Submission by Human Rights Watch to the Committee on the Rights of the Child for its Day of General Discussion on State Violence Against Children

Summary: All states must be urged to abolish
deep-rooted prejudices against
children who have disabilities and
children abandoned by their parents,
vigorously address reports of abuse,
and ensure that all abandoned and
orphaned children, whether disabled
or otherwise, receive full respect for
their human rights and protection
against discrimination.

1 Committee on the Rights of the Child Day of General Discussion State Violence Against Children Friday, 22 September 2000 – OHCHR (Palais Wilson, Geneva) Submission by Human Rights Watch 2 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH CHILDREN’S RIGHTS DIVISION 350 Fifth Avenue, 34th floor, New York, New York 10118 USA Submission from Human Rights Watch to the Committee on the Rights of the Child for its Day of General Discussion on State Violence Against Children September 22, 2000 I. GENERAL RECOMMENDATIONS REGARDING MECHANISMS TO ADDRESS STATE VIOLENCE AGAINST CHILDREN…………………………………..…………..3 II. MISTREATMENT, ABUSE AND NEGLECT OF CHILDREN IN THE CARE OF THE STATE …………………………………………………………………………………….4 · Summary ………………………………………………………………………….……4 · Possible recommendations to states……………………………………………………...5 · Example: Russia………………………………………………………………………….6 · Example: China…………………………………………………………………………..8 III. VIOLENCE AGAINST CHILDREN IN THE CONTEXT OF “LAW AND PUBLIC ORDER” …………………………………………………………………………………….10 · Summary…………………………………………………………………………………10 · Possible recommendations to states …………………………………………………….11 · Illegal detention and police torture of children during interrogation……………....……12 · Police violence against street children ………………………………………………….13 · Conditions in juvenile justice facilities and prisons ………………………….………...15 · Treatment of children in detention, including corporal punishment and torture………...17 · Detaining children with adults ………………………………………………..…………19 IV.ANNEX: Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Children …………………….……………..22 3 I. GENERAL RECOMMENDATIONS REGARDING MECHANISMS TO ADDRESS STATE VIOLENCE AGAINST CHILDREN Violence against children—including summary execution, police abuse of street children, beatings and torture in detention facilities, and horrifying neglect and maltreatment in orphanages—is pervasive in nearly every part of the world. Unfortunately, these acts of violence are often seen as lamentable, yet isolated incidents rather than a global phenomenon. Despite the Convention on the Rights of the Child’s clear standards prohibiting all forms of physical or mental violence, millions of children continue to suffer violence and abuse. Perpetrators are rarely investigated and prosecuted, and in many cases, the abuse is carried out by law enforcement officials who are responsible for children's protection. In addition, there is no existing global mechanism to address this international problem. Although many instances of violence against children may fall within the mandates of current human rights mechanisms, (including the Special Rapporteurs on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography; on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Execution; on Torture; on Harmful Traditional Practices; and on Violence Against Women), the existing framework of mechanisms is unable to give adequate attention to the pervasive violence against children, or to help the international community recognize and address it effectively. Human Rights Watch welcomes the Committee on the Rights of the Child’s decision to focus its attention on state violence against children. In addition to issuing recommendations to states parties to the Convention regarding stronger protections for children vulnerable to state violence, we urge the Committee to consider recommending new and broad initiatives at the international level to galvanize global efforts to help end violence against children. We would like to submit the following suggestions for your consideration: 1. The Committee on the Rights of the Child should urge the Commission on Human Rights to consider the appointment of a special rapporteur on violence against children. This rapporteur, working with the Committee on the Rights of the Child and other relevant UN bodies, would bring needed international attention to the pervasive violence against children, monitor adherence to the standards that protect children, investigate abuses, and present recommendations to better protect children from violence and abuse. [For specific issues to be examined by a Special Rapporteur and methods for carrying out his or her mandate, please see the attached Annex.] 2. The Committee on the Rights of the Child should urge the Commission on Human Rights to establish a major study on violence against children along the lines of the effective and influential 1996 Machel study on “The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children.” 3. The Committee on the Rights of the Child should urge UN agencies to undertake a major campaign against violence against children. The United Nations Children's Fund should act as the lead agency in such a campaign, supported actively by the World Health Organization, 4 United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, the International Labor Organization and other relevant organizations. 4. The Committee on the Rights of the Child should urgently request current special rapporteurs to make special efforts to look into violence against children during their investigations, and to include their findings in subsequent reports. 5. The Committee on the Rights of the Child should urge the High Commissioner on Human Rights to organize a special workshop for all relevant special rapporteurs to examine violence against children and ways in which special rapporteurs can more effectively incorporate this issue into their work. 6. The Committee on the Rights of the Child should urge the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to investigate violence against children in refugee camps, to protect children from such violence, and to discipline appropriately those found responsible. II. MISTREATMENT, ABUSE AND NEGLECT OF CHILDREN IN THE CARE OF THE STATE Summary: Human Rights Watch has published reports on the institutionalization of orphans and abandoned children in Romania, China, and Russia.1 These detailed horrifying patterns of severe abuse, malign neglect, and widespread corruption. Mortality rates are extremely high for institutionalized children, with those in China reaching epidemic proportions. Even when children survive in these institutions beyond infancy, they are often treated as if they are not human. They may be denied interaction, stimulation, medical care, and education. Children are subjected to both physical and psychological abuse, and frequently learn to live in fear of the very people who are their only providers of care. In some countries, children are abandoned at alarming rates, due to family poverty, restrictive population control policies, and cultural traditions that value boys more than girls. Prejudice against children with disabilities leads parents to institutionalize children who are disabled or perceived to have disabilities. A by-product of this prejudice is that all abandoned children may be assumed to be disabled. Once institutionalized, this prejudice can lead to such extreme neglect or abuse that children’s very lives may be endangered. Chronic failure to investigate and discipline staff who abuse children allows it to continue, and staff who try to speak out may be punished or fired. Institutions are often closed to outside scrutiny and children have no mechanisms for reporting abuse. Children deprived of a family environment are “entitled to special protection and assistance provided by the State” (CRC art. 20). However, in these reports it is revealed that the 1 Romania’s Orphans: A Legacy of Repression (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1990), Death by Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China’s Orphanages (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996) and Abandoned to the State: Cruelty and Neglect in Russian Orphanages (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1998). 