Child Labor Exploitation in The Textile Sector: A Concern Embedded in Sustainable Development 2025

Abstract

Child labor in the textile industry represents a critical and persistent violation of human rights that fundamentally compromises global sustainability goals. Despite the estimated 160 million children engaged in child labor worldwide, academic and corporate discourse on textile sustainability has historically prioritized environmental dimensions over social ones. This study quantitatively investigates this asymmetry through a bibliometric analysis of 68 scientific documents indexed in the Scopus database (2005–2024), complemented by a systematic content review. Using co-occurrence analysis, the literature was categorized into four thematic clusters: (1) Structural Determinants of Child Labor, (2) Health and Well-being Impacts, (3) International Economic Pressures, and (4) Eradication Policies. The analysis reveals a profound epistemic disconnect: the literature on environmental sustainability (41.2% of publications) and child labor (17.6%) operate in distinct, non-overlapping clusters, with no single document explicitly integrating both dimensions. These findings confirm that the persistence of child labor is not solely a function of economic factors, but is also sustained by a fragmented scientific knowledge architecture that systematically marginalizes social violations. We conclude that achieving genuine textile sustainability requires an urgent rebalancing of academic and regulatory attention toward the effective and integrated study of both environmental and social dimensions.