Kwara based legal practitioner, Mr Muritala Yusuf, has urged governments at all levels to ensure that strict measures were put in place to ban teenage hawking in Nigeria.
He also called for enforcement, arrest and prosecution of parents sending underaged children to hawk.
Yusuf, who made the call in Ilorin on Thursday in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), said hawking had ruined so many lives of young children.
He advised parents to desist from sending their wards and children to the streets to hawk as it was dangerous and unsafe.
Yusuf said many teenagers had been raped, harassed all in the process of hawking to make money for their parents.
“Kids can be easily lured into doing different things as they are not matured enough to understand who and who is deceiving them.
“Most girls have been forcefully raped in the process of mingling with different men to sell goods to them.
“Most young boys also join smoking gangs and sniff any kind of substance without the knowledge of their parents.
“When you send your kids to the streets, you are exposing them to dangerous situations. They encounter many challenges that cannot be spelt out,” he said.
The legal practitioner, however, warned parents to stop ignorantly trading the future of their children for money.
“We need to save the future of our kids from ruin,” he advised.