Peer-reviewed article
Invisible Victims, Visible Crimes: Child Labour and Organized Criminality in India and Mexico
Sahil SK, Priyanka PG ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study compares child labour and its connection to organized criminality in India and Mexico. It shows that children exploited through labour are often treated as informal workers or offenders rather than recognized as victims of organized crime. The research argues that weak legal enforcement, fragmented welfare services, and institutional gaps leave exploited children invisible despite formal legal protections. The authors propose that rights-based social work and integrated systems are needed to properly protect these children.
Key points
- Child labour in India and Mexico intersects with forced labour, trafficking, bonded work, and criminalized survival practices
- Children remain institutionally invisible when categorized as informal workers, offenders, migrants or dependents rather than as rights-bearing victims
- Weak labour inspection, fragmented welfare provision, and unequal access to rehabilitation perpetuate exploitation
- Formal legal commitments to child protection exist but are inadequately implemented under conditions of socio-economic vulnerability and migration
- Integrated prevention, identification, protection, prosecution, trauma-informed rehabilitation and reintegration are needed
Limitations
This is a comparative legal and socio-legal analysis rather than an empirical study with quantitative data on prevalence or outcomes. The document does not provide specific statistics on numbers of affected children or measurable impacts of particular interventions.
Abstract
Abstract Child labour remains a persistent human rights violation in India and Mexico, yet its relationship with organized criminality is frequently obscured by explanations that reduce children’s exploitation to poverty, informality, or household survival. This article adopts a mixed socio-legal comparative design to examine how the exploitative child labour intersects with forced labour, trafficking, bonded and coercive work, street-based exploitation, illicit economies, and criminalized survival practices. Based on child-rights norms, socio-legal scholarship, comparative legal analysis, and the perspectives of rights-based social work, the study examines the operation of legal prohibitions and institutional child protection frameworks under conditions of socio-economic vulnerability, migration, weak labour inspection, fragmented welfare provision, and unequal access to rehabilitation. The India-Mexico comparison shows that, although the two states have formal legal commitments to child protection, children exploited through labour often remain institutionally invisible when treated as informal workers, offenders, migrants or dependents instead of rights-bearing victims of organized exploitation. The article has made contributions to the scholarship of human rights and social work by re-framing child labour as a socio-legal and organized violation of rights that require integrated prevention, identification, protection, prosecution, trauma-informed rehabilitation, and reintegration. It posits that the rights-based social work is critical in the transformation of visible crimes to responsible systems of child protection.