Source: http://www.guilamuir.com/blog/facilitation-skills/what-is-a-trainer-what-is-a-facilitator/
What Is a Trainer? What Is a Facilitator?
A thoughtful look at important differences that impact YOUR practice.
Recently, I’ve noticed that some corporations call their trainers “facilitators.” I can only assume this is meant to be shorthand for “facilitator of learning.” However, is “facilitator” really an appropriate term when the “facilitator” exclusively lectures and uses Power Point? Are facilitating a strategic planning session and teaching someone how to do that really the same thing?
Even the roots of the two words interplay. “Educe,” the root of “educate,” literally means “to bring out.” That is what the best trainers do…but isn’t it also what facilitators do? The root of “facilitate,” of course, is “facile,” or to make a process “easy.” The best trainers seem to make learning easy, don’t they?
It’s no wonder confusion exists. The greatest trainers and facilitators do share many characteristics and behaviors. However, I believe the role of trainer and facilitator are ineluctably different and that it’s important to distinguish between them. This will not only help reduce confusion about the terms, but (more importantly, to me-) ensure they retain real meaning.
Let’s Talk Terms
Even though the term “training” is broadly accepted for the field of adult education, some in our field argue that “training” itself is an unacceptable word. They argue that the word conjures up “dog training” or other potentially de-humanizing acts.
Others differentiate between the terms training, instruction and education, but conclude that all are necessary to help people learn. (Stolovitch and Keeps, 2002.) Most adult educators use “train” as an umbrella term for what they do.
4 Major Differences Between Facilitator and Trainer Roles
Great Facilitator
Is not necessarily a content expert.
Is an expert in many forms of group process (including inter-and-intra-group conflict resolution, strategic planning, team building, etc.)
Often helps the group to define and verbalize its own outcomes (e.g. to solve a specific problem or develop a new procedure.)When outcomes are externally prescribed, helps the group develop, implement and “own” action steps to achieve the outcomes.
Sees facilitation as a process to help achieve specific “bits” of broad organizational goals. Often focuses on training’s impact on actual, discrete job performance or tasks. Trainer may evaluate training’s effectiveness long after the training event takes place.
Great Trainer
Is a content expert.
Is not necessarily expert in many forms of group process. Instead, continually develops new methods to help participants achieve specific learning outcomes.
Most often in corporate, organizational or higher education settings, the trainer does not help each learner group establish its own learning outcomes. (That's a whole other approach called, Popular Education.) However, the trainer may be involved in implementing and/or analyzing the results of training needs assessments. These should include input from representative(potential)participants as well as other stakeholders.
Often focuses on training's impact on actual,discrete job performance or tasks. Trainer may evaluate training's effectiveness long after the training event takes place.
Elements the Two Roles Share
Both great facilitators and the best trainers…
--Help the group achieve specific outcomes through the use of
active, participatory, participant-centered methods.
--regularly evaluate the process in real time, and can measure how well the participants achieved the stated outcomes at the end of the process.
--have made themselves familiar with the organizational culture and context in which they are working, and ensure the processes “fit” that culture.
--stimulate dialogue and interaction between participants, not just between themselves and the participants.
In this article, I’ve tried to scratch the surface of similarities and differences between facilitation and training. I believe passionately in the value of each. Both can help us understand ourselves, each other, our work, and the world better. Beyond that, they play different roles in the workplace and community.
Guila Muir is the premiere trainer of trainers, facilitators, and presenters on the West Coast of the United States. Since 1994, she has helped thousands of professionals improve their training, facilitation, and presentation skills. Find out how she can help transform you from a boring expert to a great presenter: www.guilamuir.com
© 2007 Guila Muir. All rights reserved.
You may make copies of this article and distribute in any media so long as you change nothing, credit the author, and include this copyright notice and web address.
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Victims of Child Slavery Learning to Fight Back: Nepal's Lost Daughters
Source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,749955,00.html
The man who once bought Urmila squats on the threshold between her past and her new life, picking a piece of chewing tobacco from his teeth. He spits a black stream of saliva into a bucket next to him on the living-room floor. Urmila Chaudhary, who hasn't been his property for the last four years, kneels on the carpet at his feet and hands him a tray holding a cup of sweetened tea.
She ought to hate, curse and berate this man. But, instead, she bows to him and calls him "father."
Urmila was taken from her family and enslaved as a young child. Now 20, she has long, black hair and a gentle, melodious laugh. She wears blue smiley-face earrings and a colorful skirt with a red stripe along the hem, the traditional attire of women from Nepal's Tharu people. Her clothing says a lot about the story of Urmila and this man -- and about the thousands of other young girls who are sold every year as soon as they are big enough to look over the edge of a table and yet still young enough to grow into their new roles as servants.
Her former owner wears his black hair carefully parted, a bomber jacket and tracksuit pants. He was astonished when he saw Urmila on television and in a newspaper photo that depicted her standing next to the country's president.
"I thought you would have forgotten us," he says.
"No," Urmila replies.
Sold for 50 Euros
Urmila says she was five years old when this man, an attorney from a respected family, came to her village of Manpur, on the Rapti River, and made an offer that ended her childhood.
It was a day in January, just after the Maghi festival had begun, one of those cold days of the year when the Tharu celebrate the New Year. It's also the time of the year when they sell their daughters.
"I can still see him coming toward us," says Urmila. He was a man from the city, wearing sunglasses and a suit. "I had never seen such clothing," she says. She was sitting at the fire pit in front of the tiny mud-and-dung house where her family of 11 lived. Pumpkins grew on the straw roof, and pigs lay in shallow pits in the ground. Urmila was sitting there with her mother and brother as the man approached.
"I knew it was my turn," Urmila says. Her sisters and her sisters-in-law had all worked as kamalari, or slave girls. One sister had told her about the beatings she endured at the hands of the landowner who purchased her and the kitchen scraps she was fed. "I begged my mother not to send me away," Urmila recounts. Her mother said that she had no say in the matter.
Instead, the man spoke with her older brother because he was the one who supported the family. The man offered the brother money -- 4,000 rupees, or about €50 ($70) -- for his little sister Urmila. The family owed money to the landowner whose fields they farmed, there wasn't enough food and the children wore shoes made of bean pods tied to their feet with pieces of rope. Four thousand rupees. It was a lot of money. Urmila's brother agreed to the deal.
Millions of Child Slaves across the World
In Nepali, the word kamalari means "hardworking woman." But these aren't women being sold off and forced to work; they're children between the ages of five and 15, thin-armed girls forced to work 14-16 hours a day in the households of families, fully at the mercy of their owners and exposed to their moods and their beatings. About one in 10 of the girls is sexually abused.
