In New York, a new interactive street art campaign was launched earlier this week in order to raise awareness about child trafficking, exploitation, and labor. Some of the art pieces depict small children’s faces trapped in the mouth of a horrendous factory robot, being trampled by famous New York landmarks, and more.

Street Art for Mankind (SAM), an artistic movement meant to fight child trafficking, has commissioned nine pieces across New York City, many being splattered on places like billboards or small murals near popular bus stops. Since its creation in 2015, SAM has set up numerous successful campaigns including an Art Walk in Manhattan in 2019 where freedom murals told the stories of child labor and trafficking survivors.

This campaign, however, is different since it incorporates technology and helps passerby engage more. The pieces can be accompanied by a mobile application where augmented reality lets users hear experts explaining the real-life issues the mural is set to represent and the artists behind the work. App users are also introduced to a number of things they can do in order to take part in the fight against child trafficking.

Globally, around 150 million children are estimated to be engaged in child labor, with half being tasked with dangerous work in construction, agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. In January, the United Nations said urgen action was needed if its goal of ending child labor by 2025 was going to be met, also warning of the effects of COVID-19 on previous work. Progress toward declaring 2021 as the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labor still has a long way to go.

Academics around the world have actually criticized the U.N.’s goal to end child labor, calling it “impractical” and “out of touch.” Child poverty researcher Alula Pankhurst said that these efforts need to do better at contemplating many different sets of circumstances. Pankhurst coordinates Young Lives, a global study of childhood poverty that has followed 12,000 children over the course of 15 years. She has said that it’s important to “take into account different local realities and avoid blanket bans that can be detrimental to the wellbeing of children and endanger the survival of their families.”

In the United States specifically, the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs has estimated that there are approximately 500,000 child farmworkers in the country. Many of the children in this situation start working at age 8 and are not unfamiliar with 72-hour work weeks, roughly over 10 hours per day.

Agricultural work is uniquely dangerous thanks to the chemicals children are exposed to. These are different types of pesticides, all of which greatly increase their risk for cancer according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA has stated that children are three times more vulnerable to the pesticides’ carcinogenic effects than adults are.

The U.S. still has a long way to go in terms of prohibiting child labor under the law, seeing as the United States’ Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 makes few specifications. While it prohibits those under 14 from working the majority of industries and restricts hours to three or less on weekdays for 16-year-olds, these regulations don’t apply to agricultural labor. Farmworker children often tend to be migrant workers, seeing as they are arguably more susceptible to child labor as a whole.

“Street art is cross-generational, cross-cultural. It really attracts everybody. It’s such a great tool to raise awareness on these issues, because child labor and trafficking are issues people don’t necessarily want to hear about.”

Audrey Decker, Street Art for Making co-founder

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