Restoring the rights of children

In 1991 some 49,600 children under five died as a consequence of the US-led war against Iraq. In 1999 a UNICEF report predicted that by the end of the century infant and child mortality in Iraq would have doubled and another 500,000 children would have died as a result of disease, malnutrition and poor medical care.

Saddam Hussein, intent on dramatising conflict between the US and the rest of the Arab world, can be blamed for part of this catastrophe. But it is also due to an intransigent US policy of persistently ignoring human rights laws that conflict with US interests. UN-endorsed but US-promoted sanctions have led to a humanitarian crisis from which Iraq will take decades to recover. The only positive outcome is that there are calls for a clear definition of people’s fundamental rights to be inscribed in international law to prevent violations by aggressors, including superpowers:

But without a passionate commitment by the people of the United States and other major powers to stop their own governments from violating those definitions of human rights, hold them accountable for their acts and to prevent their own media from seducing them into acceptance or complacency, there will be no protection for the poor and powerless and no correspondence between the words of rich and powerful nations and their deeds.1

The powerless include children. Iraq is a country where ‘death stalks children from the moment of birth’ and where rationing is so severe that ‘the loss of a baby can entail a unique added anguish – not admitting it for the sake of a little extra for the other children.’2 Paradoxically, Iraq is no longer in the media spotlight, although the plight of its people occasionally features in the more concerned mass media (see, for example, the New Internationalist of September 1999). Elsewhere in the world, children’s rights are being systematically violated in other ways.

Child soldiers

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) obliges signatories to take all feasible measures to ensure that persons under 15 years do not take a direct part in hostilities and are not recruited into the armed forces (Article 38). Using children as soldiers is now a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) which classifies ‘conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into armed forces or groups or using them to participate actively in hostilities’ as a serious violation.3

Yet, as international conferences on ‘The Use of Children as Soldiers’ were told (Maputo, Mozambique, April 1999; Montevideo, Uruguay, July 1999; and Berlin, Germany, October 1999) about 300,000 children as young as seven are being used in conflicts world-wide. Some 120,000 child soldiers are believed to be fighting in Africa, where the countries most affected were named as Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda.

Mozambique was chosen for one conference because of the country’s painful experience of trying to heal and rehabilitate thousands of children drafted into the 16-year armed conflict between the government and Renamo rebels. The struggle ended in 1992 after one million Mozambicans had been killed, 60% of them children. A researcher from the Institute of Security Studies, South Africa, told participants that during the war in Mozambique, ‘Renamo forces regularly kidnapped children from their homes, gave them basic training and then sent them into battle against the Frelimo government.’4

Another especially violent example was to be found in Sierra Leone, where civil war raged for more than eight years (1991-8). Thousands of children had their lives irreparably damaged – in some cases literally when their hands were hacked off by soldiers using machetes (BBC TV News, 18 March 1999). Many children were forced to take up arms and to commit atrocities. It was even reported that a boy of ten shot his own grand-parents (BBC TV News, 19 March 1999).

A report by Article 19 called for the recruitment of children to the Civil Defence Forces in Sierra Leone to cease, saying that an announcement by the government in mid-1998 that no child will be prosecuted for criminal acts committed in the context of war was an important step towards reconciliation in Sierra Leone. But the matter cannot be left there:

If the roots of the conflict are to be addressed, children must feel that there are other, peaceful and more hopeful avenues through which their views can be given due weight by their elders, ways that genuinely are in their best interests. Without this, children involved in the conflict may not be prepared to accept that they cannot expect to exercise their rights in the manner of adults.5

The dignity of children and freedom to express themselves are germane to the future of every society and depend on them understanding and using their right to communicate. Without that, they may be led - or coerced - into using other means of achieving their aims. A horrific example of this possibility was recently reported in the British press. A Burmese rebel group that includes child soldiers is ‘commanded’ by a pair of 12 year-old cigar-smoking, gun-wielding twins. The group is made up of fundamentalist Christians who have banned alcohol, swearing, and eating pork. Its third-in-command is reported to be even younger than the two boys. In early 2000 these ‘guerillas’ captured a hospital in Ratchaburi, 75 miles west of Bangkok, and took hostage 200 staff and 700 patients and visitors. They threatened to blow the hospital up if Thailand did not grant the Karen tribes, to which the rebels belong, protection from attacks by the Burmese army. For the soldiers of ‘God’s Army’, as the group is known, these illiterate boys have mystical powers and are virtual deities. All three possess and have doubtless used AK47 guns and one was described as an ‘unpredictable volatile character’, a ‘psycho’ (The Guardian, 25 January 2000).

Child prostitution

Child prostitution not only occurs in countries such as Thailand and the Philippines. The Jubilee Campaign has made it clear that North and South are equally involved and that ‘child prostitution and the sexual exploitation of children must be viewed as a crime against humanity, a global problem requiring international co-operation and a multi-dimensional response.’6

Child prostitution ranges from individual cases to mass victims of organised crime. It includes those who sell children to brothels; those who supply children to clients; individuals who acquire children for sexual exploitation for themselves; and organisations that acquire children for exploitation by their members. A UN report on The Sale of Children (1993) stated that child prostitution is a global business run for profit:

This is a major cause of child exploitation which has not been sufficiently addressed. At the very worst, children are abducted, drugged and coerced by gangs and syndicates into prostitution both locally and across frontiers. They may also be killed or maimed in the process. The tragedy is aggravated by the advent of AIDS and the various forms of discrimination which arise against child prostitutes faced with this dilemma.

A significant new book identifies the characteristics of ‘new slavery in the global economy’. It argues that the criteria of enslavement today no longer relate to colour, tribe, or religion, but to weakness, gullibility and deprivation. Poverty is the common denominator. A case study of Thailand (where it is estimated there are some 800,000 child prostitutes, many from Burma and Laos) explores the social and cultural dimensions of the problem. These include Thai Buddhism, whose central message of acceptance and resignation in the face of life’s pain and suffering is used to persuade Thai children simply to accept their ‘destiny’. The author comments:

Thailand is a country sick with an addiction to slavery. From village to city and back, the profits of slavery flow. Once authorities and business people become accustomed to this outpouring of money, once any moral objection has been drowned in it, a justification of slavery is easy to mount, and Thai culture and religion stand ready to do so.7

It’s easy to point the finger. But the situation is hardly better in Europe and North America where economic problems, domestic violence and abuse, family disintegration and drug addiction are increasingly recognised as factors leading to an increase in child prostitution.

Child labour

Shoishob, an organisation working with child domestic labour in Bangladesh, estimates that there are 250 to 300 thousand resident child servants in Dhaka, most of them young girls. The servants are children of some of the poorest families being fed and sheltered by middle-class households. This arrangement ought to have two advantages: it represents one less mouth to feed and it protects the girl’s marriageability. Yet, there is increasing evidence of exploitation and abuse. Again the root causes are social and cultural:

In Dhaka there are three options for poor young women. They can make clothes in garment factories; they can wash clothes in other people’s homes; and they can take off their clothes.8

Shoishob is running schools to help child labourers whose ambitions are to become ‘job holders’, working in offices or as doctors and teachers. An attempt is being made to teach them their rights, to improve their sense of identity and self-worth.

In Pakistan the situation may be worse. According to the Human Rights Commission, the majority of Pakistanis are children. Fifty-nine million, some 44% of the total population, are under 15. And if, as the Commission believes, 20 million children between the ages of 5 and 15 are not attending school, that is more or less the number of child labourers.

They work in farming, tanning, weaving, tobacco harvesting and making surgical instruments. They work in the brick kilns mixing mud for the raw bricks, hauling them from the pits to the kilns, stacking them in the kilns, removing them after firing and loading them into carts or trucks. Before that, the coal has to be carried to the top of the kiln and shovelled into fire holes where the temperature reaches over 130 degrees:

If the conditions of work were not bad enough, the system of working in the brick kilns presents other dangers and hardships. Virtually all of the families making bricks are working against a debt owed to the owner of the kiln. These debts pose a special danger for the children. Sometimes, when a kiln-owner suspects that a family will try to run away, and not pay off their debt, a child might be taken hostage to force the family to stay. Such children are tricked away from the kiln and held by force.9

Communication for coexistence

The examples of child abuse mentioned above (soldiering, prostitution and labour) barely lift the curtain on a global failure that social movements must tackle if genuine co-existence is to be a reality of the 21st century. Political coexistence is one issue: the development of systems of governance that can accommodate ethnic diversity and pluralism. But it is at the level of ‘community coexistence’, as Kumar Rupsinghe has argued, that different groups have to define (and live out) their relationships with each other. He sees education as the key:

Every child has to have access to education and participate in making decisions about her education. Education and learning is a principal means of learning to live together. This means that the school becomes a major institution for teaching coexistence and multicultural learning.10

Rupesinghe calls for a policy shift ‘where living together in diversity becomes a principal value in the education of the child.’ Unfortunately, he makes no reference to the role that communication can play in this process. ‘Community coexistence’ surely depends on communication as much as education, and it is here that there are signs of hope.

Computers in the slums

In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, favelas (shanty towns) cover the hills around the city. They are the strongholds of armed drug gangs but they are also home to thousands of people. For most young people in the favelas, the choice is stark: face a lifetime of unemployment and menial labour or join the drug traffickers and run the risk of being shot dead. Until recently.

Rodrigo Baggio, a former computer systems analyst, realised that technology can be used to empower young people and to give hope to the most disenfranchised communities. Because large companies regularly buy new hardware, there are always second-hand computers available. Baggio set out to find these unwanted machines and was given his first five by the clothes store C & A. His aim was to teach young people how to use computers to gain a foothold on the precarious slope of economic security.

Baggio began the project in 1995. It was so successful that he founded the Committee to Democratise Information Technology (CDI) and by the end of 1999 had set up 107 schools in favelas throughout Brazil. They offer a three-month basic course in computer literacy which gives young people a skill that makes them employable. Learning to use the software, students are set tasks related to issues such as violence, racism and pregnancy. They design posters with messages about problems facing the community. One centre has been set up in an indigenous indian village where they use their own language, Guarani, and another in Rio de Janeiro’s maximum security prison.

The CDI reckons that so far it has taught skills to 25,000 young Brazilians and now has an annual capacity of 32,000. As word spreads, Baggio is being asked to advise on establishing similar projects in other countries. CDI has started working in Chile, Colombia and the Philippines and Microsoft has even jumped on the bandwagon by giving £3 million worth of software.11

A similar experiment took place in New Delhi, India, where a computer was housed in an outdoor kiosk next to a slum colony. Kids took to the computer like fish to water. They invented their own vocabulary to describe how the computer worked and formed classes to teach one another. Another project was started in Udang, West Bengal, where students and teachers went on to create a rural resource and healthcare database.12

Inter-cultural dialogue

In 1987 the Jewish-Arab Centre for Peace in Givat Haviva, Israel, initiated a programme to change the socio-cultural outlook of the country from self-interest to one that includes all citizens of the state equally. In other words, it seeks greater understanding and reconciliation between young people who live very separate lives in their schools and communities.

The Children Teaching Children (CTC) programme uses workshops and games to question received views and opinions. ‘This way, the children learn that they can have common interests or disputes, and still express themselves openly. They can dialogue and confront over the controversies, and still act in the same framework.’13 Over 50,000 children, young people and adults from Israel and abroad come to the Centre each year to participate in seminars, workshops, courses, conferences, formal and informal educational programmes.

The CTC is the only project of its kind in Israel that is allowed to function within the regular school programme. Supported by the Ministry of Education, it confronts age-old prejudices by placing children side-by-side and encouraging them to communicate their similarities as well as their differences.

Such work is also going on in Eire at the Glencree Centre for Reconciliation in Enniscree, Co.Wicklow. The Centre ‘fosters mutual respect, tolerance and understanding between individuals and promotes peace and reconciliation within Ireland and between Ireland and Britain’. Established in 1994, it offers learning programmes for students, political dialogue workshops and a women’s programme. Its aims are ‘to open hearts and minds to difference; to promote respect for diversity; to address conflict; to analyse the power usage of language; to recognise the importance of communication; to understand issues related to justice, equality, rights and responsibilities; and to encourage full participation in society.14

A children’s parliament

For more than 20 years the Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC), an Indian NGO based in Tilonia, a small village in Rajasthan, has been working with the poorest of India’s rural population. In this part of the country, almost 70% of children are not in school and many help their families by tending animals or working in the home.

The SWRC set up evening schools to enable such children to receive a minimal education. Using songs, puppets and classroom theatre they gain an idea of mathematics, language, reading, writing, and human rights. There are now 275 such schools in nine Indian states. The children even have their own Parliament which meets annually, oversees the management of the schools, appoints teachers and looks after equipment. The youngest ‘minister’ of the Children’s Parliament is just 10, the oldest 15.

SWRC takes a pragmatic approach to the place of children in rural Indian society and to self-empowerment:

Children need to be taught what is good for them and what is not; to acquire the ability to make decisions in the world they live in... We want to transmit the essential values of democracy, a process that is not made easy by the anachronistic rigidity of the caste system, or the status of women and children in India society.15

At the other end of the scale, the City Montessori School has been running a highly successful enterprise since 1959 in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. It is the largest private school in the world, with 23,000 students and provides education from kindergarten upwards focusing on both academic achievement and emotional well-being. The vision of Mahatma Gandhi is incorporated into a curriculum that defines values and learning about world citizenship, social responsibility, peace and religious issues. The philosophy is simple:

When you divide children, when you put them into different camps, and when they do not coexist from the earliest stages of their lives, you sow the seeds for a lifetime of problems. You can see this everywhere in the world. Children are not born prejudiced; it’s we adults who introduce prejudice into their minds.16

Advocacy and empowerment

In Iraq childhood has become expendable and in many other countries children’s rights are summarily ignored. Children alone cannot change the policies of dictators and corrupt governments, nor can they change a global economy that traffics in human beings. But social movements and NGOs are able to act. In this, advocacy is vital:

[It] means criticising and denouncing those communicative and social relations in which human beings have no voice... lending them one’s own voice, becoming the temporary spokesperson for their interests, needs and claims... proceeding against the exclusion of themes and (groups of) persons from public discourse.17

Of course, advocacy alone is not enough in the face of the gigantic scale of the problems and the political and economic corruption at all levels in which they are mired. There has to be structural change and here the obstacles can be daunting. Ethical reasoning – however universal its logic - is often undermined by economic or cultural arguments.

In India, for example, the country’s rural political economy has traditionally depended on poor families being able to work their children. The regional seminar on ‘Media, Human Rights and Child Abuse’ (Dhaka, Bangladesh, 15-17 November 1999) recognised this reality when it recommended that ‘child labour should be condemned only if it is hazardous or harmful to the well-being of children’. No definition of ‘hazardous or harmful’ was offered. The harsh terms of survival leave no room for what many see as Western sentimentality when it comes to the sanctity of childhood. Similarly, it is all too easy, as in Thailand, to endorse a culture in which Buddhist monks decree that people should ‘accept their destiny’. In the interest of global coexistence, all societies everywhere must promote universal principles of equality, justice and human dignity.

