Examples Of Child Labor In Huckleberry Finn

According to The Borgen Project, a nonprofit organization working to fight against poverty and slavery, “an estimated 29.8 million people live in modern slavery today.” If slavery was prohibited with President Abraham Lincoln 's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, how come more than one hundred fifty years later it is still evident in society? The novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain showcases the struggle of an enslaved African American in the 1840s fighting for his freedom. He is constantly worried about if he is going to be caught running away, something with which a white person does not have to be concerned with. A current New York Times article, “America’s Child-Marriage Problem” by Fraidy Reiss, highlights a type of

The last type of enslavement, most prominent in the United States is child labor. Children as young as the age of twelve are taught to be grown ups when they still have a childhood ahead of them. They are denied a proper education because they spend so much of their time working. Most of this child labor are seen in tobacco fields. It is common for children to work “for 50 to 60 hours a week in sweltering heat, often without shade or adequate drinking water. They plant seedlings, weed tobacco fields and work among tall tobacco plants” (Becker 2). This sounds exactly like the conditions in cotton plantations that African American slaves had to endure earlier in history. It is perfectly legal to work those strenuous hours if there is a parent’s consent. Why would anyone want that for their child? Parents should be wanting their children to enjoy their youth while it lasts, as well as ensure that they obtain a proper education. The “top tobacco companies have much weaker child labor policies, and some, including Reynolds American, the second-largest tobacco company in the United States...have none at all” (3). Parents, as well as the government obviously does not care about the effects working in tobacco fields has on minors. Another example of child enslavement is evident in the novel, Huckleberry Finn, when the main character’s father, Pap controls Huck by forcing him to do work and locking him up. Huck is forced against his will when he says, “once he locked me in and was gone three days. It was dreadful lonesome” (Twain 22). This form of enslavement is child abuse. In 2017, if a thirteen-year-old boy is left in a house locked up and alone, the guardian would be sent to jail. Jim, who is declared an actual slave in this novel is also forced against his will to work for the Phelps 's. At the end of the novel, he is declared free and his masters did not tell him (242). The Phelps’s were forcing labor out of him even though he was not a slave any longer. Forced labor