who dropped out, around 1 per cent stated they were aware that young female workers had been forced into prostitution after being retrenched. This is the only indication in the studies, given the cultural norms of this society, of the number of children going into sex work.22 It reveals that the number of ex-garment worker children going into hazardous work, including sex work, is probably much less than was portrayed in the media.
> 20. Note that the only allusion to sex work is drawn from UNICEF, op.cit, table 3.14, p. 56.
So all of that is to say that it seems to me that the “prohibiting child labor results in child prostitution” argument is “a significant” overstatement.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/22/opinion/reckonings-hearts...
[2]http://web.archive.org/web/20180620180656/https://www.unicef...
[3]https://www.unicef.org/media/84761/file/SOWC-1997.pdf
[4]https://www.youthpolicy.org/library/wp-content/uploads/libra...
[5]https://www.ilo.org/ipecinfo/product/download.do?type=docume...