5 human rights of children in the care of the state are consistently and egregiously violated, with no opportunity to be represented or heard (CRC art. 12) and no way to challenge the deprivations of their liberty (CRC art. 37). Their rights to health (CRC art. 24), education (CRC art. 28), privacy, honor and reputation (CRC art. 16), and even life (CRC art. 6) are repeatedly violated. They are discriminated against because of their birth status and their (real or perceived) disabilities (CRC art. 2). Disabled children’s rights to “enjoy a full and decent life, in conditions which ensure dignity, promote self-reliance and facilitate the child’s active participation” (CRC art. 23) are sadly and often cruelly violated. Their rights to be free and protected from physical or mental violence, abuse, negligence, exploitation, and sexual abuse (CRC art. 19), as well as torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (CRC art. 37), are often purposefully violated – by the only people in a position to offer such protection. Even after these violations, orphans in these countries are also denied recovery from abuses and reintegration “in an environment which fosters the health, self-respect and dignity of the child” (CRC art. 39). Possible recommendations to states by the Committee on the Rights of the Child: · Ensure that children held in orphanages or other non- correctional facilities are not subjected to physical or psychological abuse or corporal punishment of any kind. · Investigate incidents of abuse of children and appropriately discipline staff members found guilty of such abuse; dismiss guilty staff and bring criminal charges where indicated. · Appoint an independent commission of experts from the fields of pediatrics, psychology, neurology, and early childhood education, vested with full authority to conduct unannounced visits to institutions and to order sanctions for violations of children’s rights. · Furnish children with information about their basic rights. · Establish effective and confidential complaint procedures for children and their families; ensure that complaints are investigated by an independent outside authority. · Ensure that staff members receive training in handling and treating children and in the basic human rights to which children are entitled. · Ensure that children are placed in institutions only where there is no reasonable alternative; urge states to remove from institutions abandoned children and children with disabilities wherever possible; reallocate resources devoted to institutional care to develop alternative humane, non-discriminatory care. · Support efforts of families to keep children at home, including children with disabilities. · Ensure that children receive adequate education, health and mental health care. · Encourage public education campaigns and outreach to dispel prejudices against abandoned children and children with disabilities. 6 · Ensure that institutionalized children receive full protection against discrimination and full respect for their human rights. · Ensure that children have access to assistance or representation from child advocates or child welfare experts in any proceeding bearing on their future, and that children are allowed to express their wishes and concerns in any such proceeding. The following examples of abuse and neglect suffered by children are drawn from Human Rights Watch’s most recent reports on orphanages in Russia and China. Russia In Russia, children have been abandoned to the state at a rate of more than 100,000 per year. Many are placed in orphanages, where they are exposed to appalling levels of cruelty and neglect. They may be beaten, locked in freezing rooms for days at a time, or sexually abused, and are often subjected to degrading treatment by staff. Russian babies who are classified as disabled are segregated into separate rooms where they are changed and fed, but are bereft of stimulation and lacking in medical care. Confined to cribs, they stare at the ceiling, and are not encouraged to walk or talk. At age four, these and other children who are labeled retarded or “oligophrenic” (“small- brained”) are sent to locked and isolated “psycho-neurological internats.” According to one Russian doctor, these internats are “like a prison to the brain. There’s a total lack of sensory stimulation. There’s no input, no competition with other children if the others are even more retarded. It’s just a process of slowing down, slowing down, then idling – and then – stop.”2 At least 30,000 children have been labeled “ineducable,” and relegated to the psycho-neurological internats, where they may be confined to cots, often on bare rubber mattresses, and left to lie half-naked in their own filth. Children deemed “too active” or “too difficult” are often placed in dark and barren rooms, sometimes tethered to a bench or their bed by a limb. Others are restrained in makeshift straightjackets made of dingy cotton sacks pulled over the torso and drawn at the waist and neck. One child welfare advocate estimates that the death rate in internaty is twice the rate in the general population.3 A 1996 national statistic from Ukraine indicated that “approximately thirty percent of all severely disabled children in special homes – a staggering figure – die before they reach eighteen.”4 In June 1998, four months after Human Rights Watch saw one internat, we received a report from a regular visitor there that one of the emaciated children – a nine year old girl – had died. The visitor thought the girl had not been getting enough food, and used to go there to wash her. The orphanage misinformed the visitor of the burial time, and when she arrived, it had already taken place. At the site, she saw a lot of unmarked graves, and learned that the other 2 Human Rights Watch, Abandoned to the State: Cruelty and Neglect in Russian Orphanages (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1998), p. 76. 3 Ibid., p. 22. 