Slave Children; Battered Children...

SLAVE CHILDREN: Forgotten Angels

By Claire Brisset
Le Monde

Tuesday 10 October 2006

For a long time, violence against children was treated as a sort of necessary sidekick for every society. An inevitable expression of ordinary sadism. Given what we now know, such a vision is no longer adequate to account for such violence's existence today. In fact, this October 11 the results of a long investigation conducted on this theme for three years under the direction of Brazilian jurist and former minister Paulo Sergio Pinheiro at the request of UN General Secretary Kofi Annan will be presented to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. More than 2,000 people have participated in this research, with which - as has not up until now been customary - children themselves have been associated.

The results are arresting, far distant from the abstractions that would have made them "acceptable." Judge for yourself. During the year 2002 alone, 53,000 of the world's minors were murdered. Three thousand five hundred children under 15 are killed every year in developed countries. Everywhere, these murders are concentrated on two age groups: from 0 to 4 years old and from 15 to 17 years old. The most numerous victims come, of course, from the more fragile groups: handicapped children, street children, members of ethnic minorities, refugees and displaced persons, delinquents.

But the murders obviously account for a very small part only of the violence against children. Sexual violence and corporal punishment are incomparably more frequent than homicides. On these two counts, the UN's research brings new and crushing information. In fact, it notes that during 2002, 150 million girls and 73 million boys were subjected to forced sexual relations, generally within the framework of the family or by someone close to the child, including peers. This sexual violence reaches its extreme, of course, when it is linked to a form of slavery, for example, prostitution or child pornography, which, far from being "virtual," also requires "real" children. In total, close to 2 million minors are forced into prostitution and pornography, over a million of them having literally been bought and sold, sometimes beyond the borders of their countries.

The study also analyzes the situation of children in institutions, many of whom, it emphasizes, are the objects of mistreatment: orphanages alone contain some 7 million children in conditions where corporal punishment is very widely practiced as an educational method.

Physical discipline in the family is now prohibited - by the law - in sixteen industrialized countries. Obviously, the experts, without saying so explicitly, would like this prohibition to be spread. On the other hand, they categorically state the necessity of prohibiting corporal punishments in school, still practiced - in all legality - in over fifty countries in the world and accepted in many more.

The study reserves its most intense criticisms for practices that are not prohibited everywhere, such as female sexual mutilation, to which between 100 and 140 million women were victim during their childhood. Or the imprisonment of adolescents, sometimes practiced for simple vagrancy. Finally, and above all, for the death penalty applied to minors for crimes committed before their majority. One also discovers that 31 countries authorize "legal" sanctions such as whippings, stoning, and amputation of minors.

Finally, and this is not the least aspect of this research, close to 220 million children around the world are economically exploited, half of them in dangerous activities (mines, explosives manufacture, arms manufacture, toxin treatment) and over 5 million are slaves. Yet, hope comes from precisely this sector of child labor, since these data, while frightening, are in decline over several years. Thanks to the legal instruments the international community has created over the last twenty years beginning with the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), consciousness has been raised more and more: legal systems are evolving; and some improvements are appearing. Every country in the world with the exception of two (Somalia and ... the United States) has ratified this treaty today.

But the improvements remain too timid and too slow. Thus, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro concludes there is an absolute necessity to change the most unacceptable texts (death penalty, legal mutilations, etc.). But he also demands that member states cease to consider violence against children as some sort of natural phenomenon against which nothing can be done. True prevention is possible, he says, citing an example: that of the domestic violence which between 133 and 275 million children witness every year. Obviously, violence arouses outrage among those who witness it directly. But it also acts as a "model" for the generations to come.

Models of violence: finally, adults start armed conflicts, which, among their other impacts, ravage the lives of the youngest. In the world, 300,000 children have become soldiers in spite of themselves. They carry weapons too heavy for them in a world that is also too heavy for them.

By way of this study, the United Nations has launched a challenge to its member states. They have yet to meet it.

Claire Brisset is a former Children's advocate.

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