Every year on 12th June, when the world marks the fight against child labour, the same images return. A child carrying bricks at a kiln. A young boy bent over a machine at a sugar mill. A little girl is cleaning someone else’s home. These scenes are real, and they rightly deserve our outrage. Approximately 138 million children remain engaged in child labour worldwide. In Pakistan alone, millions remain out of school, many pushed into fields, workshops and domestic work.
But these images no longer show the whole picture. While these forms of exploitation must remain at the centre of public concern, a newer form is also quietly growing in places where inspectors, teachers and even parents may not think to look. Child labour has entered the digital age, and it does not always look like the way we expect it to. Now it is not just behind a factory gate. Sometimes it is behind a phone camera, a freelance account or a platform demanding more.
Pakistan’s Constitution promises the protection of a child from exploitative labour and envisions the right of free and compulsory education. Those promises, therefore, should not end where the internet begins.
As a matter of fact, no universal definition of digital child labour exists at present. However, the idea itself is not difficult to grasp. It arises when a child’s time, image or attention is used in online activities for financial gain, often with insufficient regard for the impact on the child’s education, rest, privacy or healthy development. Consider the child appearing daily on a family YouTube or TikTok channel. It may begin innocently enough, such as a birthday video, a toy review or a funny moment at home. But when the account gets monetised, when ads and sponsorships arrive, when the child is expected to perform because an audience is waiting, the line between entertainment and labour fades away. Consider also another teenager who is completing online gigs under an adult’s name, writing product descriptions, tagging images, and editing videos late into the night. Another child streams games for hours, chasing subscribers and brand attention. Since these children are not standing in a workshop, we often do not see them as workers. This is the very danger.
Digital work is easily dismissed as fun. Gaming can be fun. Making videos can be creative. Freelancing and helping your family are normal. The harder question is when a voluntary activity stops being truly voluntary. A child may enjoy recording videos or playing games. But when views, deadlines, sponsorships, expectations and platform rewards begin to shape that activity, play can quietly become pressure. Some scholars describe this blurred space as “playbour”, where play and labour begin feeding into each other. What matters is not only whether the child smiles on camera, but whether the child is free to refuse, to rest and to grow outside the demands of an audience.
The loss, therefore, is not just physical. A child may lose sleep, study time, privacy or the simple freedom to grow without being watched and measured. A video uploaded today may follow that child for years. A joke, a crying moment or a personal detail turned into content before the child is old enough to understand what consent means. In digital spaces, there is also a risk of harassment, grooming and emotional pressure. Children who become visible online are exposed to audiences they cannot control. Children doing digital work may face unfair pay, long hours and adult responsibilities without meaningful protection.
Our laws and enforcement systems were primarily built around physical workplaces. They do envision a factory, a kiln or a workshop, but are far less prepared for a smartphone that turns a child into content or an online gig platform that turns a minor into a hidden worker. Pakistan’s Constitution promises the protection of a child from exploitative labour and envisions the right of free and compulsory education. Those promises, therefore, should not end where the internet begins.
Countries have, in fact, started taking small steps to protect the interests of child influencers, such as their earnings and content. Pakistan can learn from such examples without copying them blindly. Our realities are different. Poverty, weak enforcement, millions of out-of-school children and a fast-growing digital economy require a response tailored to our own circumstances.
This, however, does not require panic. It requires a practical and honest conversation. Parents should ask whether a child’s online activity is still healthy or whether it has quietly become a job. Platforms must take age rules more seriously. Earnings made from a child’s image or work should be protected for that child, not absorbed into a family income stream. Schools, regulators and child protection bodies must start treating digital work as part of the child labour conversation, not as something that belongs to a separate modern world they have not yet figured out.
Technology itself is not an enemy. It is not something we want to exclude the children from. It can be a powerful tool for learning, creativity and self-expression, unimaginable just a generation ago. The purpose is to protect the natural innocence of a child from commercial exploitation by means of the Internet. While a child who carries bricks and a child generating revenue through a screen may live very different lives, the ethical question raised about each has considerable similarity. When adults profit from a child’s labour, image or time, what happens to that child’s education, privacy and future?
On this World Day Against Child Labour, we should continue to fight the menace of child labour in factories and fields. We must, however, also recognise that child labour is evolving. Increasingly enough, it is appearing on screens, hidden behind views, sponsorships and online earnings. If our understanding of child labour remains stuck in the industrial age, we risk overlooking a new generation of children whose work is taking place in plain sight.
The writer is a law student and an independent researcher. He writes on law, human rights and social issues. He can be reached at muhammadannas231 @gmail.com