Stolen Childhoods
Documentary (52 or 80 min.)

Stolen Childhoods is told primarily in the words of laboring children, who live on four different continents across the globe, but who share a common fate. It also hears the voices of their parents, people working daily to help them, policy makers and government officials.

Children are shown working in dumps, quarries, brick kilns, making charcoal, on fishing platforms, picking tobacco, coffee or vegetables, working in sweatshops, as domestics, making rugs, and selling their bodies on the street.

These children's stories fit in the broader context of the worldwide struggle against child labor. Stolen Childhoods provides an understanding of the causes of child labor, what it costs the global community, how it contributes to global insecurity and what it will take to eliminate it.

Shot in 7 countries; Brazil, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal and the United States, the film includes slave and bonded labor footage never seen before. It has framing interviews with US Senator Tom Harkin (the leading legislative advocate for global action to eliminate child labor) and includes human rights advocates for children; Bruce Harris, Pharis Harvey, Inderjit Khurana, Wangari Mathai and Kailash Satyarthi.

The story is not without hope. Best practice programs remove children from work and put them in school. These programs range from efforts to save migrant children from toxic exposure to pesticides, to Bolsa Escola, a model Brazilian educational subsidy, now in place in seven other countries, that reimburses families for wages lost when children go to school.

The effects of public policy, poverty, prejudice and multinational profit on the lives of our most helpless and exploited global work force are reflected in the words of the children. The stories of the children who have lost their childhoods and of the lucky former child laborers can teach us how to create a more equitable world.