Aid organizations estimate that 10,000 girls work as kamalari in Nepal. As long ago as 1956, the United Nations declared that forms of child labor and bonded labor were slavery and should therefore be outlawed. However, although human trafficking has been officially illegal in all countries for a long time, it still exists to a significant degree in about 70 countries. Indeed, roughly 27 million people across the world are victims of modern slavery -- living in debt bondage, as forced prostitutes and as bonded laborers. Between 40 percent and 50 percent of these are children, and many are in Asia.
In many poor countries, there is a tradition of using child slaves in private households. Children are practical because their personalities are flexible and their characters are as malleable as clay on the sculptor's wheel. Child slaves go by many names: the kamalari in Nepal, the restavék in Haiti and the abd in Mauritania.
The principle is almost the same everywhere. On the one side are the parents, who are unable to earn enough money to feed their children. On the other are the more affluent members of society, the landowners and businesspeople. In many cases, the people who buy children and raise them to suit their purposes are teachers, lawyers and politicians. The child slaves are rewarded with affection or extra meals, while punishments consist of being denied food, beaten and berated. In the end, they have no choice but to do their work without complaint.
Bought as a Present
Urmila was in the same position as most of the others. "Down there," she says, pointing to a door on the ground floor of the yellow townhouse, "down there in the room next to the kitchen is where I spent the first night." Her brother had taken her on the bus to Ghorahi, a noisy city in southwestern Nepal. With its cars and bicycle rickshaws, the place was completely unlike her village of Manpur. Urmila lay on a mat on the floor next to another girl the house's owner had bought. It was cold. A wedding was being held in the house. The son of the landowner had found a wife, and there were many relatives among the guests, including the owner's daughter. She lived in Katmandu, and Urmila had been bought as a present for her.
"She's so thin and small," the daughter said when she first saw Urmila. "How is she supposed to work properly?" From then on, Urmila was instructed to address the daughter as "maharani," or mistress, and her children as "prince" and "princess." A few days later, the daughter took Urmila with her to an apartment in Katmandu, where she was required to work for 12 people. It would be four years before she saw her parents again, and 11 before she was free.
Part 2: Facing Up to the Past
On this day in early February, 15 years after she was sold, Urmila has returned to visit the man who deprived her of her childhood. She has come to wish him a happy birthday, but she has also come to ask him for the wages she should be entitled to after more than a decade of hard work. She wants 20,000 rupees, or €200, from the man.
But the words that usually come so easily to her -- the courageous words that have made her famous in her country, the words that have made her a leader of slave girls -- are now stuck in her throat. She looks at the floor and her voice is faint, as if the man had regained ownership, as if his mere presence were enough to deprive her of her courage.
When asked why, Urmila shrugs her shoulders. "I'm afraid to offend him," she says as she leaves his house without having asked for the money. "This is an influential family," she says. "Who knows what will happen if you make these people angry."
Slavery or Starvation
There is a long tradition of repression of the Tharu, one of the lowest castes in predominantly Hindu Nepal. It is passed on from one generation to the next. The Tharu live in Terai, a fertile region near the border with India. They once owned the land but, in the 1950s, people from the mountainous regions began settling in the area, took the land from the Tharu and made them their bonded servants. Since submissive behavior is deeply ingrained among the Tharu, they did not resist.
Urmila's father was also owned by a landowner his entire life. When asked why he gave away his daughter, he says it was just the way things were done back then.
The father is squatting on the ground in front of his house. Urmila's mother, sitting next to him, is making plates for lunch out of leaves she has gathered in the forest. "We were slaves, uneducated slaves," says the father, a man with tanned skin and black sunglasses.
Their grandchildren play on the ground around them while ducks scurry around the yard. He speaks slowly and with a hoarse voice. "We had to cultivate the fields for a few sacks of rice a year," he says, "sowing, plowing and harvesting." To make extra money, the men also sent their wives and daughters to the house of the owner of the land they farmed and to the houses of other rich men. There, they were required to cook, clean and do laundry. They were also forced to do other things.
"The landowners blackmailed us," the father says. "They told us that we wouldn't get any food if we didn't give them our daughters." He says that his children -- three girls and three boys -- were hungry.
Liberated from Bad into Worse
As he tells his story, the man hardly looks at Urmila. Her parents bless her, as is customary, whenever she comes to visit them in the village. But there are hardly any embraces or smiles.
"Sometimes I'm furious with them," says Urmila, "and then I ask them: Why did you do this to me?" But she already knows the answer: "What else could we have done?" It's the same excuse that all the parents give.
Indeed, many have never heard that there is such a thing as the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that children have the right to an education, to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities, and to a safe home.
In Nepal, bonded labor wasn't abolished until 2000. This meant that the Tharu were free and no longer required to work in the landowners' fields. But it also meant they lost their livelihoods. Without fields, there was no rice. Since then, daughters sold during the Maghi festival have often been the only reliable source of income for many families. If things go well, a family can earn 4,000 to 5,000 rupees per child per year. If things don't go so well, a family receives a one-time lump sum, and the girls simply disappear into a different city.
The unlucky ones are forced to work in a family for so long that they can eventually hardly function without being told what to do. The luckier ones end up in a place like the hostel in Narti.
Part 3: Victims Helping Victims
More than 100 girls live at the hostel, which consists of a few simple houses with green and blue shutters. The plaster on the walls is crumbling, and it's cold at night. But there are rows of blue bunk beds inside, and each girl gets her own bed. The hostel has become a home for the girls. Urmila also lived at the hostel for a while.
It is late in the afternoon and the setting sun is creating an orange glow as more than 100 former slave girls walk around in rubber flip-flops in the hostel's dusty courtyard, humming and giggling to each other. They are wearing school uniforms and colorful shirts called kurtas. Some are wearing the skirts with red hems that identify them as Tharu girls. They line up and walk across the courtyard holding up their fists and shouting: "Stop child labor! Abolish the kamalari system!" The youngest girls are 4 years old.
The hostel is part of the Kamalari Abolition Project (KAP). Funding for the project comes from the international aid organization Plan, which gets a large percentage of its donations from Germany. Social workers with local aid organizations team up with former child slaves to try to liberate other girls from their positions of servitude. Those who are unable to return to their families are given a bed at Narti.
The aid workers enroll the girls in schools or vocational training programs as seamstresses or vendors, while others open small restaurants.
