Assembling Webs of Support: Child Domestic Workers in India Shaziah Wasiuzzaman Independent Researcher Karen Wells* Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK This paper uses ethnographic and qualitative interview data with Muslim child domestic workers, their families and employers to investigate the social ties between young workers and their employers. Our analysis shows that working-class families use children’s domestic work with middle-class families as part of a web of resources to protect them from economic shocks and to enable them to afford to meet the cost of social obligations. We show that in this par- ticular context, a town in Uttar Pradesh in north India, hiring domestic workers locks employ- ers into relations of social obligation with their employees and their families. We conclude that these webs of support are enabled precisely because the domestic workers are children and not adults; their status as children makes it possible for the labour contract to be mysti- fied and reconfigured as a social relationship. Ó 2010 The Author(s). Journal compilation Ó 2010 National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited. Keywords: caste, child labour, class, domestic work, gifts. There is little ethnographic or sociological literature on domestic work in India (Dickey and Adam, 2000). This silence is partly because of the difficulty that researchers have in access- ing domestic spaces, and the increasing secrecy of employers about their employment of young domestic workers as a response to the circulation and legitimacy of global discourses of childhood that prohibit children from work (in 2003 the Indian Government banned the employment of children as domestic workers). This paper challenges the view of girls as vic- tims of their mothers’ inadequate care, and non-agential ‘slaves’ (Black, 1997; Blagbrough and Glynn, 1999; ILO, 2004; Save the Children, 2006). Our analysis shows the importance of children’s work to assembling webs of support that transverse the boundaries between class ⁄ - caste and may protect working-class families from economic shocks. Our study focuses spe- cifically on Muslim households. The research was carried out by qualitative semi-structured interviews with six child domes- tic workers, their families and employers, supplemented by ethnographic data, conducted in the main town of a district in Uttar Pradesh in 2008. The ethnographic data consisted of field notes of observation, and conversations with both participants and non-participants in employers’ homes and the wider neighbourhood. The analysis offered in this paper draws on the entire corpus of data. The study participants were identified from an initial contact with one family’s domestic worker whose daughter was herself a domestic worker. Her daughter was interviewed and she suggested other young domestic workers who might be interested in being interviewed. All the interviews were carried out in the workers’ homes. CHILDREN & SOCIETY VOLUME 24, (2010) pp. 282–292 DOI:10.1111/j.1099-0860.2010.00312.x Ó 2010 The Author(s) Journal compilation Ó 2010 National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited