Due to abject poverty of their family, these children have been forced to do worst form of labor and are denied of their basic rights.
Even the officials serving several law enforcing agencies, and rights organizations have been keeping small children from districts adjoining the capital as domestic helps. [break]
Coordinating with the police, Children-Women in Social Service and Human Rights (CWISH), a non-governmental Organization, rescued three of such children from Ghattekulo area of the capital on Wednesday.
The organization, which advocates rights of children and women, said that it has rescued Puja Thapa, 14 from Yamuna´s Simkhada´s home at Ghattekulo.
Simkhada is Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) of the Armed Police Force (AFP).
Simkhada did not allowed Thapa to go to school and forced her to do all household chores.
"She was even restricted to come out of the house. It is a kind of bonded labor," Pradeep Dongol, a child right officer at CWISH, said, adding, "We have liberated her."
Likewise, the organization said that it has freed an 11-years-old boy from Shree Prasad Prashain´s home at Ghattekulo.
Prasain is a retired police officer. The boy had been serving Prashain´s family for last three years but was denied his rights to attend a school. Dongol said that Prashain used to give him a monthly wage.
Similarly, the organization has rescued a nine-year-old boy of Taplejung from Devendra Rawat´s home at Ghattekulo.
Rawat is deputy director of Deprox Nepal, a micro finance project.
He was also not sending the child to school. "When we asked, why he did not sent the boy to school, he told us that the child may forget the way back home," he added. Dongol said that Rawat´s own son is a doctor and all other children are educated.
The organization claimed that dozens of small children have been working as domestic helps at the houses of bureaucrats despite the fact that Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 2000, prohibits government officials from keeping underage domestic helps.
Dongol said that the families with both spouses employed usually do not send domestic helps to school. Some admit the child workers in schools for formality as they cannot attend school regularly.
Several studies have shown that such children have been denied even their basic rights. In some instances, child domestic helps have become victims of sexual abuses. Dongol said that most of the children rescued in the past complained that they suffered excessive torture at their master´s hands.
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