4 Ibid., p. 23. children from the orphanage were made to dig the grave for the dead child. According to the visitor, the director of that internat told her that she does not report deaths to the authorities in order to keep the $300 allocated to the deceased child per month earmarked for her institution.5 Children deemed “educable” and who pass the test at age four are sent to a dyetskii dom, or children’s home. Human Rights Watch concluded from observations and interviews that the standard orphanages were relatively clean and provided adequate food. The children had access to a local public school and sometimes even had extracurricular activities. However, these schools had a dark side as well—abuse, dereliction of responsibility, and gratuitous cruelty also emerged. The variations on acts of corporal and psychological punishment fell into two broad patterns. In the first instance, adult staff members, with the informal consent of the orphanage director, strike and humiliate children. Then, in an elaborate version of this direct abuse, the adults engage other orphans with them to punish a child “collectively.” In one example of collective punishment, a student recalled that one teacher would grab a student, strip off his or her clothes, and force the student to crawl on all fours in front of everyone. “Then the rest of us children had to kick the child and sit on him like a horse – to humiliate him. The kids push and kick and pull hair and ride him like an animal. [The teacher] was an active sadist.”6 This proxy pattern was particularly insidious because the favored children developed a repertoire of vicious and injurious punishments which the older, stronger orphans inflicted upon the younger or weaker ones. In Russian, this is known by its familiar colloquial term “dyedovshchina,” or hazing, which is taken from military slang. Some of the punishments by proxy, meted out by the children themselves, included forcing a smaller child into the small wooden clothes chest that each child has and throwing him out the window; “in the wind,” where smaller children are held upside down outside a (fourth story on one account) window; and “velociped” (“bicycle”), an army technique where balls of cotton are stuck between a child’s toes and then lit on fire.7 One boy recalled: “They did a torture called “electric chair” on me. I was laid on a metal bed, naked. Then someone takes wires that are connected to 220 volt electricity and touches the metal bed. The power runs through it and the kid lying on the bed shakes.”8 Corporal punishment and abuse by staff members included beating, shoving a child’s head in the toilet, squeezing a hand in a vise, squeezing testicles during interrogation, locking children in a freezing, unheated room for days, engaging children in sexual relations, and sending children to a psychiatric institution as punishment. In addition, public shaming often sharpens corporal punishment. One child was thrown out a first floor window by the staff psychologist, a teacher, and the deputy director of the orphanage. After complaining about this treatment, he was subsequently punished by being stripped in front of an entire classroom of both boys and girls. The teacher took off all his clothes and threw them away. When one girl was caught trying to smoke at the summer camp, a notoriously cruel teacher dragged her in her underwear to the boys’ shower to humiliate her. After being institutionalized their whole lives, orphans are unprepared to enter society at large. As one orphanage staff member put it, “they’re not prepared for future life. They don’t know how to make money, even to make tea! Look at the official statistics.”9 The statistics are grim indeed. According to the Russian Procuracy General, some 15,000 children leave state dyetskiye doma every year. Within several years, 5,000 will be unemployed; 6,000 will be homeless; 3,000 will have criminal records; and 1,500 will commit suicide.10 China In 1989, orphans and abandoned children in welfare institutions in China faced a less than 50 percent chance of surviving for more than a year. The overall mortality rate in 1989 for the Chinese provinces of Fujian, Shaanxi, Guangxi, and Henan showed that institutionalized orphans faced overall annual mortality rates ranging from 59.2 percent to 72.5 percent. These rates were far higher than the rate documented in any other country. For instance, the death rate from neglect and infectious disease in one of Romania’s most abusive state orphanages was 40 percent in 1989 – these conditions drew worldwide outrage over the plight of Romania’s orphans and handicapped children. In 1991, official figures put the annual deaths-to-admissions ratio in China’s best-known and most prestigious orphanage, the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute, at 77.6. 11 Most Western media reports assumed that poor conditions in Chinese orphanages were due to lack of resources. But the evidence gathered by Human Rights Watch refuted this, and suggested instead that many Chinese orphanages – including some with death rates among the worst in the country – enjoyed budgets that provide more than adequately for wages, bonuses, and other personnel-related costs. Expenses for children’s food, clothing, and other necessities, however, were extremely low in institutions throughout the country. Given this disparity, the management and staff of China’s orphanages cannot excuse their failings by pointing to lack of funding or inadequately paid employees. Our research suggests that high mortality rates were due to something far more sinister: a deliberate and apparently systematic program of eliminating unwanted infants through starvation and medical neglect. In addition the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute seemed to be characterized by a pattern of more active abuse. Older children in particular were subject to many forms of cruel and degrading treatment, including beatings, torture, sexual abuse and forced labor. Numerous witnesses have reported that before 1993, infants and children at the Children’s Welfare Institute were routinely tied to cribs, beds, and chairs, chiefly as a means of reducing the staff workload. The policy of tying children up appears to have been a factor 9 contributing to the large number of deaths of orphans in the winter of late 1991, during a period of extremely cold weather. An investigation team from the Shanghai Bureau of Supervision in December 1991 reported that large numbers of children were being kept tied to their beds. The team also discovered several small children tied to chairs, often wearing only thin clothing with no shoes or socks, and able to relieve themselves only through holes in the chair seats into chamberpots placed underneath. A number of these children had developed blue-black discoloration on their skin, apparently a symptom of advanced hypothermia aggravated by the immobilization of their limbs. Virtually all older orphans at the Children’s Welfare Institute before 1993 suffered violent physical abuse at least occasionally at the hands of orphanage employees. Some of the most common methods employed included: · forcing children to assume the “airplane” and “motorcycle” positions for long periods of time (respectively, bent forward horizontally at the waist with arms held vertically upward, and sitting unsupported at half-squat with arms stretched forward horizontally). In some cases, these techniques were supplemented by forcing children to balance bowls of hot water on their wrists, heads, or knees or to squat over bowls of boiling water, so that scalding occurred when the child fell; · forcing children to kneel on ridged washboards for long periods of time; · hanging children upside down with their heads submerged in water, until nosebleeds and near-suffocation ensued. This technique, known as qiang shui (“choking on water”), was reportedly the one most feared by children. Reports suggest that these punishments were often inflicted for relatively minor disciplinary infractions, or simply on the whim of the child-care workers themselves. Some Western observers have charged that the phenomenally high death rates among China’s abandoned children resulted from neglect and lack of medical training on the part of orphanage employees. However, medical records and testimony obtained by Human Rights Watch showed that deaths at the Shanghai orphanage were in many cases deliberate and cruel. Child-care workers reportedly selected unwanted infants and children for death by intentional deprivation of food and water – a process known among the workers as the “summary resolution” of children’s alleged medical problems. When an orphan chosen in this manner was visibly on the point of death from starvation or medical neglect, orphanage doctors were then asked to perform medical “consultations” which served