Child Labour and Delinquent Behaviour in Nigeria: A Risk Factor Analysis

The thrust of this paper is to analyse the issues surrounding child labour and delinquent behaviour, linking the core of the problem to parents’ financial status, cultural practices and parental literacy. The article presents that child labour is a widespread global abnormality, wherein underage children are illegally engaged in undignified, dangerous, and debasing economic activities without considering the implication on their safety, security and dreams. These children are unduly engaged or employed to work for longer hours; usually at dumpsites, industrial layouts, farmlands, and in other settings; as servants, labourers and scavengers. A situation that has a significant socio-psychological effect, which in extreme cases results in delinquent behaviour. Child labour invariably creates a feeling of false maturity syndrome, as well as, exposes children to negative habits in the course of interacting with people of low-virtue, who often in the guise of patronizing their wares indoctrinate them into their unsavoury ways of life. As Nigeria battles the increasing rate of child labour and the attendant juvenile delinquency, it has become imperative that qualitative education should be made free, compulsory, relevant, attractive, and available for all, irrespective of their tribe, gender, religion, and geographical location. If child education is guaranteed, it, therefore, follows that parents would not see the need to give out their children as baby sitters and house helps to their relatives who initially promise to give the child good education whereas such relatives eventually use the innocent child in multiple labour such as domestic laundry and street hawking.