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Summary: Ms. Judith Mulenga, of Zambia Civic Education Association, delivered the following presentation for the side event, "The impact of violence on children's right to health", at the 22nd Session of the Human Rights Council.
International NGO Council on Violence against Children report: Violating children’s right to health – harmful practices based on tradition, culture, religion and superstition The International Council was glad to have the support of Norway in New York last October when we launched our report on “Violating children’s rights – harmful practices based on tradition, culture, religion and superstition”. And we are unapologetic about promoting the report and its recommendations again here - because all of the practices listed in the report do violate, in many cases directly, the child’s right to health. We issued the report because we were concerned that the terminology of “harmful practices” had become too vague to be useful - all violations of children’s rights are harmful practices. And we felt that the challenge to these practices was not comprehensive nor fully rights-based. The International Council believes that the common element in the practices we identified is that they are perpetrated by people close to the child, most often by parents or family members, and are condoned or actively encouraged by parents or by significant adults within the child’s community. Indeed, some still enjoy majority support within communities, regions or whole states. It is the active adult justification which marks these violations, and the justifications include reference to tradition, culture, religion and superstition. As Paulo Pinheiro said when he spoke at the launch meeting in New York: “We have to get beyond banal generalisations and document and challenge the persisting ‘justifications’ in detail. I find it deeply depressing that I still often sense a very unhealthy and dangerous hesitation, even among human rights activists, in actively challenging harmful practices that target children, when the adults involved are claiming cultural or religious justifications. There is nothing new about the term “harmful traditional or cultural practices”. It has been common UN terminology for half a century. And there has been a strong focus on certain practices which impact particularly on girls – FGM and child marriage. The last thing we want to do is to reduce the impact that this focus is beginning to have on these particular gross violations. But we do want in addition to provoke a wider and unhesitant focus on a whole range of commonly justified practices that still impact on children. Sadly, the hesitancy is too often there; hesitancy even in using the CRC term “harmful traditional practices”, although it is obvious that many of these practices are ingrained in tradition and equally obvious that they are harmful; hesitancy in challenging justifications that quote religious belief, hesitancy about challenging what goes on behind the closed doors of the family home or the religious institution. Children’s rights, like women’s rights, do not stop at the door of the family home. A general condemnation of harmful practices is not going to move us on. The list of practices based on tradition, culture, religion and superstition in our report is not of course comprehensive: what we urge is investigation and documentation in every state, and within every religion. And this is not a static concept; new harmful practices emerge, they spread through migration and through modern information technology. We need explicit prohibition where the illegality of the practices is not already absolutely clear (in many cases it is of course clear because many of these practices involve criminal assault or indeed murder). We need law to be enforced and no impunity. But enforcement when parents are the perpetrators must be pursued in the best interests of the child victim. Insensitive and simply punitive interventions are not going to help children and indeed may place them in further danger. Paulo Pinheiro’s UN Study Report hoped that it would mark – I quote - “a turning point - an end to adult justification of violence against children, whether accepted as ‘tradition’ or disguised as ‘discipline’.” But the 50 years of debate on harmful traditional practices within the UN system, the clear human rights standards, the resolutions the systematic recommendations from Treaty Bodies, from the UPR, the strong General Comments of the Committee on the Rights of the Child, … None of these has achieved the turning point. Why is it so difficult to move on from grotesque practices that so obviously harm, disfigure, injure, in many cases kill children… and in every case invade their dignity and development? The turning point will not come until we drop these hesitations and apply and enforce human rights standards consistently. As our report rightly underlines, the Convention on the Rights of the Child upholds the child’s own independent right to religious freedom. Children are not born into a religion; every individual has the right to religious freedom. Thus, parents and others cannot quote their adult religious beliefs to justify perpetrating harmful practices on a child, before she or he has the capacity to provide an informed consent. Our inclusion of non-therapeutic, non-consensual male circumcision in the list reflects a growing and increasingly children’s rights-based debate about this very common practice, including the child’s right to health And in the context of today’s Human Rights Council focus on the right to health we need to highlight the failures of health education and promotion to effectively challenge false beliefs about child development and the cause and treatment of ill-health, which lead to such listed harmful practices as binding, blood-letting, food taboos and restrictions and so on. Our report’s recommendations range widely, because we want to maintain a comprehensive debate and we need to halt the persisting failures: the failures of international and regional human rights mechanisms to identify and provoke effective prohibition and elimination of the full range of these practices in all regions; the failures of political and community leadership to move parents, families and societies on from plainly harmful practices to cultures fully respectful of children’s rights. the failures of many religious leaders to insist that no form of violence against children can be justified in the name of religion and to highlight the child’s own freedom of religion. the still too common adult failure to accept fully the child’s equal status as an individual person and rights holder, entitled to full respect for their human dignity.