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[DAKAR, 20 November 2006] - About one in three children in West Africa live apart from their parents, leaving them vulnerable to violence as many work in domestic service, on farms or beg on the streets, a UN expert said on Monday. Jean-Claude Legrand, regional child protection adviser for the United Nations children's agency UNICEF, told Reuters many West African children were sent away from home by their parents, often from an early age. Some went to live with relatives, to help in the household, while others living in Islamic societies were sent to Koranic schools for a religious education. In more extreme cases, children were lent out by their parents to work to pay off a debt, or were sold to traffickers who smuggled them across borders to toil on plantations growing cocoa and other cash crops far from their homes. "This leaves the door open to all kinds of abuse, physical and sexual," said Legrand, who spoke after the presentation in Dakar of a global UN study on violence against children. Legrand added that what had started as a cultural tradition of solidarity - the sending of children to help or stay with other members of extended families - had turned into cases of exploitation of the children themselves. Families in poor states like Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso were handing their sons aged between 5 and 15 over to religious teachers called "marabouts", ostensibly to learn the Koran and obtain an Islamic education in neighbouring Senegal and Mali. But many were ending up on the streets as beggars and are a common sight in the Senegalese capital Dakar where they approach motorists with tins to ask for money. UNICEF said they were often sent out by their marabouts who punished them if they did not bring back enough money. "These aren't schools anymore, but systems of exploiting children," said Barbara Bentein, UNICEF's deputy regional director for West and Central Africa. Legrand said marabouts from Senegal were going to Guinea-Bissau to recruit children from their families. The experts said cases of physical violence and sexual abuse against children working in domestic service were often difficult to detect. Other examples of violence against children in West Africa, specifically young girls, were the customs of early marriage, and excision, or the cutting of female genitals. This last practice was widespread in countries like Guinea, Sierra Leone and Mali and followed age-old traditions, often linked to initiation into womenhood or attempts to control female sexuality. "It happens in patriarchal societies ... it's to do with the domination of women by men," said Abdoul Karim Gueye, regional child protection adviser for Plan International, an organisation that addresses the causes of poverty and its impact on children. Further information
pdf: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L20807011.htm