The project also includes the many teams of girls who organize liberation campaigns in the Tharu villages. They march through the streets, demonstrate in front of houses, hand out flyers, write letters and badger landowners and parents. When none of this works, they force the landowners to let the girls go by threatening them with legal action. Urmila has already used these techniques to liberate several dozen girls. She was elected president of the teams of girls in her district, which is called Dang. The former child slaves and aid workers have liberated 1,758 girls since the project began.
The Silent Slave Girl
At the moment, the women are marching down the street, prompting men on bicycles and women driving their goats through the ditches along the sides of streets to stop and gawk, bus drivers to honk their horns and children to run after them. "Look out, you landlords," the girls chant. "Anyone who keeps kamalari will be punished!" They are finally shouting the things they were barred from saying their entire lives.
In one of the first rows of the procession, there is a little girl named Rami who can hardly believe this is happening. Rami arrived at the house of liberated girls only two weeks ago. It shows in her clothes, which are still covered with the dirt from her old life, and in the lice in her dark hair. It shows in the way she looks around with darting eyes, not quite sure whether to be overjoyed or afraid.
Rami is 9 years old. She comes from a village near the small city of Lamahi, where her father, his wife and the three other children live in a single dark room. He owns a lamb on a leash, a few ducks and a few sacks of rice and lentils. His eldest daughter is a slave girl in Katmandu. He is paid about €30 a year for her work. He received even less for Rami.
Later, Rami sits on a cold rock in front of the hostel, a shy girl with almond-shaped eyes. After spending three years in an old man's house, she was freed by one of the teams of girls on Jan. 13. Rami looks up at the sky, searching her memory. "No," she says, "I don't remember how I came to his house."
Rami was six when she started working for the man. "I had to scrub the floor, wash pots and do laundry," she says. "They beat me when I didn't do my work well."
Even though her father lived only a stone's throw away, she was almost never allowed to leave the house. Rami talks about the long workdays, about how much she missed her siblings, about being afraid of doing something wrong and about sometimes feeling hungry. "The landowner let me watch television once in a while," she says. Those were her best days.
The Unrepentant Former Master
It isn't hard to find Rami's former master. His house at the entrance to the village is distinguished by the bricks, which are sturdier than the Tharu mud huts, by its size and by the fields behind it. "She didn't have to work a lot," he says. "I treated her like my granddaughter."
The 84-year-old man is sitting on a bed frame in the visitors' room in his house. He has blanket around his shoulders and a scarf around his head to ward off the cold. "I must have had 50 girls in my life," he says. His name is Prem Bahadur Dangi, and he is a Bahun, a member of the highest-ranking caste. "I own seven houses," he shouts. He is hard of hearing.
Dangi says his family has always had Tharu as bonded laborers. "How else would we have done it all? The fields, the houses?" he asks. It isn't as if he hadn't worked hard himself, he adds, holding up his calloused hand.
He then climbs a narrow staircase to his living space, which consists of a few rooms and an open kitchen with a view of his land, which is still covered by the morning mist. "Here," he says, pointing to a dimly lit room with two wooden beds in it. "This is where we had her sleep." He isn't talking about the bed, though. He's talking about a space on the floor at the foot of a bed. He and his wife sleep in the beds.
Dangi laughs and says: "We called her Lati," he says, the quiet one, because she didn't say anything. "No, I don't know her real name," he says when asked about the girl who worked for him for three years.
The girls who wanted to liberate Rami appeared at Dangi's door two weeks ago. It wasn't the first time they had come to his house. They told him what he already knew: that child labor is against the law and that Rami should be in school.
"Why should I have a bad conscience?" Dangi asks. "I help her by letting her work for me." In fact, he points out, he was doing her entire family a favor. As a parting gift, the old man gave Rami 30 rupees -- or about three cents.
'Cruel Ma'am'
Urmila has been free for four years. She lives in a room in Lamahi, a small city not far from her old village. Every day, she gets up at 5 a.m. to study and learn new vocabulary. At about 9 a.m., she puts on her school uniform, a gray pleated skirt, and straightens her tie. At 20, she is the oldest in her class, and yet she is behind in many subjects. "It makes me furious," she says, "that they always promised me they would send me to school and, in the end, they were all just lying to me."
In the late afternoon, she walks home from school and changes clothes. Then she takes the bus to Narti to visit the girls at the hostel or into the villages to spend time with the teams of girls. She helps them memorize their lines for plays and plans campaigns, demonstrations and liberation efforts with them. They keep records on girls who have disappeared, writing down their names and trying to track them down, even if they've already been taken to other cities.
Before she was freed, Urmila worked for a politician, a wealthy, influential woman, the sister of the man who had bought her. After working for the man's daughter for the first few years, she was passed on to this woman. Urmila calls here "Cruel Ma'am." The woman locked Urmila into her villa in Katmandu for years; she wasn't even allowed out on the street alone to buy milk. Her duties included cooking, cleaning and serving. "I also had to massage her," Urmila says with a grimace, "every day, in the front and in the back." It disgusted her, she says.
The politician finally let her go when she turned 16. Urmila had started asking questions like: When can I go home? When can I see my family? She was now at a marriageable age, a time when the kamalari contract is traditionally dissolved. She had also heard about the rescue project and discovered there were people who would help her.
Part 4: New Laws Bring Little Change
When she returned home from Katmandu after 11 years, Urmila started going to school for the first time -- at 16. Urmila learned quickly "the ABCs" as well as "plus, minus and times." Her lips curl into a smile when she talks about it. Her teachers and the employees at the aid organization soon realized that Urmila wasn't like the other girls. She was confident and willing to talk about her feelings and her past.
Before long, Urmila was chosen to lead the teams of girls. And when 600 girls in Tharu skirts traveled to Katmandu, the capital city, it was Urmila who spoke on their behalf to the president of Nepal. "I wasn't really all that nervous," she says. "After all, I had something important to say to him."
Soon afterwards, the Nepalese government announced its plan to provide €1.2 million to fund the training and reintegration of liberated girls. Only recently, the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare approved a bill outlining the government's child-protection policies, which ban the practice of kamalari. Urmila's district, Dang, has now been declared a kamalari-free zone. The aid organization has placed a sign to let the residents in almost every village know about the changes.
Nevertheless, girls are still being sold in other districts. Though it's a criminal offence to have child slaves, the laws have no teeth, and hardly anyone is arrested or fined.
This is partly because, having only recently emerged from a decade of civil war, the country is now being run by a more or less ineffectual government. Indeed, Nepal is still in the process of transitioning from a monarchy to a republic. The Maoists, who want to integrate their former fighters into the army and the police force, are the strongest political force. Elections have failed repeatedly, and elected officials are constantly resigning. After 16 failed attempts, a new prime minister was elected, a man from the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist).
