MEDIA VOICES FOR CHILDREN PRESENTS A quarterly newsletter
2019/20 Vol. 1
MVC ADVOCACY
Media Voices for Children has been doing work in the child labor sector for over two decades. Here is an update on the issue as it stands today PAGE FOUR
BENEATH THE BARCODE
Beneath the Barcode, our photographic exhibition on child labor, opened at Art Space in Key West this year PAGE SIX
CHILDREN OF BAL ASHRAM
Media Voices’ newest documentary has been accepted into multiple festivals already. It continues to change minds and hearts PAGE EIGHT
FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER Robin Romano was an American documentary filmmaker, producer, photojournalist, human rights activist and the co-founder of Media Voices for Children.
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KENYAN SCHOOLHOUSE
The Kenyan Schoolhouse Program was chosen as charity of the year by Operation Days Work. Read about this partnership and the success of the program PAGE TEN
GRADUATES
Meet some Kenyan Schoolhouse graduates who have gone on to attend competitive universities PAGE ELEVEN
GET INVOLVED
Donate or become a monthly sponsor by visiting our website www.mediavoicesforchildren.org for more information
MVC FEATURED AUTHORS Len Morris Petra Lent McCarron Melissa Knowles
ART DIRECTOR AND EDITOR Morgan Keyt
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MINING IN INDIA All over the world, children ages 5-17 are involved in the mining of minerals like cobalt and graphite. These are conflict minerals that go into all of our electronics, including the electronics we, as an organization, use to do this work. It is important to remember the labor that goes into the production of everything we use. Learn more about this issue on PAGE SIX.
ADVOCACY FOR OVER A DECADE we have worked with the 38 partner organizations of the Child Labor Coalition in Washington, D.C. to prioritize the needs of children in the U.S. and abroad. Here are some of the major issues we’re currently working on. Due Diligence in Supply Chains: Most of the electronics we use and much of the jewelry we wear is comprised of materials mined by child labor or forced labor. The Netherlands has just passed the most extensive law to date requiring companies to plan and publish their efforts to outlaw the practice. France, Germany and California are considering their own versions. The U.S. has a federal ban on the importation of products made by children but it goes largely unenforced.
The Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety is a bill in the U.S. House that would extend safety protections to the estimated half million children who pick and handle our food. It is currently without a Senate co-sponsor and has only 23 Democratic endorsements. These children are at high risk for trafficking and should be given the same safety protections as all children in our workforce. They also are at high risk for pesticide exposure. Those of us who care about what we eat and drink and feed our children should lobby our political representatives to outlaw pesticides that make their way into our food supply. The Ban Pesticides Act of 2019 includes a particularly lethal pesticide, chlorpyrifos. The Bill has 113 co-sponsors and
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ADVOCACY
Media Voices has helped lobby NY Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban the use of these poisons in NY State. The Federal ban against their use was overturned by the Trump EPA and will likely go to court.
our Cape and Islands representatives on a bill outlawing early marriage in our state. Both have signed on and we’re hopeful this 350-year oversight will be corrected soon.
The hard science of illness caused by children handling tobacco was established over a decade ago and yet we still have thousands of children, many younger than sixteen, working in largely southern states handling a crop that can and will shorten their lives.
Finally, with cuts to housing, schools, student loans, food, health care, child care and virtually every other form of family and community assistance before Congress, discussion of financial transactions taxes has resurfaced as a way to raise sizable amounts of funding for these purposes. Many presidential candidates have a plan to implement the financial transactions tax. Here is an area to go big! When Flint gets clean water, children get to drink it.
Only Virginia’s legislature has made an effort to regulate child labor in tobacco and it failed. This practice should be outlawed and there is a bill in Congress to do so. The Children Don’t Belong on Tobacco Farms Act should be passed on a voice vote. It’s that simple. Estimates vary, but even the U.S. Government concedes now that over 9000 children have been separated from their parents at our southern border, many held in prison-like conditions for months. Hundreds of these children were orphaned when their parent(s) were deported. These actions are gross violations of multiple international human rights treaties signed, and often written by the United States. The practice is wholly immoral and actually violates our existing national immigration law. Opposing this practice is central to who we are as people. The last decade has seen a reduction of child labor around the world by over 100 million kids. This is awesome news. Tens of millions of girls are in school for the first time. But in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, child labor in the cocoa sector has actually increased by 1.6 million children while Hershey and Nestlé, two of the most profitable companies, refuse to discuss their responsibilities. Studies and publicly funded efforts and protocols have failed for 20 years. Perhaps a boycott of all things Hershey and Nestlé is in order. Growers need guaranteed payments sufficient to send their children to school. International companies make hundreds of billions of dollars off the backs of these child slaves.
-LEN MORRIS
70 million children work in hazardous child labor that compromises the health, safety, and basic human dignity of a child
46%
The majority of child laborers work in the agriculture sector.
