The week in children's rights - 1538

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In this issue:

NEW GUIDE: Using the law for children's rights

While many authorities can tolerate some traditional campaigning methods, it is usually harder to ignore the law. As part of broader campaigns, the law can be a powerful tool for achieving the changes that children need. Legal advocacy is now being used systematically in many countries - leading to strong outcomes for children - and has great potential for wider use.  

With this in mind, CRIN is launching a new introductory guide to using the law for children’s rights. It offers guidance on how to explore your options and how to promote legal advocacy work with other children’s rights advocates. This is the first version of the guide, so please let us know what you think of it, and send us any suggestions for improvements to [email protected].

LATEST NEWS AND REPORTS

Sexual exploitation and abuse

The Vatican's third ranking official has been charged with multiple sexual offences in Australia. Full details of the charges against Cardinal Pell have yet to be announced, but police from the state of Victoria said that there are multiple complaints relating to historical sexual assault offences. Pell gave evidence last year to Australia’s royal commission, which has been investigating responses to child sexual abuse relating to his tenure as an archbishop in Melbourne and Sydney, where he admitted that an institutionalised culture of disbelief allowed children being abused by priests to go unheard. Pell did not attend the hearings at the time, giving evidence from Rome as he was too sick to fly to Australia. Responding to the charges, the Cardinal has announced that he will return to Australia to clear his name, “following advice and approval by his doctors who will also advise on his travel arrangements”. He is the highest-ranking Vatican official to be charged with sexual abuse to date. The first hearing at Melbourne Magistrates’ Court is scheduled for 18 July.

At least 23 UN peacekeepers have been accused of sexual exploitation or abuse of civilians across UN missions around the world since January 2017, according to new UN figures. Since the beginning of 2017, there have been 33 recorded cases, five of which involved children. The figures show that the number of reported cases is on the rise, up to 103 in 2016, from 69 the previous year. Last month, the UN announced the withdrawal of 600 Congolese troops serving as UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic following allegations of sexual abuse. However the latest figures indicate that less than 10 days after this announcement, a new case of sexual exploitation was registered against a member of the Congolese peacekeeping force. Earlier this year, an AP investigation found that 2,000 allegations of sexual exploitation or abuse had been registered between 2005 and 2017.
 

Child protection

Plastic surgery is being promoted to children online through advertising and games, health experts in the United Kingdom have warned. A new report from the Nuffield Council of Bioethics says children are being “bombarded” by promotion of breast implants, nose jobs, and non-surgical procedures such as Botox and laser hair removal. The think tank also highlights that there are makeover apps and online plastic surgery games aimed at children as young as nine, such as Plastic Surgery Princess, Little Skin Doctor and Pimp My Face. The authors say such games and advertising contribute to the relentless promotion of “unrealistic and often discriminatory messages on how people, especially girls and women, ‘should’ look”, and warn that it can lead to childhood anxiety related to unachievable appearance ideals. Marketing these games for children, the think tank says, encourages them to “play” at having cosmetic surgery makeovers, which it considers “clearly inappropriate and irresponsible”, and urges app stores to better regulate their products.

Children as young as 12 years old are joining so-called “baby gangs” in Naples, Italy. That these child gangs even exist is a perverse result of successful policing, according to the head of the Italian state police, Franco Gabrielli. He explains that the courts have detained so many veteran gang bosses that the task of keeping Naples under the control of the Camorra has fallen to ever-younger affiliates. Clan membership also attracts the young because it offers lucrative work in a region where the youth employment rate is under 12 percent, according to the Economist, which explains that a frequent complaint is that the Camorra provides the jobs that the State fails to. One organisation, L’Oasi, a sports and cultural centre in the city, works with the children of Camorra members to keep them from drifting into criminal activities or an early death.

Children’s rights groups in Europe are among 53 organisations calling on the Council of Europe to scrap draft rules on the administrative detention of migrants to avoid human rights abuses. The joint statement, also signed by CRIN, says the draft code, developed by the European Committee on Legal Co-operation, is ill-conceived and fails to draw a distinction between migrants and criminal detainees, highlighting that in some cases “the draft rules seem to provide even lower standards than existing prison rules”. The organisations propose changes in five broad areas:

• creating a fundamentally different regime, as migration is not a crime per se;
• reinforcement of a broader set of fundamental human rights, which takes into account migrants’ safety, dignity and humanity;
• clarification that administrative immigration detention is never acceptable for particularly vulnerable migrants, including children;
• the adoption, as an urgent priority, of alternative measures to detention; and
• ensuring access to immigration detention centres for independent monitors as a safeguarding measure against arbitrary detention and ill-treatment.

Gender and racial discrimination

Women’s groups in Tanzania are urging the government to lift its ban on pregnant pupils in state schools in a joint statement that describes the prohibition as unfair punishment to the girls, their children and the nation. The statement comes after Tanzanian president, John Magufuli, said that pregnant girls will never be readmitted to school after giving birth. The home affairs minister also warned activists that they would risk de-registration if they continued to campaign for pregnant girls. Tanzania has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the world, where 21 percent of girls aged 15 to 19 have given birth, many of whom fell pregnant after rape or coercion, according to 2015-16 statistics. More than 55,000 schoolgirls have been expelled from school over the last decade for being pregnant, according to the US-based Centre for Reproductive Rights, and while wealthier families can afford to send their daughters to private school, most expelled girls resort to casual work. Underage sex is criminalised in Tanzania, with convicts facing up to 30 years in prison, but activists stress that education is the key to reducing the teenage pregnancy rate and point out that the current policy is doomed to failure.

