The important change today is that domestic work by children is becoming commercialized. Increasingly it is not a family arrangement designed to suit the child's interests, to impart skills or a sense of responsibility, but the outcome of a financial transaction in which the traded commodity is the child's labour. Many more youngsters now work in households which are not related to their own. And whatever the intention to be kind and caring, the real reason children are engaged is that they are cheaper and more malleable than adults. The child has no say, no control over conditions of service, often no access to his or her earnings, no privacy, no freedom, no opportunity to go to school, no social interaction with peers, and sees her or his parents very rarely.
Isolation often causes acute psychological stress even where there is no physical abuse.
One of the most important ways of helping child domestic workers, in the view of those running projects for them, is to give them a place where they may meet others, create relationships with adults who care, find a non-servant identity, step out of the mental prison into which they have become confined. And, of course, to persuade their employers to let them go to such a place. Meanwhile, attitudinal invisibility to-wards child domestic servitude remains a major obstacle to reducing the practice. Perhaps it helps to publish agonizing stories of gross abuse. Perhaps attitudes will eventually yield to 'shock-horror' tactics.