as a ritual marking the child for subsequent termination of care, nutrition, and other life-saving intervention. Deaths from acute malnutrition were then, in many cases, falsely recorded as having resulted from other causes, often entirely spurious or irrelevant conditions such as “mental deficiency” and “cleft palate.” Reports from the Shanghai orphanage also indicated that medical staff there misused their authority in other ways. In several cases, children who were accused of misbehavior or were in a position to expose abuses at the orphanage were falsely diagnosed as “mentally ill” and transferred to psychiatric hospitals against their will. Many other children were given powerful drugs without any apparent medical justification, in order to control their behavior. Conclusion: Many of the practices found in state-run institutions for children amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Tying children in sacks, tethering them to furniture, confining them needlessly to beds, warehousing them in barren and windowless rooms, denying them available food, keeping them in unsanitary accommodations or in inadequate clothing, denying them appropriate medical treatment—all these practices constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Physical and psychological abuse by staff, and negligent practices that facilitate sexual and physical abuse by other children also also violate the state’s duty to protect children in its care from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In some cases, beatings and other forms of punishment clearly amount to torture. All states must be urged to abolish deep-rooted prejudices against children who have disabilities and children abandoned by their parents, vigorously address reports of abuse, and ensure that all abandoned and orphaned children, whether disabled or otherwise, receive full respect for their human rights and protection against discrimination. IV. VIOLENCE AGAINST CHILDREN IN THE CONTEXT OF “LAW AND PUBLIC ORDER” Summary: Human Rights Watch has published eighteen reports on violence against children in the context of law and public order since 1991. These reports have covered fourteen countries.12 Through our investigations we have interviewed hundreds of children, advocates, social workers, NGO representatives, government officials, police, members of the judiciary, lawyers, and staff at juvenile institutions. Key findings from the most recent reports are set forth below, and they show a surprising consistency in the types of abuses found. All over the world, children are all too often subject to extreme violence at the hands of the police, and while in detention facilities. They are beaten for punishment and discipline, for revenge, and for no reason at all. They are denied food, put in solitary confinement, and restrained for extended periods. Children are charged as adults and often confined with adults. Even when not confined with adults, they are often not segregated according to the reason for detention – this can result in an eight-year-old child “in need of protection” being housed with a sixteen-year-old convicted for murder. They are at risk of extortion and physical and sexual assault by other inmates and by police and staff. Detained children are denied education, recreation, rehabilitation, and medical care. Overcrowding of prisons means that they are often forced to sleep on the floor, share beds, or trade their clothing or money for a space to sleep. Street children, because they are poor, young, small, ignorant of their rights, and do not often have any adults to whom they can turn for assistance, are especially easy targets for police. At the hands of both police and others (from whom the police rarely protect them), street 11 children suffer illegal detention, abuse, extortion, sexual assault, and even deadly attacks both on the streets and in the prison and detention systems. From their first contact with mechanisms of “law and public order,” children’s right to be treated “in a manner consistent with the promotion of the child’s sense of dignity and worth” (CRC art. 40.1) may be violated. The treatment they often experience and conditions that they endure violate their rights to be protected from all forms of torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (CRC art. 37.a), sexual abuse and exploitation (CRC art. 34), and any other form of abuse (CRC art. 19). Possible recommendations to states by the Committee on the Rights of the Child: · Investigate violence against children in state institutions, both correctional and detention facilities; protect children from such violence, and discipline appropriately those responsible. · Institute training programs for judges, police, staff of correctional and other institutions in handling and treating children, and in the basic human rights to which children are entitled. · Ensure that children have knowledge and understanding of their basic human rights. · Establish effective and confidential complaint mechanisms in state institutions, with the authority to initiate and conduct investigations. Such mechanisms should be directly accessible to children, and its actions subject to review by outside authorities, including NGOs. · Ensure that children are not held with adults in detention or correctional facilities, where they are particularly vulnerable to abuse. · Ensure that children are never subject to the death penalty. · Ensure that children are not criminally prosecuted for status offenses--actions that would not be criminal offenses if committed by an adult, such as truancy, running away from home, or being "incorrigible." Incarcerating children for these offenses may expose them to violent behavior on the part of staff or other inmates. · Ensure that children are represented at court or other hearings bearing on their future, and that they receive fair treatment under law. · Ensure that children are treated with dignity and respect during any criminal or other proceedings. · Investigate police violence against street children, protect children from such violence, and discipline appropriately those responsible. · Investigate police round-ups of children, in which children are detained arbitrarily and often abused physically and sexually. 1. Illegal detention and police torture of children during interrogation In many countries, children are detained by police without sufficient cause, for too long, without notification to their parents or guardians, or simply as a mechanism of intimidation. Such detention is often accompanied by brutal interrogations and torture. Illegal conduct by police is rarely prosecuted, even when children die in custody. This impunity reinforces the stronghold police have over children and communities. Additional factors contributing to such practices include police prejudices (for instance against street children or Roma), poorly paid and trained police forces, and a culture of violence within police departments that fosters abusive behavior. In Pakistan in May 1998, a thirteen-year-old boy, Ghulam Jilani, died just hours after being arrested and taken to a police station in Mansehra.13 Though officially reported as a suicide, an account provided to Human Rights Watch by another boy who was arrested with Jilani indicated that he died after severe and prolonged torture. The autopsy report stated that Jilani had died of head injuries; the other boy had also been physically abused while in custody, and sustained contusions on his arm and leg. Interviews by Human Rights Watch of twenty children corroborated the findings of a medical team that interviewed 200 Pakistani children in Karachi’s Youthful Offenders Industrial School. The team