Age Assessment of Child Laborers

Abstract

A shortage of labor amongst maritime industries has led to the hiring of child laborers. In most cases, there is no official document showing the status of a person, which causes problems in health, occupational hygiene and safety at work because the nature of the work and the work environment are likely to be harmful to children. Thailand was classified as Tier 3 in the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report. This caused a huge national problem because USA and the European Union claimed it to be a trade barrier. There are various methods and principles of age assessment by physicians, but most assess for illness or abnormal development. Each method has deviations from the chronological age and there is no national standard. Due to this issue, the Ministry of Justice has cooperated with the Ministry of Public Health to launch a guideline for identifying individuals whose age is less than 18 years. This article provides various methods of evaluating child age, which can be utilized to identify child laborers. In Thailand, there are guidelines for evaluating age with radiography of the left wrist bone by a radiologist, using the methods of Greulich and Pyle and Tanner-Whitehouse. Although both methods can estimate the age to be close to the actual age, there are also deviations from many factors such as nutritional status, hormones, socioeconomic conditions. Therefore, it is advisable to use other information from experts in many fields, including dentists, psychologists, as evidence to help assess the age of a child.