A twitter campaign aimed at raising awareness for the growing problem of child labour has managed to gain worldwide traction. The campaign, launched by Reliance General Insurance and children’s rights NGO Child Rights and You (CRY) uses the hashtag #DONT_EMPLOY_LITTLE_ONES and urges twitter users to tweet whatever they ordinarily would, but using only all caps. And hence avoiding the usage of ‘little ones’.
There are 5.7 million Indian child workers aged between five and 17, out of 168 million globally, according to the International Labour Organization. More than half the Indian children work in agriculture, toiling in cotton, sugarcane and rice paddy fields, and over a quarter in manufacturing, embroidering clothes, weaving carpets or making matchsticks. Children also work in restaurants and hotels, and in middle-class homes.
The campaign was created by digital agency OgilvyOne Worldwide. Burzin Mehta, Group Creative Director, OgilvyOne said, “We are becoming increasingly immune to an issue that surrounds us all the time. Whether it’s a child who serves us tea at a tapri stall or delivers our daily newspaper. The ask of us was to raise awareness around the problem and we felt this very simple thought could probably do more. By getting people to engage with the message, it turns every tweet in all caps into an active statement of intent against child labour.”