Invisible Victims, Visible Crimes: Child Labour and Organized Criminality in India and Mexico
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.
Sahil SK, Priyanka PG