America: land of the not so free, home of the brave child laborers.

According to a new Human Rights Watch report, kids can't legally buy cigarettes, but they can make them. Thousands of children—including 12 year olds and younger—work in tobacco fields, primarily in North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, where they routinely get poisoned by nicotine and pesticides:

The conditions the children testify to—grueling work, being covered in pesticides—are similar to accounts of local farmworker labor in Berkeley anthropologist Seth Holmes' aptly-titled Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, as well as stories I heard from farmworker children in Skagit Valley last year, when I covered protests by berry pickers at Sakuma Brothers Farms.

In response to their strikes and fledgling union-organizing efforts, Sakuma Brothers Farms is seeking to replace the local farmworkers with "guest workers" imported from Mexico.

As for child farm labor across the nation, Human Rights Watch says:

Under US labor law, children working in agriculture can work longer hours, at younger ages, and in more hazardous conditions than children in any other industry. Children as young as 12 can be hired for unlimited hours outside of school hours on a farm of any size with parental permission, and there is no minimum age for children to work on small farms. At 16, child farmworkers can do jobs deemed hazardous by the US Department of Labor. Children in all other sectors must be 18 to do hazardous work. Regulations proposed by the Labor Department in 2011 would have prohibited children under 16 from working on tobacco farms, but they were withdrawn in 2012.

"The US has failed America’s families by not meaningfully protecting child farmworkers from dangers to their health and safety, including on tobacco farms,” [HRW Researcher Margaret] Wurth said. "The Obama administration should endorse regulations that make it clear that work on tobacco farms is hazardous for children, and Congress should enact laws to give child farmworkers the same protections as all other working children."

#BringBackOurGirls? How about #ProtectOurChildren?