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In this issue:

LATEST NEWS AND REPORTS

Violence and minimum ages

Children as young as 14 are among hundreds of students, political activists and protesters in Egypt who have been abducted, tortured and forcibly disappeared in a bid to wipe out peaceful dissent, according to a new Amnesty International report. Three to four people are seized every day in the country, local NGOs say. The report features the detailed cases of 17 people, including five children, who were subjected to enforced disappearance, held incommunicado for up to seven months, and denied access to their lawyers or families or any independent judicial oversight. In two of the cases, 14-year-old boys were disappeared and suffered beatings, rape and electric shocks to extract a false ‘confession’. A state security prosecutor later warned one of the boys that he would face further electric shocks if he tried to retract his ‘confession’. In some cases, even after the child’s release was ordered by the Public Prosecutor, security forces would subject them to enforced disappearance for a second time before bringing fresh charges against them. The report alleges that judicial authorities are colluding with security forces, failing to pursue torture allegations and accepting ‘confessions’ extracted through torture.

Lawmakers in the Philippines are seeking to lower the age of criminal responsibility from nine years old. The lawmakers in question claim that youth offenders are being “pampered”, while “adult criminals – individually and/or in organised cabal – knowingly and purposely make use of youth below 15 years old to commit crimes, such as drug trafficking, aware that they cannot be held criminally liable.” The move comes as a proposal to bring back the death penalty for heinous crimes was also introduced. Such cases would include treason, arson, and drug-related offences. Some senators fear the two bills could lead under-18s to be sentenced to life imprisonment or even death. Prior to his election, President Rodrigo Duterte who vowed to return the death penalty as well as to amend the juvenile justice law.

Read more about children’s rights and the age of criminal responsibility.
 

Radicalisation, digital rights and privacy

A human rights group in the United Kingdom has condemned the government's flagship anti-radicalisation measure for schools, Prevent, as counterproductive. The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 requires teachers from the childcare sector up to university to identify apparent signs of student extremism and refer youngsters to the government’s deradicalisation programme, known as Channel. Rights Watch UK conducted interviews with affected students, teachers and parents and found many accounts of discrimination and overzealous reporting. The organisation found that children as young as four had been identified as being at risk of being radicalised just because of the way they pronounce words or because of clothes they wear. In another case, a 16-year-old was referred to Prevent after borrowing a book on terrorism from the school library. Also as part of online safety measures in the UK, schools will begin to monitor every website a student visits from September this year, despite concerns from rights groups that the measure will impact children’s right to information and privacy.

Claims that sexually explicit content is routinely sent to minors via a section of Snapchat have resulted in a lawsuit against the company in the United States. The video and picture sharing app is a phenomenon among young people with an estimated 10 billion videos viewed per day, allowing users to share messages that quickly disappear with friends and followers. However, one Californian 14-year-old and his mother have claimed that Snapchat Discover, a feature showcasing stories from the app’s media partners, frequently includes inappropriate material. The initial complaint was made after the teenager read an explicit article involving a favourite Disney character but it quickly became evident how much other adult content was being offered after a short session of scrolling through different curators’ content streams. Snapchat claims it has not yet been served with a complaint but stood by its partners’ editorial independence in a statement.
 

Education, discrimination and investment

Hundreds of school textbooks in Morocco will be modified to remove sexist or discriminatory content, the Minister of Education has said. Mr Rachid Benmokhtar explained this process is being taken as school textbooks often present discriminatory content towards gender and race groups as well as towards disabled people and rural citizens. The revision of 390 different school textbooks has already begun in preparation for the 2016-2017 school year, which starts in September 2016. More than 400 comments have been made already by editors attempting to address a persistent gender bias in textbooks which is “sapping girls’ motivation, self-esteem and participation in school,” said Manos Antoninis from UNESCO’s global education monitoring report.

More than 170 tonnes of food had to be flown in to one of Mexico’s poorest states after teachers protesting against education reforms blockaded the main highways in a standoff with the government. Teachers resorted to creating the roadblocks in protest over a series of reforms, including a new test for all teachers which many fear will see them losing their professional status. In many schools, unions are in charge of recruiting, teaching jobs are more or less hereditary and bad teachers are rarely fired, stacking the odds against the students. Mexico consistently ranks among the worst in the world for per-student spending and achievement rankings, and the government has blamed poor student outcomes on cronyism, corruption and padding payrolls.

