All violations of children’s rights can legitimately be described as harmful practices.* The common characteristic of the violations highlighted in the Violating Children's Rights report is that they are based on tradition, culture, religion or superstition, and are perpetrated and actively condoned by the child’s parents or significant adults within the child’s community. Indeed, they often still enjoy majority support within communities or whole states.
Harmful practices based on tradition, culture, religion or superstition are often perpetrated against very young children or infants, who are clearly lacking the capacity to consent or to refuse consent themselves. Assumptions of parental powers or rights over their children, allow the perpetration of a wide range of these practices, many by parents directly, some by other individuals with parents’ assumed or actual consent. Yet the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), ratified by almost every state, favours the replacement of the concept of parental "rights" over children with parental "responsibilities", ensuring that the child’s best interests are parents’ "basic concern" (article 18).
Many of the practices identified in this report involve gross and unlawful discrimination against groups of children, including gender discrimination, and in particular discrimination against children with disabilities. Some are based on tradition and/or superstition, some on religious belief, others on false information or beliefs about child development and health. Many involve extreme physical violence and pain leading, in some cases intentionally, to death or serious injury. Others involve mental violence. All are an assault on the child’s human dignity and violate universally agreed international human rights standards.
The International NGO Council on Violence against Children believes the continued legality and social and cultural acceptance of a very wide range of these practices in many States, illustrates a devastating failure of international and regional human rights mechanisms to provoke the necessary challenge, prohibition and elimination. Comprehensive children’s rights-based analysis and action are needed now. Above all, there must be an assertion of every State’s immediate obligation to ensure all children their right to full respect for their human dignity and physical integrity.
The report is designed to complement other current activities in the UN system that are focusing on harmful practices based on tradition, culture, religion or superstition and children, and will hopefully lead to more effective action. The UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Violence against Children, Marta Santos Pais, held an International Expert Consultation on the issue in June 2012, in Addis Ababa, in which the International NGO Council was represented and prepared a submission.
The International NGO Council believes that the continuing legal and social acceptance of these violations, and the slow progress in identifying and effectively addressing them, are symptomatic of children’s low status as possessions rather than individuals and rights-holders, in societies across all regions. The oft-quoted mantra of the UN Study was "No violence against children is justifiable; all violence against children is preventable." Tragically, many adults are still justifying extreme violence, both physical and mental, on spurious grounds of tradition, culture or religion.
The report first looks at the definition and scope of harmful traditional, cultural and religious practices violating children’s rights. Then section 3 outlines the human rights context for their prohibition and elimination. Section 4 lists practices identified through a call for evidence issued by the International NGO Council earlier in 2012, and additional desk research. It also provides some examples of legal and other measures already taken to challenge and eliminate them. Section 5 provides recommendations for action by States, UN and UN-related agencies, INGOs, NGOs, national human rights institutions and others.
Download the full report on Violating children's rights: harmful practices based on tradition, culture, religion or superstition.
* CRIN is advocating for the UN to stop using the term "harmful practices" on its own. Previously, this area was referred to as "harmful traditional practices." We understand some have favoured dropping the word "traditional" because it may offend communities who value their traditions. But highlighting harmful traditions does not in any sense deny the existence of positive, non-harmful traditions. "Harmful practices" refers to all violations of children’s rights, while abuses of children’s rights that are hallowed in tradition are often the most difficult to eradicate, meaning they require specific attention.