Peer-reviewed article

Textile Design as Social Advocacy: A Practice-Based Study of Child Labour and Child Abuse in Ghana

Philomena Obu · 1 Jan 2026

Abstract

Child labour, child abuse, and mental-health disorders remain among the most pressing social challenges confronting children and adolescents globally.International organisations consistently report high prevalence rates of exploitation, neglect, and psychosocial distress, particularly in low-income regions and informal economic sectors (International Labour Organization [ILO], 2021; UNICEF, 2021; World Health Organization [WHO], 2022).In Ghana, rapid urbanisation, household poverty, educational inequities, and entrenched social norms have intensified children's vulnerability to hazardous labour, domestic abuse, and untreated psychological trauma.Policy frameworks such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and Sustainable Development Goal Target 8.7 stress the elimination of child labour and the promotion of child well-being, yet public awareness and behavioural change remain uneven.Conventional advocacy strategies often privilege legal discourse, statistical reporting, and mass-media campaigns.While indispensable, such approaches may fail to communicate affectively or culturally with diverse communities whose experiences of trauma are embedded in everyday practices rather than formal documentation.Across African societies, textiles historically function as communicative artefacts by encoding social status, mourning, protest, spiritual symbolism, and collective memory.Cloth patterns, colour schemes, and fabrication techniques frequently operate as narrative systems through which communities articulate values and social critique.Contemporary textile practice extends this tradition into activist and educational domains, positioning fabric not merely as decorative material but as a visual language capable of conveying suffering, resilience, and social injustice.This article situates textile design within the methodological field of arts-based research (ABR), which recognises creative production as a legitimate form of scholarly inquiry and social intervention (Leavy, 2015).Through a practice-based investigation undertaken in Ghana, the study explores how digital and printed textile works may visually articulate experiences of child labour, child abuse, and depression while generating public dialogue and empathy in exhibition contexts.In this context, creative and