classified the torture and ill-treatment to which children were subjected into two categories: “major torture” and “minor torture.” Major torture included severe beatings, electric shocks, hanging, cheera (stretching apart of the victim’s legs, sometimes in combination with kicks to the genitalia), cuts, and burns. Minor torture included slapping, verbal abuse, food deprivation, solitary confinement, and being forced to maintain uncomfortable body positions. Applying these standards, the team found that while in police custody, 59.7 percent of detained childten had been subjected to major torture, and an additional 18.9 percent to minor torture only.14 Street children in Kenya also report abuse during interrogations. Fifteen-year-old John described his experience in a roundup: “two police men in uniforms questioned me. They asked me questions, like where I was from, where my parents were. Every time I didn’t answer a question, they whipped me on my back with a cable brake from a motorcycle.”15 Seventeen-year- old Minga described his detention in a station in Nairobi: “I stayed in the cell for three days. The first day, I was hit on the head with a piston and kicked and punched. Whichever policeman would come into the cell and do the head count would hit me.”16 In Bulgaria, children reported severe police brutality both at the time of arrest and particularly during interrogation sessions at police stations. Children reported being beaten by police with electric shock batons, clubs, chains, rubber hosing, boxing gloves, and a metal rod with a ball at the end of it (known as a beech). One boy was stripped of his clothing, doused with water, and beaten on the soles of his feet with an electric shock baton.17 In India, the case of Anand, a thirteen-year-old ragpicker was typical. Anand was asked by the police to come to the station to pick up some garbage. Anand told Human Rights Watch: “When we were inside the station, the police started to beat me with their lathis and fists, calling me a thief and asking me to tell them where some stolen articles were. I said I had no idea what they were talking about. The beating continued for some twenty or thirty minutes. ... At around 4:00 p.m., the police let me go, one of the constables having first grabbed me by the shirt, slapped me, and told me to get out. No charges were filed, and no case was registered. It was the second time I’ve been detained without justification or explanation by the police.”18 The Indian police regularly torture children to obtain evidence and confessions. One boy, Shantanu, committed a robbery at a wedding. He was arrested eight days later and taken to the station. There, his hands were beaten with a baton for an hour until the complainant came and identified Shantanu as the robber. Once identified, Shantanu was taken back to the enquiry room, hung from the ceiling, and beaten for about forty-five minutes with police batons on the shoulders, back, and thighs. Following this, he was forced to lie on a block of ice while his legs were held in place by police. The police hit him whenever he tried to move. Then he was taken outside and made to lie in the sun for two hours while police asked him where the stolen property was kept. Two days later, Shantanu’s parents were brought in and threatened with beating if he did not confess. He confessed, the property was recovered, and his parents were released. He was held for another ten days, and was tortured so badly that two officers had to hold him up in court when he appeared. He was sent to an adult prison, and then to an observation home when the prison inspector-general discovered his age. Immediately after his release, Shantanu spent twenty days in the hospital as a result of the torture he received in police custody and in the observation home.19 2. Police violence against street children Street children risk violence at the hands of the authorities much more frequently than other children. Children on the street are beaten, tortured, sexually assaulted, and sometimes killed. Several factors contribute to this phenomenon: police perceptions of street children as vagrants and criminals, widespread corruption and a culture of police violence, the inadequacy and non-implementation of legal safeguards, and the level of impunity that officals enjoy. Street children are easy targets because they are young, small, poor, ignorant of their rights, and frequently do not have responsible adults to look out for them. Police also have financial incentives to resort to violence against children. They beat children for their money or demand payment either for releasing them from (often illegal) custody or for protection. Human Rights Watch first reported on street children in Guatemala in 1991, 20 and then followed up with another report on that country in 1997. In a year and a half, beginning in 1990, fourteen children were murdered and dozens more severely attacked by National Police officers and other government security force members.21 The attacks included severe beatings, forced ingestion of toxic shoe glue, torture and mutilation, death threats, and point-blank extrajudicial executions. In 1994, thirteen murders of street children were recorded, and in 1996 at least ten children were murdered, though the majority of perpetrators in 1996 were unidentified. One fifteen-year-old told Human Rights Watch that police hit street children with “rifles, or with sticks, on our backs and stomachs. And sometimes they just punch us in the stomach with their hands. They also take our paint thinner and pour it over our heads. They’ve done that to me five times. It’s awful, it hurts really bad. It gets in your eyes and burns; for half an hour you can’t see anything.”22 Girls and young children are also at increased risk of sexual harassment and assault by the police. Susana, a sixteen-year-old, reported that often police will touch her under her clothes under the guise of searching her. She also said that she and her friend were picked up by police who said that if Susana didn’t sleep with them they would plant marijuana on her and put her in jail. Three police officers took the two girls to the stadium where two of them raped Susana while the third kept watch with the other girl.23 Fifteen-year-old Rakesh, a porter in India, was awoken by police on a railway platform and taken with three other boys to the police station. At the station, Rakesh was made to lie on his back with his arms outstretched. A policeman stood on each of his hands, then his legs were tied and placed in the air. He said that this happened to all four boys. Another policeman started to beat their legs and feet with lathis while the police called them thieves and sons of prostitutes. He said he was beaten for a long time and so badly that his legs and feet bled. The next morning the police sent the other children to observation homes, but they did not send Rakesh because they had injured him so badly they did not want a magistrate to see him. Instead he was carried to the street by two strangers. He was not charged with any offense. Rakesh had to walk with a cane for eight weeks because of the injuries he sustained.24 The scale of violence against street children in India can reach brutal levels, and has even resulted in custodial deaths of children. In October 1995, four boys were beaten so badly by the Railway Protection Force that two had their arms fractured and one had his lips torn and lost two teeth. The last case of custodial death of a child that resulted in a conviction was in 1986. Between 1986 and 1995 no police officers had been prosecuted for the death of a child in custody, even though in one province, Andhra Pradesh, fourteen children