A few weeks ago, Urmila traveled to Kailali to lead a large demonstration, even though she is in the midst of her eighth-grade final exams. She has written a book, "Slave Child," in collaboration with a German author, which has just been published in Germany. It is her story, Urmila says, but it's also the story of thousands of others.
Hunting for Victims and Perpetrators
Two girls from the aid organization are standing in the noisy bus terminal in Lamahi, the town where Urmila lives, surrounded by the exhaust fumes of long-distance buses arriving at the terminal. Food vendors sell their wares from outdoor shops. The girls climb the steps into the buses and scan the seats, looking for men in the company of village girls.
After a few hours, they find what they are looking for. It's already the second time today. A young man is sitting next to a scared-looking girl. She is less than 1.50 meters tall (4' 11"), and she hides her round face behind a large green scarf.
Based on the man's clothing and his relatively light skin color, the girls immediately surmise that he is from a different region. They call up their fellow team members and take the man and the girl to their office. They ask the man what he plans to do with the girl and where is taking her. The man moves his legs nervously up and down, his arms folded in front of his chest. He says the girl was promised to him as a wife. The aid workers take the man's cell phone and call his relatives; they know nothing about a fiancée.
The man becomes evasive and suddenly claims the girl is his sister-in-law. The girl -- a 15-year-old named Rita -- has kept silent the whole time, hiding her face and holding onto her bag tightly. Then, she suddenly pulls the green scarf away from her face, looks at the man for a moment and says: "I've never seen him in my life."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
The man who once bought Urmila squats on the threshold between her past and her new life, picking a piece of chewing tobacco from his teeth. He spits a black stream of saliva into a bucket next to him on the living-room floor. Urmila Chaudhary, who hasn't been his property for the last four years, kneels on the carpet at his feet and hands him a tray holding a cup of sweetened tea.
She ought to hate, curse and berate this man. But, instead, she bows to him and calls him "father."
Urmila was taken from her family and enslaved as a young child. Now 20, she has long, black hair and a gentle, melodious laugh. She wears blue smiley-face earrings and a colorful skirt with a red stripe along the hem, the traditional attire of women from Nepal's Tharu people. Her clothing says a lot about the story of Urmila and this man -- and about the thousands of other young girls who are sold every year as soon as they are big enough to look over the edge of a table and yet still young enough to grow into their new roles as servants.
Her former owner wears his black hair carefully parted, a bomber jacket and tracksuit pants. He was astonished when he saw Urmila on television and in a newspaper photo that depicted her standing next to the country's president.
"I thought you would have forgotten us," he says.
"No," Urmila replies.
Sold for 50 Euros
Urmila says she was five years old when this man, an attorney from a respected family, came to her village of Manpur, on the Rapti River, and made an offer that ended her childhood.
It was a day in January, just after the Maghi festival had begun, one of those cold days of the year when the Tharu celebrate the New Year. It's also the time of the year when they sell their daughters.
"I can still see him coming toward us," says Urmila. He was a man from the city, wearing sunglasses and a suit. "I had never seen such clothing," she says. She was sitting at the fire pit in front of the tiny mud-and-dung house where her family of 11 lived. Pumpkins grew on the straw roof, and pigs lay in shallow pits in the ground. Urmila was sitting there with her mother and brother as the man approached.
"I knew it was my turn," Urmila says. Her sisters and her sisters-in-law had all worked as kamalari, or slave girls. One sister had told her about the beatings she endured at the hands of the landowner who purchased her and the kitchen scraps she was fed. "I begged my mother not to send me away," Urmila recounts. Her mother said that she had no say in the matter.
Instead, the man spoke with her older brother because he was the one who supported the family. The man offered the brother money -- 4,000 rupees, or about €50 ($70) -- for his little sister Urmila. The family owed money to the landowner whose fields they farmed, there wasn't enough food and the children wore shoes made of bean pods tied to their feet with pieces of rope. Four thousand rupees. It was a lot of money. Urmila's brother agreed to the deal.
Millions of Child Slaves across the World
In Nepali, the word kamalari means "hardworking woman." But these aren't women being sold off and forced to work; they're children between the ages of five and 15, thin-armed girls forced to work 14-16 hours a day in the households of families, fully at the mercy of their owners and exposed to their moods and their beatings. About one in 10 of the girls is sexually abused.
Aid organizations estimate that 10,000 girls work as kamalari in Nepal. As long ago as 1956, the United Nations declared that forms of child labor and bonded labor were slavery and should therefore be outlawed. However, although human trafficking has been officially illegal in all countries for a long time, it still exists to a significant degree in about 70 countries. Indeed, roughly 27 million people across the world are victims of modern slavery -- living in debt bondage, as forced prostitutes and as bonded laborers. Between 40 percent and 50 percent of these are children, and many are in Asia.
In many poor countries, there is a tradition of using child slaves in private households. Children are practical because their personalities are flexible and their characters are as malleable as clay on the sculptor's wheel. Child slaves go by many names: the kamalari in Nepal, the restavék in Haiti and the abd in Mauritania.
The principle is almost the same everywhere. On the one side are the parents, who are unable to earn enough money to feed their children. On the other are the more affluent members of society, the landowners and businesspeople. In many cases, the people who buy children and raise them to suit their purposes are teachers, lawyers and politicians. The child slaves are rewarded with affection or extra meals, while punishments consist of being denied food, beaten and berated. In the end, they have no choice but to do their work without complaint.
Bought as a Present
Urmila was in the same position as most of the others. "Down there," she says, pointing to a door on the ground floor of the yellow townhouse, "down there in the room next to the kitchen is where I spent the first night." Her brother had taken her on the bus to Ghorahi, a noisy city in southwestern Nepal. With its cars and bicycle rickshaws, the place was completely unlike her village of Manpur. Urmila lay on a mat on the floor next to another girl the house's owner had bought. It was cold. A wedding was being held in the house. The son of the landowner had found a wife, and there were many relatives among the guests, including the owner's daughter. She lived in Katmandu, and Urmila had been bought as a present for her.
"She's so thin and small," the daughter said when she first saw Urmila. "How is she supposed to work properly?" From then on, Urmila was instructed to address the daughter as "maharani," or mistress, and her children as "prince" and "princess." A few days later, the daughter took Urmila with her to an apartment in Katmandu, where she was required to work for 12 people. It would be four years before she saw her parents again, and 11 before she was free.
Part 2: Facing Up to the Past
On this day in early February, 15 years after she was sold, Urmila has returned to visit the man who deprived her of her childhood. She has come to wish him a happy birthday, but she has also come to ask him for the wages she should be entitled to after more than a decade of hard work. She wants 20,000 rupees, or €200, from the man.
