"Showing child labor the ‘red card’", 08 Dec 2014

Most of us seem to take it for granted when we see young children on street corners begging or selling chewing gum or cheap trinkets. We usually adopt some personal moral standard who we give money to and who we won’t...

I don’t know how many exploited children are in Saudi Arabia begging, selling stuff or washing your car’s windshield for a few riyals, but the number I heard thrown around lately is nearly 2 million countrywide, which includes Saudis and expats. I confess I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the issue until a group of young female college students from Umm Al-Qura University came to our university campus recently with a supervisor to recruit volunteers to help reduce child labor...

The young women’s efforts are part of a larger “red card against child labor” campaign organized by the National Family Safety Program of the National Guard along with the Women’s World Summit Foundation and the World Trade Organization (WTO). A four-day awareness campaign was held last month, and the students’ efforts at King Saud university campuses in Jeddah and other cities are an extension of that campaign...