Justice & Law Quote by Carol Bellamy

Policy is doing the emotional labor here. Carol Bellamy’s sentence reads like a modest case study, but its real purpose is to normalize a particular kind of moral authority: the idea that protecting children isn’t primarily about charity or rescue narratives, it’s about rewriting the rules that make exploitation possible.

The choice of “for example” is telling. It signals an educator’s instinct to teach through evidence, but it also frames UNICEF as a pragmatic lever-puller rather than a feel-good brand. “Works with governments” quietly sidesteps the fantasy of NGOs swooping in to fix things; change is pictured as slow, negotiated, bureaucratic. That’s the subtext: real protection happens in committee rooms and legal codes, not just in campaigns.

India functions as both a concrete reference and a rhetorical shield. By pointing to legislation in a specific national setting, Bellamy anchors the claim in scale and seriousness while avoiding the messier questions that follow any schooling mandate: What counts as “workplace” in informal economies? Does raising the age create enforcement that punishes poor families? What resources make “compulsory” meaningful? The line doesn’t answer these; it’s designed to justify the strategy, not litigate its complexities.

The phrase “keep children in school and away from the workplace for longer” carries a clear value hierarchy: school equals safety, work equals risk. It’s persuasive because it compresses a sprawling development debate into a clean causal story. The context is late-20th/early-21st century child rights governance, when the language of protection increasingly meant systems reform, and the battleground moved from moral appeals to legislation.