But the words that usually come so easily to her -- the courageous words that have made her famous in her country, the words that have made her a leader of slave girls -- are now stuck in her throat. She looks at the floor and her voice is faint, as if the man had regained ownership, as if his mere presence were enough to deprive her of her courage.
When asked why, Urmila shrugs her shoulders. "I'm afraid to offend him," she says as she leaves his house without having asked for the money. "This is an influential family," she says. "Who knows what will happen if you make these people angry."
Slavery or Starvation
There is a long tradition of repression of the Tharu, one of the lowest castes in predominantly Hindu Nepal. It is passed on from one generation to the next. The Tharu live in Terai, a fertile region near the border with India. They once owned the land but, in the 1950s, people from the mountainous regions began settling in the area, took the land from the Tharu and made them their bonded servants. Since submissive behavior is deeply ingrained among the Tharu, they did not resist.
Urmila's father was also owned by a landowner his entire life. When asked why he gave away his daughter, he says it was just the way things were done back then.
The father is squatting on the ground in front of his house. Urmila's mother, sitting next to him, is making plates for lunch out of leaves she has gathered in the forest. "We were slaves, uneducated slaves," says the father, a man with tanned skin and black sunglasses.
Their grandchildren play on the ground around them while ducks scurry around the yard. He speaks slowly and with a hoarse voice. "We had to cultivate the fields for a few sacks of rice a year," he says, "sowing, plowing and harvesting." To make extra money, the men also sent their wives and daughters to the house of the owner of the land they farmed and to the houses of other rich men. There, they were required to cook, clean and do laundry. They were also forced to do other things.
"The landowners blackmailed us," the father says. "They told us that we wouldn't get any food if we didn't give them our daughters." He says that his children -- three girls and three boys -- were hungry.
Liberated from Bad into Worse
As he tells his story, the man hardly looks at Urmila. Her parents bless her, as is customary, whenever she comes to visit them in the village. But there are hardly any embraces or smiles.
"Sometimes I'm furious with them," says Urmila, "and then I ask them: Why did you do this to me?" But she already knows the answer: "What else could we have done?" It's the same excuse that all the parents give.
Indeed, many have never heard that there is such a thing as the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that children have the right to an education, to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities, and to a safe home.
In Nepal, bonded labor wasn't abolished until 2000. This meant that the Tharu were free and no longer required to work in the landowners' fields. But it also meant they lost their livelihoods. Without fields, there was no rice. Since then, daughters sold during the Maghi festival have often been the only reliable source of income for many families. If things go well, a family can earn 4,000 to 5,000 rupees per child per year. If things don't go so well, a family receives a one-time lump sum, and the girls simply disappear into a different city.
The unlucky ones are forced to work in a family for so long that they can eventually hardly function without being told what to do. The luckier ones end up in a place like the hostel in Narti.
Part 3: Victims Helping Victims
More than 100 girls live at the hostel, which consists of a few simple houses with green and blue shutters. The plaster on the walls is crumbling, and it's cold at night. But there are rows of blue bunk beds inside, and each girl gets her own bed. The hostel has become a home for the girls. Urmila also lived at the hostel for a while.
It is late in the afternoon and the setting sun is creating an orange glow as more than 100 former slave girls walk around in rubber flip-flops in the hostel's dusty courtyard, humming and giggling to each other. They are wearing school uniforms and colorful shirts called kurtas. Some are wearing the skirts with red hems that identify them as Tharu girls. They line up and walk across the courtyard holding up their fists and shouting: "Stop child labor! Abolish the kamalari system!" The youngest girls are 4 years old.
The hostel is part of the Kamalari Abolition Project (KAP). Funding for the project comes from the international aid organization Plan, which gets a large percentage of its donations from Germany. Social workers with local aid organizations team up with former child slaves to try to liberate other girls from their positions of servitude. Those who are unable to return to their families are given a bed at Narti.
The aid workers enroll the girls in schools or vocational training programs as seamstresses or vendors, while others open small restaurants.
The project also includes the many teams of girls who organize liberation campaigns in the Tharu villages. They march through the streets, demonstrate in front of houses, hand out flyers, write letters and badger landowners and parents. When none of this works, they force the landowners to let the girls go by threatening them with legal action. Urmila has already used these techniques to liberate several dozen girls. She was elected president of the teams of girls in her district, which is called Dang. The former child slaves and aid workers have liberated 1,758 girls since the project began.
The Silent Slave Girl
At the moment, the women are marching down the street, prompting men on bicycles and women driving their goats through the ditches along the sides of streets to stop and gawk, bus drivers to honk their horns and children to run after them. "Look out, you landlords," the girls chant. "Anyone who keeps kamalari will be punished!" They are finally shouting the things they were barred from saying their entire lives.
In one of the first rows of the procession, there is a little girl named Rami who can hardly believe this is happening. Rami arrived at the house of liberated girls only two weeks ago. It shows in her clothes, which are still covered with the dirt from her old life, and in the lice in her dark hair. It shows in the way she looks around with darting eyes, not quite sure whether to be overjoyed or afraid.
Rami is 9 years old. She comes from a village near the small city of Lamahi, where her father, his wife and the three other children live in a single dark room. He owns a lamb on a leash, a few ducks and a few sacks of rice and lentils. His eldest daughter is a slave girl in Katmandu. He is paid about €30 a year for her work. He received even less for Rami.
Later, Rami sits on a cold rock in front of the hostel, a shy girl with almond-shaped eyes. After spending three years in an old man's house, she was freed by one of the teams of girls on Jan. 13. Rami looks up at the sky, searching her memory. "No," she says, "I don't remember how I came to his house."
Rami was six when she started working for the man. "I had to scrub the floor, wash pots and do laundry," she says. "They beat me when I didn't do my work well."
Even though her father lived only a stone's throw away, she was almost never allowed to leave the house. Rami talks about the long workdays, about how much she missed her siblings, about being afraid of doing something wrong and about sometimes feeling hungry. "The landowner let me watch television once in a while," she says. Those were her best days.
The Unrepentant Former Master
It isn't hard to find Rami's former master. His house at the entrance to the village is distinguished by the bricks, which are sturdier than the Tharu mud huts, by its size and by the fields behind it. "She didn't have to work a lot," he says. "I treated her like my granddaughter."
The 84-year-old man is sitting on a bed frame in the visitors' room in his house. He has blanket around his shoulders and a scarf around his head to ward off the cold. "I must have had 50 girls in my life," he says. His name is Prem Bahadur Dangi, and he is a Bahun, a member of the highest-ranking caste. "I own seven houses," he shouts. He is hard of hearing.