A new resolution adopted by the Human Rights Council urges member States to regulate education providers and invest in public education. The resolution urges all States to “address any negative impacts of the commercialisation of education”, in particular by putting in place a framework to regulate and monitor education providers, holding to account those that negatively impact the right to education. The agreement follows a previous resolution from June 2015, but now includes the need to address commercialisation in the core of the text. Acknowledging that “education [i]s a public good”, the resolution also urges States to “recognise the significant importance of investment in public education to the maximum of available resources” and to “increase and improve domestic and external financing for education”.
 

Exploitation and child marriage

Senegal’s President Macky Sall has threatened to imprison the parents of child beggars as a deterrent to the longstanding practice, as dozens of children were rounded up in the capital Dakar. It is commonplace for parents in Senegal to send their children to Islamic schools called daaras, where they, alongside trafficked children, receive food, shelter and quranic teachings, with large numbers of these children being forced onto the streets by their teachers in order to beg for money. Despite Senegal passing a law in 2005 aimed at stopping the abuse of these students, only a dozen teachers have so far been prosecuted. Issa Kouyate, founder of a shelter for street children in Senegal, states that sweeping these children off the streets will not put an end to their trafficking and exploitation. For Kouyate, “this is the ideal time to talk with the Koranic teachers and invite them to put their daaras (Islamic schools) in order”, adding that the government must not “bend under pressure” from teachers wishing to maintain the status quo. CRIN’s case study on this issue can be found here.

The Gambia and Tanzania have both introduced new measures to combat child marriage, with the focus placed on criminalisation in both countries. Gambian President Yahya Jemmah instructed the Gambian congress that they have a deadline of 21 July to pass a bill outlawing the practice, with long jail sentences for adult spouses, parents and any persons aware of such a marriage who fail to act upon said information. The Tanzanian High Court recently held that child marriage was illegal, ruling that certain provisions of the national marriage law were unconstitutional. This decision follows new provisions passed by the parliament in June rendering it illegal for anyone to marry primary and secondary school girls under any circumstances, even with parental consent as previously permitted. Tanzania has one of the highest adolescent pregnancy and birth rates in the world and the Tanzanian Attorney General stated that the measures are being taken as a complement to the country’s free education policy.

The second largest cigarette company in the world, British American Tobacco, has said it will investigate its supply farms in Bangladesh after a campaign group discovered children working up to 16 hours a day growing and processing tobacco. Swedwatch reported that the child labour in Bangladesh’s tobacco farms was “widespread”. The organisation says the children were pulled out of school to work during the harvest season, and also engaged in tasks that exposed them to green tobacco plants, dust from tobacco and smoke from kiln drying. Meanwhile, in India, a film director who had travelled to the country’s northeastern region in order to shoot material for a documentary on forests, inadvertently discovered children as young as five working in coal mines. The young boys would descend narrow, steep chutes with makeshift ladders, pick axes and flashlights in order to dig coal from hard rock. The director eventually gathered enough material to produce a documentary, ‘Fireflies in the Abyss’, receiving the award for Best Film in the Mumbai International Film Festival this year.

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UPCOMING EVENTS

South Asia: Submissions for journal - ‘Institutionalised Children: Explorations and Beyond’  
Organisation: Udayan Care
Abstract deadline: 15 July 2016

Digital rights: Children & young people's rights in the digital age pre-conference
Organisation: Int’l Association for Media & Communication Research
Event date: 26-27 July 2016
Location: London, UK

Violence: 21st ISPCAN International Congress on Child Abuse and Neglect
Organisation: International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN)
Dates: 28-31 August 2016
Location: Calgary, Canada

Foster care: International Foster Care 2016 European Conference
Organisation: International Foster Care Organisation
Dates: 1-4 September 2016
Location: Sheffield, UK

Advertising: Child rights based tools for protecting kids from alcohol marketing
Organisation: IOGT International
Dates: 2 September 2016
Location: Liverpool, UK

Participation: Young Citizens & Society: Fostering Civic Participation
Organisation: University of Strathclyde
Dates: 2-3 September 2016
Location: Glasgow, Scotland

Changing Global Perceptions: Child Protection & Bodily Integrity
Organisation: Genital Autonomy
Dates: 14-16 September 2016
Location: Keele, UK

Education: Achieving education for all and eliminating child labour
Organisation: The International Training Centre of the ILO
Dates: 25-30 September 2016
Location: Turin, Italy

Alternative care: International alternative care conference
Organisation: University of Geneva and Institut de droits l’enfant
Event dates: 3-5 October 2016
Location: Geneva, Switzerland

Right to work: Eliminating child labour and promoting decent work in agriculture
Organisation:The International Training Centre of the ILO (ITCILO)
Dates: 14-18 November 2016
Location: Turin, Italy

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EMPLOYMENT

Consortium for Street Children: CEO
Application deadline: 4 September 2016
Location: London, UK

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THE LAST WORD

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