71%
Early marriage of children under 12 has finally been outlawed in New Jersey and Delaware. In Massachusetts, we worked to gain the endorsement from
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Beneath the Barcode
BEKASI LANDFILL IN INDONESIA BENEATH THE BARCODE, our photographic exhibition on child labor, opened at ArtSpace in Key West this year. It then ran for a month at both the West Tisbury and Vineyard Haven libraries. Len Morris, Melissa Knowles and Petra Lent McCarron went into the Charter School on Martha’s Vineyard last spring and taught an educational unit on child labor using some of the photographs mounted on foam core, so that the children could handle them and pass them around. Beneath the Barcode has so far been exhibited in schools in Florida, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. The interactive action kit accompanying the exhibition was especially popular with the kids who always want to know what they can do to combat child labor. The action kit was also recently distributed at a Child Labor Coalition conference and can be viewed on our website. Our plans for Beneath the Barcode include teaching units at high schools and expanding to schools in Connecticut and New York, including possibly the Museum of Art and Culture at the New Rochelle high school. -MELISSA KNOWLES
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BENEATH THE BARCODE
ACCESS OUR FULL INTERACTIVE BENEATH THE BARCODE ACTION KIT https://www.mediavoicesforchildren.org/btb/
NAYARIT, MEXICO
PAKISTAN
ORISSA, INDIA
RIFT VALLEY, KENYA
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CHILDREN OF BAL ASHRAM
MVC
CLICK THE PHOTO ABOVE TO VIEW THE LATEST TRAILER FOR CHILDREN OF BAL ASHRAM
CHILDREN OF BAL ASHRAM, the latest documentary produced by Media Voices for Children, is being shown at film festivals this year. The film premiered at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival in Chilmark last March, and both dates were sold out. We have always had a very positive and enthusiastic reception for our work on Martha’s Vineyard, years of involving the community in the fight against child labor and exploitation has resulted in an audience of stakeholders.
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CONNECT WITH US!
In April, Len Morris flew out to the Arizona International Film Festival, where Children of Bal Ashram garnered a Special Jury Award for Inspirational Filmmaking. In addition to the festival, Len went into a magnet school in Tucson and showed trailers from our films and talked about the work against child labor with 200 7-12K kids. The kids were excited and inspired by the talk. Their teachers forwarded some sample reactions: “When making a documentary, it’s not about whether or not you want to tell the story that you have in your head, It’s about capturing the facts and using that to tell your story. The second thing that I learned today was…You have to be prepared to earn the trust of whom you are going to film and take it seriously.”
“I learned that there is child labor happening in the U.S. I was actually quite surprised by this, because I’ve never heard of it happening here. I also learned that there are lots of kids who can’t go to school because of this. I knew that they were being made to work, but didn’t think that because of this they couldn’t go to school and get an education.”
In mid-September, Len flew out to Wisconsin, where Children of Bal Ashram was selected as the Opening Night film at the Freeland Film Festival. Sponsored by the anti-trafficking organization Freeland, which is active in Asia, Africa and the Americas, this film festival is a perfect fit for Children of Bal Ashram. Len was also very excited to have been able to visit the Green Lake High School to talk to the kids about fighting child labor. In October, we are thrilled to be showing the film at the inaugural Morehouse College Human Rights Festival. Children of Bal Ashram is in consideration at fourteen additional US and international film festivals, so stay tuned for more news this fall. -PETRA LENT MCCARRON
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KENYAN SCHOOLHOUSE
WE WERE DELIGHTED when the Media Voices for Children direct action project, Kenyan Schoolhouse, was chosen as the Operation Day’s Work Charity for 2019 – for the second time! Operation Days Work is in nine schools in five states and the kids do the selecting, voting and fund-raising themselves. We are so honored that the students chose to put their efforts towards the further education of former child laborers in Kenya. Their hard work is paying off – several graduates of the Kenyan Schoolhouse program have qualified for scholarships to university by excelling in the extremely difficult Kenyan national exams. These students are gaining independence, doing what they’re good at and want to do, supported on their way by American kids who understand the importance of giving someone a chance – we can’t think of a better way to raise up the world. -PETRA LENT MCCARRON
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MEDIA VOICES FOR CHILDREN DEPENDS ON DONATIONS FROM OUR SUPPORTERS. MAKE A ONE TIME DONATION OR BECOME A MONTHLY SPONSOR.
KENYAN SCHOOLHOUSE ALUMS
STEPHANIE PENDO
At the Kenya Institute of Social Work and Community Development going for a degree in Community Development
KENYAN SCHOOLHOUSE
TRINAH VALLARY a t t e nsecretarial d i n g Ja r a m o g i work O g i n - at Studying g a DAMARIS Un i v e r s i t y p u r sOTIEuing a Kajiado College
DAMARIS OTIENO a t t e n d i n g Ja r a m o g i O g i n -
DANCUN OTIENO
Studying Automotive Engineering at Kabete Technical Polytechnic
Attending Jaramogi gDAMARIS a Un i v e r s i t y Oginga p uOTIErsuing a University pursuing a degree in Education
NICHOLAS SONGOI Studying IT at Maseno University
DAMARIS OTIEVO LU ME 1 / 1 1
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