Because the Global March Against Child Labour happened to pass through Phnom Penh when 10-year-old Sok Chandara was killed as he scavenged among garbage, his death did not go unnoticed.

This boy, trying to support his widowed mother, was no different to 20 per cent of children from his nation. Across the developing world, such tragedies happen daily. But the shame of the adult world is not that 250 million minors are forced to earn a living when they are three and four years old. Even in relatively well-off societies, children have always lent a hand in the fields or helped with the care of younger siblings. The child labour which the organisers of the march are campaigning against is the type which is little more than slavery.

Girls chained in windowless huts in remote areas of Pakistan, weaving carpets; undernourished boys sewing footballs for children in the affluent West; the factories in Egypt where nine-year-olds carry hods of bricks on their heads under the gaze of overseers who whip the child who stumbles. This is the daily lot of countless thousands of youngsters in developing countries. Without the labour of the youngest generation, many poor families could not survive. But no matter how harsh their lives, at least those children are not cut off from their families entirely. It is the growing number of children sold into sexual slavery which gives by far the most chilling picture of modern society. They are exploited as much by perverts from the rich West, as they are by their own kind.