died in custody in that time. Street children in Kenya experience similar abuse at the hands of police. Children said they were frequently kicked, slapped, or hit with a rifle butt for no reason other than the fact that they are street children. Street children are often subject to extortion, and street girls are asked for sex in addition to money to avoid arrest or to be released from police custody. One girl recounted her experience: “The police are always calling us names, threatening us, saying we’re whores, trash, homeless, and beating us. Sexual abuse happens too. It happened to me once. Four policemen came and arrested me. They started taking me to the Central Police Station, and brought me here to the park. One of them hit me and I fell down, and he came down on top of me. Another held me down while the policeman raped me. After he raped me, they walked me over to Central Police Station, and just let me go.”25 In 1996, eighteen months after the acquittal of one police reservist for killing a street boy, another street boy was killed by a police reservist. Children present at the shooting could identify the police officers who came toward them with a whip and guns. Two boys had hidden in a ditch. One of them escaped into the bathroom through a tunnel, but the policeman pointed into the ditch and shot the other. The boy who escaped told Human Rights Watch that his friend was shot at point blank range, that he had his arms raised in surrender when he was shot, and that the reservist spat on his body before he walked away.26 Police in Bulgaria regularly harass and beat street children, chasing them away from areas of safety and shelter, jabbing them with electric shock batons, smearing the glue that the children sniff on their faces and clothing, and spraying them with gas. Police rob street children of their money, and search out girls on the street for sexual harassment. Several adolescent girls interviewed said that police often desire or demand oral sex from them; some of the girls comply but most run away or scream for attention when they are approached. The Roma (gypsy) ethnic identity of the majority of street children contributes to their discriminatory treatment by the police and is reflected in one police officer’s response to being asked why street children ran away when he approached. He answered, “[f]irst, most of those kids are not Bulgarians, they’re Roma.”27 3. Conditions in juvenile justice facilities and prisons Physical conditions in detention are often extremely poor and constitute degrading and inhuman treatment. Facilities are often unsanitary, vermin- infested, and overcrowded, and may put detainees at risk of physical harm. Human Rights Watch frequently noticed inadequate heating, ventilation, toilet and washing facilities, bedding, and clothing. Many children complained of insufficient food and inadequate medical care. These appalling conditions are sometimes due in part to inadequate resources, but are also rooted in a lack of will on the part of governments, prison directors and staff to recognize and address the needs of young detainees. Juvenile detention centers in Guatemala suffer from substandard conditions including poor sanitation, insufficient water, drainage problems, and inadequate hygiene. These conditions contribute to high rates of dermatological and intestinal illness among the children kept there.28 Many children complain that there are not enough beds, not enough teachers, and not enough food. Detained children in non-emergency situations are unlikely to get the medical exam or surgery they need unless their parents can pay for it. Street children, with no money, are unlikely to get any medical support at all.29 In Jamaica, adult lockups where juveniles are also detained were filthy and unsanitary. Toilets in cells were frequently broken, and guards often refused to take the prisoners to the toilets at the end of the cell block. Consequently, prisoners were forced to urinate and defecate in buckets within their cells or simply on the cell floors. Cells with only one or two concrete bunk slabs held an average of 11 to 14 prisoners each, forcing prisoners to sleep on the floor on dirty pieces of cardboard or newspaper. 30 Conditions in Maryland prisons (United States) vary between sites, but the worst site is the Baltimore City Detention Center. It is a crumbling, century-old facility equipped with inadequate light and ventilation and infested with cockroaches and rodents. 31 Maintenance at the jail is irregular. The staff relies heavily on the confinement of detainees to their cells, sometimes for extended periods, as a method of behavior management. As a result, both juvenile and adult detainees must endure appalling conditions of detention. In addition to these problems, the most frequent complaint from children at every facility that Human Rights Watch visited was that there was not enough food. Nearly every child supplements his or her food rations with purchases from the jail canteen, but not all children can afford that, and so they go even hungrier than the rest. The lockup cells in which children are held in Kenya are often overcrowded, unclean, poorly ventilated, overrun with lice and vermin, and without running water. All children Human Rights Watch interviewed reported sleeping on the floor, usually without even a blanket to cover them. The absence of any bedding material is made worse by the fact that boys and men must usually remove their shirts, along with their shoes and belts, before being put in lockup. Usually buckets served as toilets, and if there were toilets attached to the cells, they stank and filled the room with the odor of excrement and urine. A few boys reported that the stations they were detained in were so crowded that they had to sleep sitting up on the floor. All of the boys interviewed said that there was not enough food, and usually what was given was of very poor quality. According to one boy, “there were lice on the floor, you could see them.”32 In the Labor Education Schools in Bulgaria, children as young as eight may be confined through non-judicial proceedings for even minor offenses such as vagrancy or being “uncontrollable.” The conditions in the eleven schools vary considerably, with no complaints from girls at two of the girls’ schools, and severe problems in some of the other schools. There are reported problems with inadequate heating, lack of running hot water in some, and inadequate bedding in most schools.33 In one school, “65 children share a single bathroom with a single shower. The walls of the lavatories are cracked and the washbasins broken. When an attempt was made to turn on the only shower, it produced only a trickle of water.”34 Food is also inadequate. Children often complain of hunger and the quality of the food is poor. Further, deprivation of food is sometimes used as punishment in some schools. 