ABSTRACT
Turkey is among the OECD countries that have the highest child poverty rates, and the number of child labourer, although defined as illegal, is 900 thousand according to the outdated data of TURKSTAT 2013 . When the number of vulnerable children from Syria, with their temporary protection status, added to the existing conditions, child labour becomes one of the most vital issues in Turkey that needs to be solved. The basic principles that exist in childhood studies, especially “child’s rights”, “child well-being” and “child’s best interests” should serve as guidelines in the field of combating child labour, and also for research and literature. In this article, the academic publication on child labour that existed in Turkey after 2000 will be discussed as comprehensively as possible. Google Academic has been scanned in both Turkish and English with the keywords “child labour” and “Turkey”. The library’s source on the website of the Fişek Institute Working Children Foundation is included in the scan for post-2000 academic publications. In addition, research reports written for non-governmental organizations have been added. Using the NVIVO program, themes and fields are encoded and evaluated theoretically and methodologically by carefully reading the entire texts. The article elaborates on how studies in the field of child labour are handled within the framework of different disciplines and approaches, and how different themes and different forms of child labour are classified. Within the child’s well-being approach, there will be a proposal on the classification of different forms of child labour in terms of risks. Underlying the importance of ethical and methodological concerns in children’s studies, the article emphasizes how “child well-being and “the child’s best interest” perspective should be maintained in child labour literature both for its ultimate aim of prevention of child labour, and for its content and its methodology.
Keywords : Child Labor, Child Wellbeing, Child’s Best Interest, Turkey
