What happens if we experience persistent cough, runny nose, breathing difficulty, loose our sense of smell and taste lately? We will certainly quarantine, call our doctors or the Centre for disease control and get ourselves tested for covid19. Simple, isn’t it? Well, it’s not really that easy, we are able to do that because we have been educated, so much about the coronavirus and we have a centre for disease control team and healthcare frontline workers ready to knuckle down and give the necessary care once a person becomes infected or shows any sign. Wouldn’t it be out and out if the same were true for child protection?
Child protection means to shield children from violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation. Children need support and are always the most vulnerable in times of emergencies, and protecting children is our collective responsibility although we have and continue to do very poorly at our onus of safeguarding the children.
Conflicts in different parts of the World have escalated to full blown wars and the profiteers of such social plagues do not give a tinkers damn that their actions and inactions affect children the most. Social inequality is continually on the increase, the consequence of climate change has been brutal and now we have a pandemic to contend with.
September of 2015 engraved on our minds, a gory reality of the picture of the lifeless body of three years old Alan Kurdi, washed ashore.
He was a child born into war and ended up being swallowed by it; his only crime was being born by parents trapped in a war birthed out of selfishness. They were left with no other option than become refugees and seek life across the border but Alan wasn’t lucky, for those that pledged to protect him and others like him failed woefully in their duties.
History tells his story but they are millions of children like him to who are forced to live literally in “hell” day after day in Yemen, Nigeria, Palestine, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Egypt etcetera.
Children are the future and they are entitled to experience it, it’s their reality to own and live and we have the responsibility of making sure that future is secured. Our twisted thoughts and broken judgments as adults have created such social problems, that peace and calm have eluded us as a people.
The World have left children practically taking on the roles of adults as some of them have to look after their younger ones or wounded parents as a result of being orphaned or wounded from war.
Children in Mynmar, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Yemen, Nigeria, Palestine and many other parts of the globe, suffer daily from the consequences of the actions of adults in a World that they are just still strangers to. Hundreds of millions of children around the World are vulnerable to toxins, hunger, malnutrition, diseases etcetera and there is no certainty in the actual figures because data is not even able to capture the most vulnerable of them.
A society is only ever as strong as its vulnerable members and neglecting them just rips off the blinders for the whole World to see how weak we are.
Protecting children has to take centre stage in all that we do and we must against all odds give our young their fundamental human rights.
As individuals, we have to make sure that we protect the children around us by giving them the basic necessities of life and more. Groups and corporate bodies have to help carry out and maintain activities that keep them in school and save them from harm and diseases.
The government must create, maintain and continue policies centred on child protection and functional growth. The minds of the children should be trained to attract positivity and oneness. All children should be able to go to comfortable beds peacefully at night knowing that the World is safe and it will be kind to them.
Imam is an Author, School Teacher and founder of Climate Action Team, a children and youth based organization. She can be reached via [email protected]