4. Treatment of children in detention, including corporal punishment and torture Children in detention are frequently subjected to severe corporal punishment, torture, forced labor, denial of food, isolation, restraints, sexual assaults and harassment, and humiliation. Negligent practices can also facilitate physical and sexual abuse by other children. Staff at correctional facilities frequently carry out abuse with impunity. Even when there are laws against ill treatment, they are not enforced, in part because it is the officers of enforcement themselves who perpetrate such violence. This is compounded by the lack of voice and credibility given to children, as well as to ineffective grievance procedures. In some countries, national laws allow corporal punishment. While in detention in Pakistan, children are routinely subjected to ill-treatment that violates the ban on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The disciplinary measure most frequently imposed on children in juvenile wards of adult prisons or in juvenile detention centers in Pakistan is solitary confinement for up to two or three weeks.35 A medical team that visited Karachi’s industrial school in 1997 found that 17.4 percent of the children had been punished through hard labor or ill-treatment, including food deprivation and being forced to stand in the hot sun or maintain uncomfortable positions.36 Some children have also been subjected to various forms of torture, including severe physical beatings, electric shocks, hanging, and a practice known as cheera, where the victim’s legs are stretched apart, sometimes in combination with kicks to the genitalia.37 In one of the “places of safety” for boys in Jamaica, corporal punishment is permitted, but is supposed to be used as last resort for discipline. One fifteen-year-old boy said the staff was abusive and said that he had been beaten with a wrench. Another reported being hit with a belt on the palms of his hands. 38 In the United States, children in Georgia have been incarcerated in jail-like facilities, where they may be bound to a bed by their wrists and ankles as a disciplinary measure, or for showing signs of suicidal behavior.39 In the Baltimore City Detention Center in Maryland, guards will sometimes allow youths to fight with each other in what is called the “square dance.” The two boys who are going to fight are allowed in a little area about eight feet by eight feet, and everyone else is locked in their cells. Jackson F. described a square dance: “There’s a lot of yelling from everybody, but if it gets too loud the officers will tell you you need to be quiet or they’ll break up the dance. It ends up with busted heads, slashes over your eyes, broken fingers, cut lips, maybe a broken nose. But you don’t go to the hospital for the cuts. If you did, there’d have to be a report, and the guards would have to explain why two guys were out in the square while everybody else was locked in.”40 In Guatemala, some of the state juvenile centers, and a network of private “centers” or “homes” dedicated to rehabilitating troubled youth, are run by a Spanish evangelical Christian organization called REMAR (Rehabilitación de los Marginados). REMAR runs these centers on behalf of the government (children are sent to them by the courts) but receives almost no oversight, monitoring or control by the government.41 REMAR is known to children who have been in detention for its violent methods of discipline and its zealous enforcement of the “belief in the rod.” One boy recounted an episode where sixteen boys escaped and six remained in the room: “Those of us who remained were beaten badly by the Spaniards. They broke ten sticks of firewood on us – we were black and blue. One of the sticks was [6 inches in diameter]; that one they didn’t break on us. Then they put us in the isolation rooms…. They put us in in our underwear only, in these tiny rooms with no air … for one to two weeks at a time.”42 Sexual harassment and abuse in jails in Kenya was illustrated by sixteen-year-old Elizabeth. While her cellmates were asleep at night, two policemen told her that they would release her if she agreed to have sex with them. She refused, for which they punished her the next day by whipping her with a strip from an old rubber tire and ordering her to wash out the toilets.43 Corporal punishment is authorized in juvenile institutions for boys, and isolation is used as punishment. We found that water was poured on the floor so that boys could not lie down while in isolation, and the boys were fed only once a day, with half a ration for one of them. In one of the borstals, one boy said, “every one who comes on duty canes you when you’re in there.”44 In addition to corporal punishments that often far exceed the prescribed limits, boys also described such punishments as public beatings: “The boy was stripped naked, and made to bend over a stand, shackled at the hands and ankles. They put a wet salted cloth on his back side, and give him strokes of a young supple bamboo cane. The other boys were assembled around to watch. This punishment was used for things like homosexual acts, or trying to escape, or smoking cigarettes or smoking bhang [marijuana].”45 Sanjiv, a seventeen-year-old in India, was arrested for participating in a crime by holding stolen goods. He was beaten in police custody, brought before a magistrate the next day, and then remanded to police custody for fourteen days. On the third day of his custody, Sanjiv reported that the torture began. He was made to stand with his hands tied to two stationary poles while police hit him with a wooden pole over his body, including his face. Then his legs were tied and placed in a tire and he was beaten on the legs. After the beating, the police made him “exercise his legs” so that there would be no signs of torture.46 Boyan, a seventeen-year-old from Bulgaria, reported the following punishment while in a Labor Education School: “Once I made a mistake on a dictation test. The teacher took me to the director’s office. They made me sit in a chair. They tied my hands behind my back and started to beat me with cable wires. The director took out a thin steel stick, and struck me on my wrist. The day after the beating, my wrist hurt so much I went to see the nurse. She told me my wrist was broken and sent me to the hospital in Pleven. I wore a cast for several weeks after that.”47 Punishments routinely include beatings, shaving of children’s heads, denial of home vacations, confinement in an “isolator,” heavy labor, and reductions in diet. Further, there is no recourse to complaint procedures – one eighteen-year-old girl said “[c]omplaining here is like a voice in the desert”48 – and children at some schools are severely punished for attempting to speak out about what goes on at the school to outsiders. One young boy, who was beaten by teachers so severely that he had to be sent to the hospital for treatment of head injuries, was warned by school staff not to talk to doctors about the reason for his injuries or else he would never be able to leave the Labor Education School.49 5. Detaining children with adults In clear violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, children who have been taken into police custody are frequently detained with adult offenders. In some cases, children who are charged as adults are automatically detained in adult facilities, in other cases children are held in adult facilities because there is simply not enough room for them in juvenile facilities. In either case, little effort may be made to maintain separation between children and adults, as mandated by international law. The consequence is that children are exposed to physical and sexual abuse and psychological and developmental harm. Many children in Guatemala are incarcerated with adults. Three boys interviewed by Human Rights Watch had been sent to an adult prison where minors and adults were not separated. One boy said that the “adult prisoners make you take your clothes off, they make you ‘trade’ your clothes. Otherwise they’ll beat you up.”50 According to another boy, “in the adult prisons, you have to pay money to get a place to sleep. Otherwise you sleep on the floor, in the garbage. … Boys who are put in with the adults are often raped. This is very common. … The guards don’t pay any attention.”51 Under the Pakistan Penal Code, the age of criminal responsibility is twelve, but children above the age of seven may also be held criminally responsible if they are deemed