RIGHTS-ASIA: Children Face Violence In Every Realm of Life – Groups

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Alecia D. McKenzie

SIEM REAP, Cambodia, Mar 24 2005 (IPS) - If you gave children a video camera and asked them to document their daily lives, the results probably would be shocking.

Along with the normal childhood occurrences, the tapes would show that children around the world also face abuses in many forms. Extreme cases involve physical and sexual violence, but more common are the insults, obscenity, bullying and denigration in every-day situations, carried out by adults as well as other children.

”Violence against children is seen in almost every realm of life,” said Carmen Madriñán, executive director of ECPAT, which stands for End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes.

"Children face violence in the home, in schools, in institutions, and on the street,” she told more than 200 officials, development experts and members of private aid groups on the second day of ministerial level talks on the plight of children.

The three-day 7th East Asia and Pacific Ministerial Consultation on Children ends here Friday.

The MINCON, as it’s called, is the only high-level gathering of this type dedicated exclusively to children and has been held every two years since its launch in 1991, a year after the World Summit for Children.

In a closed-door gathering Wednesday, government representatives pledged action to protect children from violence. They and delegates from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) as well as non-governmental organisations discussed ways to implement and enforce legislation that would improve the current situation. They plan to hold a meeting in June to assess the development of these goals.

According to UNICEF, violence against children in the East Asia and Pacific region is "widely prevalent, albeit to varying degrees". A survey conducted by the agency in 2001 showed that three out of 10 children report violence within the family, and 23 percent of children say that their parents beat them when they do something wrong.

”Physical punishment seems to be particularly common in East Timor (53 percent), Cambodia (44 percent) and Burma (40 percent),” the study says. The only country in the assessment with a percentage under 10 was Mongolia at seven percent.

But this issue is not limited to any single region; it is a worldwide problem, according to the United Nations. UNICEF is currently carrying out a global study on violence against children, due to be completed in 2006.

The study will also look at violence in schools.

Anupama Rao Singh, UNICEF’s Asia-Pacific regional director, said that children, particularly girls, face violence not only within educational settings, but also on their way to and from school.

”In Mongolia, bullying is the most alarming form of violence,” she said.

As to corporal punishment, according to UNICEF, it is ”explicitly prohibited by law only in China, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam”, but it is still practiced even in countries where it is illegal, the agency adds.

On the street, children may face violence by law enforcement officials, particularly if they belong to vulnerable groups.

”Street children are vulnerable to gang violence, police brutality, harassment from extortionists, arrest for petty crimes and work-related exploitation,” said UNICEF.

There is also the ”virtual” street, a growing concern for those seeking to protect children.

ECPAT believes that more attention should be paid to curb the growing use of the Internet to spread child pornography. The group is urging governments to work with the information technology industry to limit such abuses of children’s rights.

"Through arrests, Interpol has shown that there are thousands of pictures of actual abuse being carried out," said Madriñán. "Abusers use web-cams to film abuse and transmit live pictures.

"The increasing connectedness of this region means that child pornography is a growing problem, complicated by the use of new technology such as mobile phones with cameras,” she pointed out. ”The Internet is also being used to lure children into abusive situations."

Next month, ECPAT plans to launch a campaign with NGOs around the world to call on the IT industry to police itself and make the Internet and mobile phones safe for children.

The group has already had some success in involving the travel and tourism sector in child protection. ECPAT, UNICEF and the World Tourism Organisation drew up the Code of Conduct for Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism that came into force last April. Japanese tour companies recently joined their Western counterparts in signing the code, which is designed to create a more responsible tourism industry, one vigilant against child exploitation.

The code requires travel agencies to train staff in countries where children are exploited; provide information about the issue to travellers; explicitly repudiate the sexual exploitation of children in any contracts with local suppliers; develop ethical corporate policies; and report annually on the issue.

ECPAT hopes the IT industry will follow suit so as to help combat the incidence of child abuse.