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LATEST NEWS AND REPORTS

Sexual violence and the sale of children

Claims of historical child sex abuse have rocked British football, with more than 20 former footballers so far coming forward with allegations, and 11 police forces investigating. The allegations were sparked after a former player at Crewe football club, Andy Woodward, waived his right to anonymity to reveal his ordeal suffered when he was in the junior league. The Football Association (FA) has announced an internal review to look at what officials and clubs knew and when, while a dedicated NSPCC hotline has received more than 250 calls, and individual clubs are conducting their own inquiries. While the FA insists its child-safeguarding unit and a network of designated safety officers throughout the grassroots structure makes it far less likely such abuse could persist today, campaign groups believe there is still not enough protection for would-be whistleblowers. Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee Damian Collins said the FA has been too slow to react and must launch a “much wider” inquiry. The revelations come as the national inquiry into child sexual abuse in public and private institutions falls further into disarray, with the resignation of yet another chair and a succession of senior lawyers.

Eric Aniva, the notorious Malawian man accused of having sex with more than 100 girls and women as part of traditional “sexual cleansing” rituals, has been convicted and sentenced to 24 months in jail with hard labour. President Peter Mutharika ordered his arrest in July after a BBC documentary in which Aniva spoke openly about his role in the rituals prompted international outcry. Customary practice in some parts of Malawi involves paying a man, known as a “hyena”, to have sexual intercourse with girls as part of an initiation ceremony to mark the transition into adulthood, and with widows as part of a cleansing practice to exorcise evil spirits. No young girls came forward to testify against Aniva, so he was tried for committing a “harmful cultural practice” under Malawi’s Gender Equality Act for the offences against widows. Aniva’s lawyer has indicated that he will appeal against the conviction and sentence. Women’s rights and children’s rights advocates reacted with anger to the sentence, stating "What message does this send to all perpetrators of sexual violence hiding behind discriminatory and destructive cultural practices?

A bill seeking to ban commercial surrogacy has been introduced in India. The draft law, currently before the lower house (Lok Sabha), aims to protect women from exploitation and ensure the rights of children born through surrogacy. The new restrictions would mean only infertile couples with medical letters would be able to approach surrogate mothers. Couples must also be of a certain age, heterosexual and have been married for five years. The surrogate must be related to the intending parents to eliminate middlemen, already have a child and may be a surrogate only once in her life. Violation of the bill could result in 10 years in jail. A lack of regulation around surrogacy in India has resulted in reports of women being detained in hostels and used as surrogate mothers without any safeguards for their wellbeing. Children meanwhile have often been denied the citizenship of their intending parents and left with no legal standing as many countries do not recognise surrogacy. The issue of surrogacy and how to regulate it remains fiercely contested - CRIN will publish a children’s rights position on this and other methods of assisted reproduction in the coming months.
 

Child labour

Child refugees sent from the so-called Jungle refugee camp in Calais to supposedly safe reception centres across France have claimed they endured forced labour at the hands of the French authorities, according to interviews with the charity Safe Passage UK. Many of the children said they were too scared to refuse the work, which included apple picking, because they feared it would harm their chances of claiming asylum in the UK. A quarter of those interviewed said they had not been given clean clothes since they arrived at the centres nearly four weeks ago, while 39 percent of interviewees said they felt better off in the Calais camp, a site routinely described as a slum unfit for human habitation. So far, about 350 children have been transferred to the UK, with the Home Office expecting several hundred more to be transferred from France. However, charities say around 2,000 unaccompanied minors were registered in Calais before the demolition and are campaigning for 1,000 to be brought over before Christmas.

Lawmakers in the European Union (EU) have backed a textile trade deal with Uzbekistan opposed by anti-slavery activists who say it will result in the EU profiting from forced labour in the country's cotton industry. The EU approved the deal, revising a 2011 European Parliament decision to put it on hold over allegations of child and forced labour in the Uzbek cotton industry. EU lawmakers have since commended Uzbekistan for its efforts in getting children out of the fields but stressed the deal was conditional on the country taking further action against forced labour involving adults. The deal is opposed by human rights groups which accuse Uzbekistan of operating a state-orchestrated forced labour system. Activists say that hundreds of thousands of people, including university students, teachers and health workers, are regularly forced to pick cotton for weeks in arduous conditions. Anti-Slavery International said the vote was disappointing and gave a green card to trade in goods produced by forced labour.

Roughly a third of children in developing nations are forced to miss school because they have to work, while a third of children said going to school was not always safe, according to recent research by the ChildFund Alliance. The research questioned about 6,200 children aged 10 to 12, and found the highest rate of absenteeism among the 41 nations surveyed was in Afghanistan, where nine out of 10 children had to work instead of going to school. The most dangerous school environment was reported in Burkina Faso, where one in five children said school was never safe. Despite the UN last year pledging the global goal that by 2030 all children should be able to complete free quality primary and secondary education, chronic underfunding has held back progress. Globally, some 59 million children remain outside of primary school education, according to UNICEF.