Dangi says his family has always had Tharu as bonded laborers. "How else would we have done it all? The fields, the houses?" he asks. It isn't as if he hadn't worked hard himself, he adds, holding up his calloused hand.
He then climbs a narrow staircase to his living space, which consists of a few rooms and an open kitchen with a view of his land, which is still covered by the morning mist. "Here," he says, pointing to a dimly lit room with two wooden beds in it. "This is where we had her sleep." He isn't talking about the bed, though. He's talking about a space on the floor at the foot of a bed. He and his wife sleep in the beds.
Dangi laughs and says: "We called her Lati," he says, the quiet one, because she didn't say anything. "No, I don't know her real name," he says when asked about the girl who worked for him for three years.
The girls who wanted to liberate Rami appeared at Dangi's door two weeks ago. It wasn't the first time they had come to his house. They told him what he already knew: that child labor is against the law and that Rami should be in school.
"Why should I have a bad conscience?" Dangi asks. "I help her by letting her work for me." In fact, he points out, he was doing her entire family a favor. As a parting gift, the old man gave Rami 30 rupees -- or about three cents.
'Cruel Ma'am'
Urmila has been free for four years. She lives in a room in Lamahi, a small city not far from her old village. Every day, she gets up at 5 a.m. to study and learn new vocabulary. At about 9 a.m., she puts on her school uniform, a gray pleated skirt, and straightens her tie. At 20, she is the oldest in her class, and yet she is behind in many subjects. "It makes me furious," she says, "that they always promised me they would send me to school and, in the end, they were all just lying to me."
In the late afternoon, she walks home from school and changes clothes. Then she takes the bus to Narti to visit the girls at the hostel or into the villages to spend time with the teams of girls. She helps them memorize their lines for plays and plans campaigns, demonstrations and liberation efforts with them. They keep records on girls who have disappeared, writing down their names and trying to track them down, even if they've already been taken to other cities.
Before she was freed, Urmila worked for a politician, a wealthy, influential woman, the sister of the man who had bought her. After working for the man's daughter for the first few years, she was passed on to this woman. Urmila calls here "Cruel Ma'am." The woman locked Urmila into her villa in Katmandu for years; she wasn't even allowed out on the street alone to buy milk. Her duties included cooking, cleaning and serving. "I also had to massage her," Urmila says with a grimace, "every day, in the front and in the back." It disgusted her, she says.
The politician finally let her go when she turned 16. Urmila had started asking questions like: When can I go home? When can I see my family? She was now at a marriageable age, a time when the kamalari contract is traditionally dissolved. She had also heard about the rescue project and discovered there were people who would help her.
Part 4: New Laws Bring Little Change
When she returned home from Katmandu after 11 years, Urmila started going to school for the first time -- at 16. Urmila learned quickly "the ABCs" as well as "plus, minus and times." Her lips curl into a smile when she talks about it. Her teachers and the employees at the aid organization soon realized that Urmila wasn't like the other girls. She was confident and willing to talk about her feelings and her past.
Before long, Urmila was chosen to lead the teams of girls. And when 600 girls in Tharu skirts traveled to Katmandu, the capital city, it was Urmila who spoke on their behalf to the president of Nepal. "I wasn't really all that nervous," she says. "After all, I had something important to say to him."
Soon afterwards, the Nepalese government announced its plan to provide €1.2 million to fund the training and reintegration of liberated girls. Only recently, the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare approved a bill outlining the government's child-protection policies, which ban the practice of kamalari. Urmila's district, Dang, has now been declared a kamalari-free zone. The aid organization has placed a sign to let the residents in almost every village know about the changes.
Nevertheless, girls are still being sold in other districts. Though it's a criminal offence to have child slaves, the laws have no teeth, and hardly anyone is arrested or fined.
This is partly because, having only recently emerged from a decade of civil war, the country is now being run by a more or less ineffectual government. Indeed, Nepal is still in the process of transitioning from a monarchy to a republic. The Maoists, who want to integrate their former fighters into the army and the police force, are the strongest political force. Elections have failed repeatedly, and elected officials are constantly resigning. After 16 failed attempts, a new prime minister was elected, a man from the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist).
A few weeks ago, Urmila traveled to Kailali to lead a large demonstration, even though she is in the midst of her eighth-grade final exams. She has written a book, "Slave Child," in collaboration with a German author, which has just been published in Germany. It is her story, Urmila says, but it's also the story of thousands of others.
Hunting for Victims and Perpetrators
Two girls from the aid organization are standing in the noisy bus terminal in Lamahi, the town where Urmila lives, surrounded by the exhaust fumes of long-distance buses arriving at the terminal. Food vendors sell their wares from outdoor shops. The girls climb the steps into the buses and scan the seats, looking for men in the company of village girls.
After a few hours, they find what they are looking for. It's already the second time today. A young man is sitting next to a scared-looking girl. She is less than 1.50 meters tall (4' 11"), and she hides her round face behind a large green scarf.
Based on the man's clothing and his relatively light skin color, the girls immediately surmise that he is from a different region. They call up their fellow team members and take the man and the girl to their office. They ask the man what he plans to do with the girl and where is taking her. The man moves his legs nervously up and down, his arms folded in front of his chest. He says the girl was promised to him as a wife. The aid workers take the man's cell phone and call his relatives; they know nothing about a fiancée.
The man becomes evasive and suddenly claims the girl is his sister-in-law. The girl -- a 15-year-old named Rita -- has kept silent the whole time, hiding her face and holding onto her bag tightly. Then, she suddenly pulls the green scarf away from her face, looks at the man for a moment and says: "I've never seen him in my life."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Forgetting the Children Born of War
Source: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66962/charli-carpenter/forgetting-children-born-of-war-setting-the-human-rights-agenda-
Charli Carpenter
Reviewed by By Robert Legvold
November/December 2010
Carpenter details how humanitarian advocacy groups set priorities that lead to strategic choices and practical agendas that overlook -- indeed, at times, consciously ignore the half million children today whose mothers were raped or exploited during war.
AUTHOR
Charli Carpenter
PUBLISHER
Columbia University Press
YEAR
2010
PAGES
304 pp.
