Child Crusaders: The Literature of Global Childhood

The headline reads "Child's Death Stirs Another's Crusade" (Coleman B1). The article, which appeared in the Boston Globe in March 2001, is one of hundreds published since the mid-1990s in the American and Canadian press focusing on the figure of Pakistani youth activist Iqbal Masih. Born into an impoverished family, Masih worked as a debt-bonded laborer in the Pakistani carpet industry from the time he was a small child in the 1980s. After weaving carpets for six years, Masih heroically escaped his employers with the help of a nongovernmental organization, the Bonded Labor Liberation Front (BLLF). Not long after, working with the BLLF, the preadolescent Masih became an internationally renowned advocate for child workers. Eventually, in 1994, when he was twelve years old, he traveled to Boston to receive the Reebok Human Rights Youth in Action Award. Only five months later, he was killed under mysterious circumstances near his home in Muridke, Pakistan. Although there is controversy surrounding the cause of his death, it is often reported that he was murdered for speaking out against the powerful rug industry, "killed by people who wanted to silence a small voice who was a threat to huge profits" (Grow 2B).

Since his death, Masih has become the emblematic victim of global child oppression and a powerful model for a generation of "child crusaders." The Globe piece introduces one such "crusader," an American teenager, Elizabeth Bloomer, who was inspired at the age of twelve by the life and death of Masih "to passionately pursue the fight to end child labor abuses worldwide" (Coleman B1). Similarly, another piece describes the activism of fifteen-year-old Laura Hannant, who was also inspired by Masih: "She heard the story of Iqbal Masih, a Pakistani boy who campaigned against child labor, and was killed to stop him from speaking out. His story made her a crusader for children's rights" (Kienlen C3). Yet another article, printed in the Los Angeles Times in 1997, describes the work of Craig Kielburger, a Canadian teenager who "launched his crusade [against global child labor] after learning the story of Iqbal Masih, a Pakistani boy who was sold into bondage as a carpet weaver at age 4" (Helfand B3). Keilburger has become the most prominent child "crusader" motivated by Masih. At the age of twelve, Kielburger founded an organization called Free the Children, which raises money to fight child labor in developing countries. In the organization's first five years, it grew to include more than 100,000 children, with chapters in twenty countries.

How can we account for this fascination with Iqbal Masih? Not only are children in industrialized countries drawn to the figure of Masih, but adults in these nations are enthralled both by Masih and by the spectacle of child crusaders. What cultural need or fantasy does Masih's story satisfy? How does he fit into contemporary understandings of the nature of childhood and the problem of global child labor? In this article, I will draw upon representations of Iqbal Masih's story in order to explore contemporary fantasies about global child labor in the media and in literature produced for children. To provide a context for this discussion, I will situate his rise to iconic status within the recent history of the international movement to eradicate child labor. I will also locate his story amidst the emergent genre of multiculturalist children's literature. Whereas this latter genre tends to celebrate children's connection to their ethnic communities, the story of Iqbal Masih—along with its attendant rhetoric of crusading—tacitly reasserts the idea of a universal childhood. Masih's story thus points to the limits of the discourse of multiculturalism. I will contend that the rise of Masih as an iconic martyr of child labor reveals our ongoing investment in the idea of childhood as sacred and as the source of the possible regeneration of adult society. ¹

I. The Movement for International Children's Rights

The development of the mythology of Iqbal Masih must...