A starting point is education for children. In 1990 a world conference on Education For All set out six goals. They were mainly to do with the provision of basic education and training in essential skills, particularly for poor, disadvantaged and disabled children. But the last objective focused on the role of communication: ‘Increased acquisition by individuals and families of the knowledge and skills and values required for better living and for sound and sustainable development made available through the mass media, modern and traditional communication technologies and social action.’

This is the philosophy of the International Clearinghouse on Children and Violence on the Screen, established at Nordicom, Göteborg, Sweden, in 1997. It promotes a range of activities and research concerning children, young people and the mass media. Examples of children’s involvement in the media clearly show that:

Children through their creative media participation have become empowered – that the participation has strengthened their pride, sense of power and self-esteem since they have felt that their voices are worth listening to, that they belong to their community, that they have achieved an understanding of others and other own culture.18

The value of media for and by children lies in: letting children speak for themselves; treating children as equals, as human beings like everyone else; asking children what they think about issues covered in the media; giving children the chance to speak freely to adults as well as to other children; seeing children as individuals, with their own thoughts, enthusiasms and concerns; letting children be themselves, not what other people want them to be; and taking children’s opinions seriously.19

To reconcile a world in conflict, to regain the trust of children, to snatch hope from the brink of despair, these are the challenges of the 21st century. Are we up to it?

Notes

1 Ramsey Clark. ‘On the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, in Acts of Aggression: Policing ‘Rogue’ States, by Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark and Edward W. Said. The Open Media Pamphlet Series. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999.

2 ‘Silent decimation – Iraq under sanctions’, by Felicity Arbuthnot, in Third World Resurgence No. 110/111 (1999).

3 See Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice, by Geoffrey Robertson. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1999, pp. 316 and 432.

4 ‘Rescuing Africa’s child soldiers’, by Antonio Gumende. Third World Network Features, November 1999.

5 Kid’s Talk: Freedom of expression and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. London: Article 19. 1999, p. 65.

6 Report on Child Prostitution: Crime Against Humanity. London: Jubilee Campaign, 1999. http//:www.jubileecampaign.demon.co.uk/children/cpr1.htm

7 Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, by Kevin Bales. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999, p. 78.

8 ‘The Little Maids of Dhaka’, by Jeremy Seabrook. Third World Network Features, November 1999.

9 See note 8, ibid. p. 151-2.

10 ‘What is Co-existence?’, by Kumar Rupesingh. People Building Peace: 35 Inspiring Stories from Around the World. Utrecht: European Centre for Conflict Prevention, 1999, p. 73.

11 See ‘Digital hope in the slums’, by Alex Bellos. The Guardian, Online, 1 December 1999.

12 ’Indian experiment shows how slum-kids speedily take to computers’, by Mark Warschauer. Papyrus News, 12 November 1999.

13 ‘Investing in future decision makers’. People Building Peace: 35 Inspiring Stories from Around the World. Utrecht: European Centre for Conflict Prevention, 1999, p. 281.

14 See http://www.glencree-cfr.ie/

15 ‘India: The children’s republic’, by Jean-Christophe Klotz. Unesco Sources, October 1999, No. 116.

16 ‘Gandhi’s visions are millennium proof.’ People Building Peace: 35 Inspiring Stories from Around the World. Utrecht: European Centre for Conflict Prevention, 1999, p. 278.

17 ‘Discourse ethics and its relevance’, by Edmund Arens. Communication Ethics and Universal Values, edited by Clifford G. Christians and Michael Traber. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997, pp. 61-2.

18 ‘Media education, children’s participation and democracy’, by Cecilia von Feilitzen. Children and Media. Yearbook 1999, p. 27. Göteborg: Nordicom. This book contains several case studies of how children are using media in different countries.

19 Reported in Interviewing Children: A Guide for Journalists and Others by Sarah McCrum and Lotte Hughes. London: Save the Children, 1998.

Philip Lee works on studies and publications at WACC’s General Secretariat and is Regional Co-ordinator for Europe