Violence against children: a tale from the tales of horror

There is no doubt that the shameful phenomenon of violence against children worldwide is like a tale from the tales of horror that often remains locked away in people's breasts, since violence is used, and with blatant intent, against the weakest members of society and those least able to protect themselves, namely children in schools, shelters, streets, refugee camps, war zones, detention centres, fields and factories. In recent days news of strange family violence has reached our ears, more like shocks that terrified us and shook our consciences. Here is a father who tortured his daughters severely and inflicted on them the harshest kinds of family oppression for ten years without anyone knowing. Chance alone uncovered this tragedy when one of the girls begged her teacher to let her stay at school after the school day had ended, and it emerged that the child's mother had separated from her father and that she and her sisters had remained in the father's care, and that he had been inflicting kinds of physical torture on them. And there is a father who killed his wife and his infant son, no more than eight months old, by drowning them in the bathtub. And a third who tortured his twelve-year-old daughter and hung her up for six hours until she died. And there is a child, no more than a day old, thrown beside a container. And there is a father who imprisoned his daughter in a dark room for eight years. These are headlines that form part of a flood that the newspapers and the media put before us and that constitute a clear violation of the rights of the child. Although children make up more than half the population of the Arab world, many of them face forms of violence that may reach brutality and crime, which is the worst face of violence against children, where the perpetrator of the crime of violence against the child is the father, the mother or the closest people to them. Talk of violence against children, whether by beating, by words or by acts contrary to decency and modesty towards children, increases day by day; indeed not a day passes without hearing of a crime against a boy or a girl that makes the body shudder. The question is: are we sick? Do we need new systems to protect our children from ourselves? And is it time for us to recognise the rights of the child, just as we so often boast about human rights and children's rights and the conventions connected with them, which are supposed to provide the child with full protection? The Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by almost every country in the world, obliges governments to protect children from every form of physical and psychological violence. Yet millions of children still suffer violence and abuse, and acts of violence in this regard are often seen as regrettable but isolated individual incidents rather than a global phenomenon calling for concerted international responses. Add to this that the violence and crimes committed against children continue because of the silence about them and the failure to take action: Human Rights Watch found, in cases of children subjected to physical abuse, that the perpetrators of these abuses escape punishment in almost every instance. And if the perpetrators of family violence among some peoples and in bygone ages slaughtered their children and offered them as sacrifices to the gods, or considered them their private property or as slaves, or killed their children for fear of poverty, or buried their daughters alive for fear of disgrace, then the crimes of violence committed today at the hands of fathers and mothers against their children are no less hideous. So what are we to do? By Khaled Mahmoud http://news.maktoob.com/article/5810930