A new study conducted in the United States has revealed that discrimination against black girls begins as young as five years old. The Georgetown Law Center surveyed 325 adults of varying ethnicities and found that black girls are seen to be more mature and less innocent than their white counterparts. The participants perceived that black girls are more independent, that they need less nurturing and protection, and that they know more about sex and adult topics. The study suggests that this dehumanising “adultification” derives from caricatures of the black woman as hypersexual and aggressive which have been part of the public consciousness since slavery. This perception likely harms the psychological development of black girls and forms a potential contributing factor to the disproportionate rates of punitive treatment in the education and juvenile justice systems for black girls. The study builds on similar results that have emerged from studies of adult perceptions of black boys, which found that they are more likely than their white peers to be misperceived as older and to face police violence if accused of a crime.
 

Health

Severe malnutrition in parts of Somalia controlled by Islamist militants has "skyrocketed" to more than three times the emergency threshold of two percent. Estimates suggest that as many as two million people currently live in areas controlled by al Shabaab, where access to affected people is limited. There are worrying echoes of 2011, when 260,000 Somalis died of famine caused by drought, conflict and lack of access to humanitarian aid. Somalia's erratic spring rains were not good enough to guarantee crop growth, and with livestock continuing to die, families are being left with little to feed their children. UNICEF has estimated that more than 275,000 children potentially face life-threatening severe acute malnutrition this year.

Health officials in Syria are scrambling to urgently vaccinate 320,000 children under the age of five following an outbreak of polio that has left at least 22 children paralysed. Health workers will likely have to coordinate with ISIS and other extremist groups to carry out the work. The disease, a crippling and potentially deadly infection that typically affects children aged less than five and can take effect in just hours has all but been eliminated except in three countries – Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. Prior to the country’s ongoing conflict, Syria had an effective healthcare operation for addressing challenges such as polio. At the start of the conflict, vaccination rates were around 95 percent but they have now fallen to around 60 percent.

New research has shown that 16,000 children in Australia are currently being prescribed antipsychotic drugs, including 1,383 children aged from two to six. Many medical experts believe they are prescribed inappropriately and are being used as first line of treatment, rather than a last resort. Some regions have even been found to have prescribing rates 22.5 times higher than other areas. The chairman of child psychiatry at the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, Dr Robertson, said: “One of the concerns is that prescribing medication is easier to do than delivering evidence-based, high quality psychosocial interventions. Where there is a shortage of resources, you worry that medications are relied on too much.” He added that antipsychotic drugs should never be used in isolation, they should be used along with psychological therapy and social support from home and school. Experts have also pointed out that antipsychotics are being prescribed as a form of behaviour restraint, rather than a form of psychosis treatment.

Child labour

The World Bank has been accused of funding agricultural projects in Uzbekistan linked to State-sponsored forced labour, including child labour, in the cotton industry. Human Rights Watch and the Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights said they have documented cases in an area where the Uzbek government is implementing a World Bank-funded project. The groups said it is “highly likely” other World Bank funded projects are also affected. Uzbekistan has faced sustained criticism over its mass mobilisation of people to work as unpaid labourers during cotton harvest and planting seasons. Following bans on Uzbek cotton by international retailers and fashion brands, the country has embarked on reforms to eradicate child labour from its cotton industry, yet campaigners say forced labour – and sometimes child labour – still persists. Researchers who worked on the report carried out interviews with nearly 100 people across the country, who allege that they were subjected to or witnessed forced and child labour, with the government forcing public and private sector employees and children to work under duress. Human rights campaigners attempting to monitor conditions during the harvest have allegedly been threatened, beaten and detained.

In parts of Ukraine, children are spending the summer months increasingly engaging in illegal amber mining, according to a new investigation. Amber mining is also associated with serious health risks, particularly for children. The head of the neurological department of a hospital in the Zhitomir region, Yury Shevchuk, has studied the long-term health problems associated with this form of mining, and has found that sterility is becoming increasingly common in young men. The harmful side effects of this work have become so common that local doctors are now reportedly able to determine the so-called "miner's diseases" after hearing about a few symptoms. Patients commonly suffer from gastrointestinal diseases, breathing disorders and intoxication from the methane gas that they inhale in the mining process.

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UPCOMING EVENTS

Child rights: Understanding human rights in practice 
Organisation: British Sociological Association
Dates: 12 July 2017
Location: Essex, United Kingdom

Child abuse: ISPCAN European conference on child abuse & neglect
Organisation: International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect
Dates: 1-4 October 2017
Location: The Hague, Netherlands

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EMPLOYMENT

Children as Actors for Transforming Society: Executive Director
Application deadline: 7 July 2017
Location: Paris, France

Plan International Thailand: Consultant 
Application deadline: 9 July 2017
Location: Negotiable

Conflict Dynamics International: Children & Armed Conflict Program Director
Application deadline: 10 July 2017
Location: Cambridge, United States

Asia-Europe Foundation: Training on Human Rights & Children
Application deadline: 19 July 2017
Location: Sofia, Bulgaria

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