sufficiently mature and understand the nature and consequences of their actions.52 Thus, children aged seven and older are potentially eligible for the full range of penalties in the code, including death and life imprisonment. In some of the smaller jails in Pakistan adults and children are detained together because of a lack of separate space for juveniles. In all prisons, two other categories of juvenile prisoners are ordinarily held with adult prisoners: children sentenced to death and girls.53 Children sentenced to death are held with adults in separate wards for condemned prisoners. Girls and adult women are held together in women’s wards, and prison officials rarely record girls separately from women, preventing an accurate assessment of their numbers in Pakistani prisons.54 At four of the five adult lockups Human Rights Watch visited in Jamaica in 1998, children were routinely detained in cells with adults. This exposes them to abuse at the hands of the adult prisoners, and also by guards and police. Most of the children in the adult lockups were awaiting trial or were there because they were deemed “in need of care and protection” and should be speedily sent to a safe facility. At the Spanish Town lockup for adults in Jamaica, one fifteen-year-old boy was detained for approximately six months in a cell with eleven adult prisoners.55 An overwhelming majority of the children interviewed in Kenya had been detained with adults, despite clear international and national standards against this. Although none of the children in pretrial lockup complained about mistreatment by adult cellmates, they said they were often singled out to perform chores around the station. Fourteen-year-old Augustine said that there “were men and kids mixed together. Women were in a separate room. The cell was dirty, with a bucket for a toilet. Us kids were made to clean out the bucket every morning, and to clean the shit and urine off the floor.”56 In contrast to the lockups, children in adult prisons are subject to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of adult inmates and sometimes guards. Robert, who had been confined in the Industrial Area Remand, said, “there were two older boys who supervised everyone. They might beat you up, or sell your clothes to buy cigarettes, or take your food. One of them tried to seduce me, but I refused, so I was beaten up and had my clothes taken away from me. They smeared excrement from the toilet all over my body. I tried to complain to the prison guards about it, but they wouldn’t listen.”57 One of the immediate results of children being tried as adults in Maryland (U.S.) is that they are detained in adult county jails while they await trial. At midyear 1995, Maryland had 200 inmates under the age of eighteen in its state and federal correctional facilities, in increase of almost 30% in five years.58 Many jail guards are unprepared to handle juveniles because they lack the specialized training necessary to deal with adolescents. In addition, children are routinely mixed with adults in both large and small jails, and often even if they are separated from adults they are not separated from each other according to the reason they are there. Thus, “dangerous youth and vulnerable children are thrown in together, often with disastrous consequences.”59 The most vulnerable children often “have little choice but to enter protective custody, which is usually a separate, secure housing unit in which they spend a great deal of time in isolation – a setting that is especially conducive to suicidal behavior.”60 According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, children held in jails are up to eight times more likely to commit suicide than those held in juvenile detention centers. One seventeen-year-old in Maryland reported that the adult inmates in his section continually harassed him by throwing urine and excrement into the cell he originally occupied. When the guards refused to move him, he told them he was suicidal and was removed to the mental health unit. When he returned to his section, he asked to be housed in an isolation cell because it had a steel door and nothing could be thrown into his cell. In his cell, he said, there “[a]in’t nothing in it, just a toilet and a bed. I’m the only person in there. I stay there twenty-four hours a day, only come out Tuesday and Friday for a five-minute shower, then get locked back in.”61 ANNEX Many instances of violence against children may fall within the mandates of current human rights mechanisms, including the Special Rapporteurs on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography; on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Execution; on Torture; on Harmful Traditional Practices; and on Violence Against Women, as well as the Working Groups on Arbitrary Detention, on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, and on Slavery. However, the broad scope of these mechanisms rarely allows for focused attention on the particular vulnerabilities of children and the violence that they suffer as a result. While efforts to mainstream children's rights should and must continue, the existing framework of mechanisms is unable to give adequate attention to the pervasive violence against children, or to help the international community recognize and address it as a single global phenomenon. A Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Children would help change the way abuses against children are viewed and bring needed international attention to this pervasive international problem. He/she would have responsibility to actively monitor adherence to the standards protecting children, investigate abuses, and present constructive recommendations to better protect children from violence and abuse. Specific issues to be examined by the Special Rapporteur could include: · abuse by police and other law enforcement authorities; · abuse by employees in juvenile correctional facilities, orphanages or other institutions; · corporal punishment; · the use of the death penalty against children; · state failure to prevent violence in the home. To avoid overlap with the mandate of the Special Representative to the Secretary General on Children and Armed Conflict, the focus of the Special Rapporteur should not include violence against children in war during the tenure of the Special Representative. The responsibilities · of the Special Rapporteur could be carried out by: · seeking and receiving credible and reliable information from governments, UN bodies, specialized agencies, regional intergovernmental organizations and non-governmental organizations, as well as medical, forensic or other experts, and responding to the information presented; · making site visits to investigate allegations of violence and abuse and making reports and recommendations to the governments involved; · monitoring the implementation of existing standards; · educating and advising states on bringing their practices into conformity with the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other relevant standards; · promoting exchange of views between governments and those who provide reliable information; · making annual reports to the Human Rights Commission, detailing findings, as well as conclusions and recommendations on ways and means to better protect children from violence; · drawing particularly serious cases to the attention of the High Commissioner for Human Rights; · cooperating with other UN mechanisms and procedures in the field of human rights, including regional mechanisms; · compiling and analyzing existing rules and norms, root causes of the problem, prevention and long-term solutions, taking into account specific situations.