Livelihood Pattern and Health Seeking Behavior of Working Children in Khulna City

Abstract

Working children are those groups of children under age 18 who engage in any form of work by which they are deprived of their childhood. Seeking behavior means the medical attention given to seeking or injured person or animal for their better health condition. The goal of the revision is to explore the livelihood pattern and health pursuing behavior of the working children in Khulna city. The study is explanatory and descriptive in nature and the survey method is conducted with an interview schedule. The study is carried out on 166 respondents through simple random sampling. The findings indicate that working children come from poor families. They have to work to support their family at an early age. This study reveals that around 42 percent of the participants belong to the age group of 13-15 years old. Their educational qualification is also very low, around 54 percent of the participants enrolled in class 1 to 5 but a great amount of participants has no formal education. The respondents live in the urban area but their corporeal state is not good. The working children do not get enough food for their survival. They are not aware of their own rights due to illiteracy. Also, the majority of the participants do not get the proper facilities from working place, and around 68 percent are tortured in graft places. They are discriminated against by their employee. Even the maximum of them (64.5%) do not use safety protection during their work time consequently sometimes they are injured physically. Besides these, they suffer from various diseases but they do not get suitable cures due to poverty in addition to illiteracy. Working children face different sorts of abuse in their working place (65.7%). Though they get help from the government there is very little for their betterment. So government and NGOs can play a very vital role to remove this discrimination besides social awareness is very far necessary to combat this problem.