A 9-year-old boy died after being mangled by a piece of machinery on Monday while working with his parents at a brick-making facility in Battambang’s Mong Russey district, police said yesterday.

Deputy district police chief Keo Sokhum said that victim Rorm Ra was loading earth into a machine that churns out formed bricks when his right arm became entangled in the machinery and was torn off. He was rushed to the provincial referral hospital, but was bleeding profusely, and died shortly after arriving.

“This is the first case of this happening in Mong Russey district,” Sokhum said.

Sokhum maintained that officers did not need to take action against the facility where the fatal accident occurred because Ra had been brought there by his parents, and was not formally employed.

Dangerous forms of child labour are strictly prohibited under the Kingdom’s Labour Law, but Sary Bothchakrya, a lawyer with the labour rights group Central, said yesterday it was unclear how much responsibility the company bore without knowing for certain whether it employed Ra directly.

“I don’t think the company has 100 per cent responsibility for the child, because the child is also under the control of the parents. I think there should be some kind of responsibility,” though it is unclear whether it is criminal or civil, Bothchakrya said...

“Build on Slavery,” released today by local rights group Licadho, exposes the prevalence of child labor and debt bondage—both illegal and, in the latter’s case, punishable by hefty prison time—in the country’s brick factories, unchecked by government authorities and trapping whole families in poverty one generation after another.

From June to August, the rights group visited 11 sites around Phnom Penh that included hundreds of factories with thousands of workers pumping out the millions of cheap bricks feeding the capital’s rapidly rising skyline.

Licadho says it found a well-rooted business practice in which factory owners give loans to their workers with the promise of their labor until the debts are paid off. But their piecework pay for the bricks is so low that they struggle to pay the loans down and often feel pressured to recruit their children just to earn enough to feed their family.

The researchers found debt bondage and child labor just about everywhere they went, as well as common reports of serious injury. In the last two years, Licadho has also investigated three cases in which children at a brick factory had lost an arm. One of them, a 9-year-old boy, ended up succombing to his injuries.