ISBN
0231151306
PRICE
$35.00
Purchase at B&N.com
Purchase at Amazon.com
By one estimate, today there are a half million children whose mothers were raped or exploited during war -- many of them, Carpenter asserts, scorned or otherwise scarred. Yet for all the work being done by NGOs and other groups to defend against the abuse of these mothers’ human rights around the world, their offspring comprise a group that has slipped through the cracks. Carpenter, who admits to being emotionally engaged in the subject, wonders why the neglect exists. So rather than simply assemble the data or tell the children’s stories in the case she examines, the Bosnian war, she details how humanitarian advocacy groups set priorities that lead to strategic choices and practical agendas that overlook -- indeed, at times, consciously ignore these half million children. While she loosely associates her study with a constructivist approach from academic international relations theory, Carpenter has written a building-block-level study -- that is, an ambitious exploration of the factors shaping the preferences of the human-rights and child-protection agencies that should be attending to the problem but are not.
Charli Carpenter
Reviewed by By Robert Legvold
November/December 2010
Carpenter details how humanitarian advocacy groups set priorities that lead to strategic choices and practical agendas that overlook -- indeed, at times, consciously ignore the half million children today whose mothers were raped or exploited during war.
AUTHOR
Charli Carpenter
PUBLISHER
Columbia University Press
YEAR
2010
PAGES
304 pp.
ISBN
0231151306
PRICE
$35.00
Purchase at B&N.com
Purchase at Amazon.com
By one estimate, today there are a half million children whose mothers were raped or exploited during war -- many of them, Carpenter asserts, scorned or otherwise scarred. Yet for all the work being done by NGOs and other groups to defend against the abuse of these mothers’ human rights around the world, their offspring comprise a group that has slipped through the cracks. Carpenter, who admits to being emotionally engaged in the subject, wonders why the neglect exists. So rather than simply assemble the data or tell the children’s stories in the case she examines, the Bosnian war, she details how humanitarian advocacy groups set priorities that lead to strategic choices and practical agendas that overlook -- indeed, at times, consciously ignore these half million children. While she loosely associates her study with a constructivist approach from academic international relations theory, Carpenter has written a building-block-level study -- that is, an ambitious exploration of the factors shaping the preferences of the human-rights and child-protection agencies that should be attending to the problem but are not.
Proposed US Budget Would Kill 70,000 Children Overseas
Source: http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/31/shah_gop_budget_would_kill_70000_children
As Congress struggles to negotiate a budget deal to keep the government running, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) told lawmakers Wednesday that the GOP version of the budget bill would result in the deaths of at least 70,000 children who depend on American food and health assistance around the world.
"We estimate, and I believe these are very conservative estimates, that H.R. 1 would lead to 70,000 kids dying," USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah testified before the House Appropriations State and Foreign Ops subcommittee.
"Of that 70,000, 30,000 would come from malaria control programs that would have to be scaled back specifically. The other 40,000 is broken out as 24,000 would die because of a lack of support for immunizations and other investments and 16,000 would be because of a lack of skilled attendants at birth," he said.
The Republican bill, known as H.R.1, was passed by the House, and would fund the government for the rest of fiscal 2011. It would effectively cut 16 percent from the Obama administration's original fiscal 2011 request for the international affairs account.
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) pointed out that H.R. 1 would provide $430 million for the International Disaster Assistance (IDA) account, which is 50 percent below the president's fiscal 2011 request and 67 percent below fiscal 2010 levels.
Shah said that such a cut "would be, really, the most dramatic stepping back away from our humanitarian responsibilities around the world in decades." The IDA account supports 1.6 million people in Darfur, so halving the account would place 800,000 people at risk, he said.
"[T]his would lead to a significant amount of reduction in feeding programs, medical programs and food and water programs for people who are incredibly vulnerable," he added.
Shah was also testifying in defense of the administration's fiscal 2012 budget request, which also faces the axe on Capitol Hill. Subcommittee Chairwoman Kay Granger (R-TX) opened the hearing by announcing that the administration's fiscal 2012 request was dead on arrival.
"While I understand the value of many of these important programs, the funding request for next year is -- is truly unrealistic in today's budget environment," she said. "We simply cannot fund everything that has been funded in the past. And we certainly cannot continue to fund programs that are duplicative and wasteful."
Granger said she would support USAID programs that have national security implications or contribute to the ongoing missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Her Democratic counterpart, Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), said that national security is threatened by instability in other parts of the world as well.
"Drastic cuts to USAID would risk a great deal in stability and security around the world which could spawn the kinds of threats that cost this country the lives of men and women in uniform and billions in treasure," she said.
Shah argued that foreign assistance is crucial to the long term economic recovery because it helps develop markets for American goods.
"USAID's work also strengthens America's economic security. By establishing links to consumers at the bottom of the pyramid, we effectively position American countries to enter more markets and sell more goods in the economies of the future, promoting exports and creating American jobs," he said.
As Congress struggles to negotiate a budget deal to keep the government running, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) told lawmakers Wednesday that the GOP version of the budget bill would result in the deaths of at least 70,000 children who depend on American food and health assistance around the world.
"We estimate, and I believe these are very conservative estimates, that H.R. 1 would lead to 70,000 kids dying," USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah testified before the House Appropriations State and Foreign Ops subcommittee.
"Of that 70,000, 30,000 would come from malaria control programs that would have to be scaled back specifically. The other 40,000 is broken out as 24,000 would die because of a lack of support for immunizations and other investments and 16,000 would be because of a lack of skilled attendants at birth," he said.
The Republican bill, known as H.R.1, was passed by the House, and would fund the government for the rest of fiscal 2011. It would effectively cut 16 percent from the Obama administration's original fiscal 2011 request for the international affairs account.
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) pointed out that H.R. 1 would provide $430 million for the International Disaster Assistance (IDA) account, which is 50 percent below the president's fiscal 2011 request and 67 percent below fiscal 2010 levels.
Shah said that such a cut "would be, really, the most dramatic stepping back away from our humanitarian responsibilities around the world in decades." The IDA account supports 1.6 million people in Darfur, so halving the account would place 800,000 people at risk, he said.
"[T]his would lead to a significant amount of reduction in feeding programs, medical programs and food and water programs for people who are incredibly vulnerable," he added.
Shah was also testifying in defense of the administration's fiscal 2012 budget request, which also faces the axe on Capitol Hill. Subcommittee Chairwoman Kay Granger (R-TX) opened the hearing by announcing that the administration's fiscal 2012 request was dead on arrival.
"While I understand the value of many of these important programs, the funding request for next year is -- is truly unrealistic in today's budget environment," she said. "We simply cannot fund everything that has been funded in the past. And we certainly cannot continue to fund programs that are duplicative and wasteful."
Granger said she would support USAID programs that have national security implications or contribute to the ongoing missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Her Democratic counterpart, Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), said that national security is threatened by instability in other parts of the world as well.
