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VENEZUELA: “Children Can’t Even Play on Their Front Stoops”

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Dec 16 2008 (IPS) - Johana Bracamonte never had a chance to learn to read. She was just five years old the morning her uncle took her to kindergarten and they were both shot by thieves who stole his motorbike, in 23 de Enero, a shantytown on the west side of the Venezuelan capital.

And in Mamera, a slum in southwest Caracas, two children aged nine and seven who were playing in front of their houses were killed in separate incidents on a single afternoon, caught in the crossfire of gunfights between rival gangs.

“These things happen every day; we are living in constant fear. We are robbed on the bus and the subway, children can’t even play on their front stoops, the criminal gangs impose their law, and nobody does anything about it,” Mamera resident Jorge Machado told IPS.

The police reported that they have identified the gangs that participated in the shoot-outs and have captured the alleged shooter in one of the killings.

When Yadira Acevedo went to a police station in El Llanito, in the east of Caracas, to give a statement on the death of her six-year-old son, Keidel Bravo, she thought she recognised one of the police officers as the driver of the car carrying the gunman who fired at a group of local residents, including Keidel, in what was presumed to be a revenge killing,

In the space of just five days this month, eight children and teenagers were killed by bullets in shantytowns in Caracas.


“This is happening in other provinces as well, in cities across the country. Criminal violence is already far and away the number one problem facing children in Venezuela,” Oscar Misle, co-director of the Community Learning Centres (CECODAP), the main non-governmental organisation working for children’s rights, told IPS.

Although the tragic deaths of young children draw more attention, it is teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 who are the most frequent victims.

In an investigation of 262 cases of social violence between October 2007 and September 2008, CECODAP found that 160 teenagers had been murdered.

Nationwide, the figures are much higher. Another human rights organisation, PROVEA, reported that between January and September 2008, 10,606 Venezuelans were killed by criminals, 11 percent more than in the same period in 2007, according to the police.

Forty percent of Venezuela’s population of 27 million are under 18. “Most criminal violence involves young people,” PROVEA researcher Laurent Labrique told IPS.

Caracas, with 130 homicides per 100,000 population, has overtaken Recife in northeastern Brazil, which has a murder rate of 158 per 100,000, as Latin America’s most violent city, according to Luis Cedeño, of the non-governmental Caracas-based Institute for Research on Coexistence and Citizen Security (INCOSEC).

Homicides are on the top rung of the scale of violence, but “they reflect the violence that is found everywhere in Venezuelan society, and whose main victims are children and adolescents,” another head of CECODAP, Fernando Pereira, told IPS.

CECODAP’s annual study this year reported that of 104 cases of domestic violence involving youngsters, 68 of the victims were under six years old, 17 were between the ages of seven and 12, 12 were teenagers aged 13 to 17, and in seven cases the age of the victim was not reported.

“Violence in the home does not discriminate between the sexes,” another CECODAP activist, Carla Villamediana, told IPS. “Fifty-four percent of the victims in this study were male, 43 percent were female, and in three percent of the cases the sex was not reported.”

In contrast, in a study of 83 cases of sexual abuse involving children under 18, CECODAP found that 74.7 percent of the victims were female and 22.8 percent male. (The gender of the remaining 2.5 percent was not mentioned.)

Rape was the most frequently reported form of sexual abuse. In 62 cases, 80 percent of the victims were girls.

“With every study we carry out, the evidence mounts that children and teenagers are particularly vulnerable to violence, while the state has a constitutional obligation to make their protection a priority,” Misle said.

The 1999 constitution says that “the State, families and society shall guarantee full protection (of children and adolescents) as an absolute priority, taking into account their best interests in actions and decisions concerning them.”

In Venezuela the regulatory institution for policies for children is the Ministry for Participation and Social Protection, acting through an autonomous institute, the National Council for the Rights of Children and Adolescents (IDENA).

The institute is sponsoring a campaign which includes workshops, publicity spots and meetings for directors of public bodies involved in child protection, as well as support for schoolwork under the motto “Restemos violencia, sumemos respeto” (roughly, Let’s subtract violence and add respect).

“Violence is not a collection of isolated incidents, but rather a consequence of social decay and the product of a capitalist model,” said Litbell Díaz, the president of IDENA. The Venezuelan state “is generating an equitable society, and assumes the responsibility of guaranteeing the rights of children and adolescents,” she added.

Misle, on the other hand, said “we have called for integral and integrated policies from the state, including coordination of efforts and the development of a national protection system for children and adolescents, but unfortunately without success, because children’s issues often fall off the radar of the public agenda.”

As an example, he showed the results of another study by CECODAP which monitored the coverage of political programmes and debates by 18 newspapers from the six most populous provinces during the campaign for the Nov. 23 provincial and municipal elections.

Out of 13,223 news reports studied, only 627, equivalent to 4.75 percent of the total, mentioned proposals related to children and adolescents. Of these 627, 38.5 percent had a length of less than 500 characters (about 75 words), most were about education, and only 7.3 percent (46 items) touched on the problem of violence.

“We are very worried about teen violence, because in an increasing number of poor neighbourhoods, it has become a sort of initiation to life, a means of survival, and the only valid way to carve out a space for oneself and deal with conflicts,” said Misle.

On top of that “we have the problem of verbal violence, the spoken word, which is part of the conflict because of the political polarisation in our society. How can we possibly create a democratic culture when the major events the country is experiencing, the political confrontations, are being conducted with aggression and by disparaging other people?” Misle asked.

 
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