Comparing Representations of Child Labour and Domestic Exploitation in Emeka Ukwuaba’s Benign Pain and Abi Dare’s The Girl with the Louding Voice

The exploitation of young girls through child domestic labour has emerged as one of the most persistent concerns in contemporary Nigerian fiction written by both male and female authors, reflecting the scale and urgency of this social problem. This study undertakes a comparative analysis of the representation of child domestic exploitation in Emeka Ukwuaba's Benign Pain (2021) and Abi Dare's The Girl with the Louding Voice (2020), examining how two Nigerian authors of different genders and literary traditions construct similar social realities through distinct narrative strategies. The study is anchored on comparative literature theory and intersectional feminist criticism, which attends to the overlapping effects of gender, age, class, and geography in producing vulnerability. A comparative close-reading methodology is employed, supplemented by recent scholarship on child labour and gender in Nigerian literature published within the last five years. Findings reveal significant convergences between both novels in their construction of the domestic employer-worker relationship as a site of abuse, but notable divergences in narrative voice, structural choice, and ideological resolution. While Dare employs first-person narration to maximise reader identification with the child protagonist, Ukwuaba uses third-person narration to create analytical distance and broader social mapping. The study concludes that both novels constitute important feminist interventions in the representation of child domestic labour and recommends their joint adoption in curricula addressing gender, child rights, and Nigerian literature.

Keywords: Child labour, Domestic exploitation, Emeka Ukwuaba, Abi Dare, Comparative literature