Education and civil liberties

Lawmakers in the Netherlands have approved a partial ban on face coverings in government buildings and health and educational settings, including public transport, hospitals and schools. The Interior Minister, Ronald Plasterk, described the law as “religion neutral”, but admitted that burqas and niqabs had been central to the debate. Plasterk emphasised that the law will not go so far as to completely ban full-face veils like France and Belgium, and people will still be able to appear in public streets with covered faces if they wish. Debate over burqas and full-face veils continues to break out across Europe, with similar proposals being considered in Germany and Switzerland, and a recent ban in Bulgaria threatening suspension of social security benefits for women who break the law. Read about the impact of a veil ban on children’s rights.

Republican state senator for Texas, United States, Konni Burton, has filed a bill which asserts the right of parents to all information and records relating to their child, including test scores and mental and physical health details. The bill is aimed to streamline and strengthen existing state law on a parent’s right to know about their child’s life, but critics have slammed the bill for violating the privacy of children who confide in their teachers and fear harmful repercussions at home. Burton was prompted to file the bill after controversial local school guidelines relating to the right to privacy of transgender students were revised to require parental involvement, and a federal judge in August temporarily blocked the Obama administration guidelines directing public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms which align with their gender identity. Rights activists fear that LGBT youth in particular face harm by the proposed law, raising fears that teachers will be forced to out students or face disciplinary action.

Secondary school students in Khartoum and North Darfur in Sudan took to the streets last week to protest nationwide fuel subsidy cuts, which have seen the Sudanese pound plummet against the US dollar and prices increase considerably. Students in Bahri and Omdurman were confronted by riot police using excessive force, while eyewitnesses in El Fasher reported that police used teargas and fired shots in the air to disperse the demonstrators. Fuel subsidy cuts in 2013 led to large-scale protests and a deadly crackdown in which at least 185 protesters and civilians were killed. The past few weeks have seen the government arrest dozens of protesters and opposition leaders and shut down several newspapers and private television channels in anticipation of public outcry over the cuts. Activists, civil society organisations and opposition groups called for a three-day action of civil disobedience on Sunday, resulting in unusually quiet streets in the capital this week as many workers and students chose to stay at home in protest at the austerity measures.

Armed conflict and unaccompanied children

Two former child soldiers have threatened legal action against the private security company, Aegis Defence Services, over psychological harm they claim to have suffered while employed by the organisation. The two men were adults at the time they were hired by Aegis, but had previously been recruited while younger than 13 to fight in Sierra Leone’s civil war. The men claim that the organisation failed to monitor their mental health, provide counselling or take steps to mitigate the harm they suffered while employed by the company. In April this year, a Danish documentary alleged that former child soldiers were among the 2,500 people hired by Aegis to work in Iraq and were paid as little as £13 per day. At the time, a former senior director of Aegis defended the practice, claiming that the company had a duty to recruit in Sierra Leone because of the lower costs and claimed that it would be wrong to check if its employees were former child soldiers as this practice would penalise people for work they were forced to do as children. Lawyers for the two men argue that the company had a duty to provide support to its employees to prevent harm related to their experiences as child soldiers.

One of Sudan’s largest armed groups, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, has signed an agreement with the United Nations to end the use of child soldiers. The armed group has been fighting in the regions of Kordofan and Blue Nile since 2011 when South Sudan declared independence. The agreement outlines measures to end the recruitment of children and for the release of children currently fighting within SPLM-N. The group did disclose how many children it has recruited, but the 2016 report of the Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict reported that the UN had verified 159 incidents of the recruitment of children in Sudan, affecting 2,596 children.

Recently released figures from Switzerland show a dramatic increase in the use of unscientific techniques to establish the age of unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the country. Out of an estimated 2,700 unaccompanied children who applied for asylum in the country last year, 1,034 had their wrists x-rayed to estimate their “bone age” - a procedure which has a margin of error of more than two years. This practice is based on the Greulich and Pyle Atlas, which documented the growth of white children in the United States in the 1930s, measures which are not transferrable to refugees arriving in modern day Switzerland. The registration centre in Zurich is also reported to have conducted genital exams to determine the age of young arrivals. Denise Graf, lawyer and asylum coordinator of Amnesty International was highly critical of the practice, arguing that such sensitive exams cannot be performed on children who may have suffered trauma, and least of all “without any medical purpose”.

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UPCOMING EVENTS

Investment: E-course on child rights public budgeting
Organisation: Human Rights Education Associates
Dates: 18 January - 1 February 2017
Location: Online

Asia: Course on "Frontiers of Children's Rights in the ASEAN Region"
Organisation: Leiden Law School et al. 
Dates: 23-27 January 2017
Location: Beji, Depok City, Indonesia

Participation: E-course on child participation
Organisation: Human Rights Education Associates
Dates: 1 February - 14 March 2017
Location: Online

Education: International Children’s Rights
Organisation: Leiden University
Application deadline: 1 April 2017 (non-EU) / 15 June 2017 (EU students)
Dates: September 2017 - Summer 2018
Location: Leiden, The Netherlands

Europe: Justice for Children Award
Organisations: DCI and OMCT
Subsmission deadline: 30 April 2017

Best interests: International Conference on Shared Parenting
Organisations: The National Parents Organization & the International Council on Shared Parenting
Dates: 29-31 May 2017
Location: Boston, United States

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EMPLOYMENT

Oak Institute: Fellowship in film/photography and human rights
Application deadline: Extended to 9 December 2016
Location: Maine, United States

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THE LAST WORD

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