There was that famous Unicef report about the child labor sweatshop in Bangladesh that closed down and most of the children went to work in the sex trade. Rega

There was that famous Unicef report about the child labor sweatshop in Bangladesh that closed down and most of the children went to work in the sex trade. Regardless of how common that actually is, it seems pretty logical to me that if people are desperate enough for work, it's only because all of their other options were worse. So while I think laws played an important part in ending chimney sweeps and the like, they only worked because enough middle class people started having fewer kids and enough resources to provide them education. To put it another way, the need for chimney sweeping didn't magically disappear. First we had to build better chimneys.