Küresel perspektiften Türkiye'de çocuk emeği: İstanbul'da çalışan çocuklar üzerine bir vaka çalışması

This study focuses on child labour in Turkey, particularly in Istanbul, by situatingthis phenomenon in the scholarly debates about child labour as a context-dependentand multifaceted global social reality. The thesis, drawing upon secondary sourcesand empirical fieldwork, explores the incidence of child labour in urban Turkey andinvestigates its underlying reasons and socio-economic background. The study ispremised on three main objectives: First, it explores the phenomenon of urban childlabour in Turkey from a broad scholarly perspective based on both theoretical andempirical approaches. Second, the thesis claims that neither a purely culturalapproach nor a narrow economic explanation is sufficient to provide acomprehensive understanding of the incidence of child labour. Third, the studycriticises existing policy proposals for eradicating child labour for disregarding thestructural reasons behind this phenomenon.The thesis is based on a field study conducted in Istanbul using non-participantobservation and in-depth interviews with the stakeholders of the issue and withchildren who work in closed environments and in the streets. The major finding ofthe field study is that the incidence of child labour in Turkey is based on diversesocio-economic and cultural factors. Children work under hazardous conditionsboth in closed environments and in the streets. The main protection mechanisms forworking children are informal social networks rather than an institutional and legalframework. Both at home and in the workplace, working children are victimized byunequal power relations based on gender and generation, and due to social tolerancetowards corporal punishment. But at the same time, the feminization of the labourforce and conversion of children into family breadwinners indicate that traditionalfamily values are challenged by the necessities of the market economy.