"Drastic cuts to USAID would risk a great deal in stability and security around the world which could spawn the kinds of threats that cost this country the lives of men and women in uniform and billions in treasure," she said.
Shah argued that foreign assistance is crucial to the long term economic recovery because it helps develop markets for American goods.
"USAID's work also strengthens America's economic security. By establishing links to consumers at the bottom of the pyramid, we effectively position American countries to enter more markets and sell more goods in the economies of the future, promoting exports and creating American jobs," he said.
Children of the Revolution - A Photo Essay
The photo essay can be found at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/31/children_of_the_revolution
Many children have died and countless more have been injured, orphaned, or displaced from their homes over the course of this year's Arab uprisings. But the Arab Spring's youngest are not only victims -- leading chants in Cairo's Tahrir Square to joining up with Libya's rebel fighters to camping out in Pearl Square in Bahrain to being jailed for writing the graffiti that inspired Syria to rise up, the children of the Arab Spring are proving that the future belongs to them.
In Yemen, children have been at the forefront of protests -- UNICEF counts at least 19 who have been killed by both snipers and explosions over the course of the protests that have gripped the nation since early February -- an estimated 20 percent of the total casualties. Above, a young Yemeni boy wears a headband that says in Arabic "I'm the next martyr" during an anti-government protest in the capital Sanaa on March 27.
Many children have died and countless more have been injured, orphaned, or displaced from their homes over the course of this year's Arab uprisings. But the Arab Spring's youngest are not only victims -- leading chants in Cairo's Tahrir Square to joining up with Libya's rebel fighters to camping out in Pearl Square in Bahrain to being jailed for writing the graffiti that inspired Syria to rise up, the children of the Arab Spring are proving that the future belongs to them.
In Yemen, children have been at the forefront of protests -- UNICEF counts at least 19 who have been killed by both snipers and explosions over the course of the protests that have gripped the nation since early February -- an estimated 20 percent of the total casualties. Above, a young Yemeni boy wears a headband that says in Arabic "I'm the next martyr" during an anti-government protest in the capital Sanaa on March 27.
Wednesday, 27 April 2011
Aid Workers Say Child Soldiers Involved in Escalating Somali Violence
Source: http://www.voanews.com/english/news/Aid-Workers-Say-Child-Soldiers-Involved-In-Escalating-Violence-120595459.html
Aid workers and observers in Somalia say an increasing number of child soldiers are being used by factions involved in the escalating violence in the country. They say most of the children are recruited or abducted by the militant Islamic group al-Shabab and suffer horrendous experiences on the battlefield.
The United Nations children's agency, UNICEF, estimates that thousands of children as young as 10 years old are involved in the fighting.
Isabella Castrogiovanni, head of the child protection unit at UNICEF Somalia, says the militant Islamic group al-Shabab recruits most of the minors.
She says the group gets children from schools, villages, and other communities, increasingly by force. She says that in one campaign, al-Shabab officials pressure families to hand over at least one of their children.
Once in the ranks, Castrogiovanni says children and other recruits have mobile phones containing short video clips to motivate them to fight. She describes one clip that she has seen.
"It's basically one al-Shabab fighter who died and there are many people around him including very young people, and there is somebody who is sitting next to the body and just saying, you know, repeating over and over again, this person [who] has died is a martyr, he has died for the cause, he will go to heaven, and then again this mantra of the infidels, the jihad, the obligation to fight for the jihad, and so on," said Castrogiovanni.
She says Somalia's government, commonly called the TFG, also uses minors. Castrogiovanni says she thinks this is mostly because the TFG does not have proper structures and procedures to determine the real age of recruits.
"I mean, we are not talking of a national army the way other countries do have a national army, meaning a very structured, controlled, centralized, and everybody is registered," she added. "There are several militia groups which are loosely associated with the TFG but maybe they are not accountable to the central TFG command structure."
It is rare that al-Shabab talks to the press. There have been many independent reports of the group recruiting child soldiers.
Somali Ambassador to Kenya Mohamed Ali Nur tells VOA the the Somali government has a strict policy of not using child soldiers.
"We have [a] committee in the forces who [are] just making sure that soldiers, if recruited, that they [committee] check how old [is] that boy or girl, and make sure that they are not underage," said nur.
In recent months, fighting has intensified between al-Shabab and the TFG. The United States considers al-Shabab a terrorist group linked to al-Qaida. The TFG was formed years ago through an international process to bring stability to the volatile country.
The African Union Mission in Somalia, AMISOM, has contributed troops to help stabilize the country and protect the government against al-Shabab attacks.
AMISOM spokesman Major Barigye Bahoku tells VOA most of the child soldiers his troops encounter say they were kidnapped by al-Shabab from Islamic schools and forced to fight. He says some parents who ask about their children or try to rescue them are killed.
Major Bahoku says at least three children every month surrender to AMISOM. He says the children describe horrific experiences.
" ...witnessing their comrades dying on the front line, how they are buried in shallow graves, how those who try to defect or run away are killed," he said. "It’s a horrendous situation."
Major Bahoku says his troops also encounter children firing on the battlefield.
"We try the best we can under the circumstances," he said. "If we are able to identify that these are underage children, we will possibly give them preference and maybe shout orders out to them to put down their guns and run away. Unfortunately we have got a language barrier problem."
UNICEF Somalia's Castrogiovanni says when children are in the line of fire, they are killed, maimed, or captured and jailed, with some lucky ones escaping. She says this is, in her words, "the worst one can imagine."
Somalia has been at war since dictator Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991.
Aid workers and observers in Somalia say an increasing number of child soldiers are being used by factions involved in the escalating violence in the country. They say most of the children are recruited or abducted by the militant Islamic group al-Shabab and suffer horrendous experiences on the battlefield.
The United Nations children's agency, UNICEF, estimates that thousands of children as young as 10 years old are involved in the fighting.
Isabella Castrogiovanni, head of the child protection unit at UNICEF Somalia, says the militant Islamic group al-Shabab recruits most of the minors.
She says the group gets children from schools, villages, and other communities, increasingly by force. She says that in one campaign, al-Shabab officials pressure families to hand over at least one of their children.
Once in the ranks, Castrogiovanni says children and other recruits have mobile phones containing short video clips to motivate them to fight. She describes one clip that she has seen.
"It's basically one al-Shabab fighter who died and there are many people around him including very young people, and there is somebody who is sitting next to the body and just saying, you know, repeating over and over again, this person [who] has died is a martyr, he has died for the cause, he will go to heaven, and then again this mantra of the infidels, the jihad, the obligation to fight for the jihad, and so on," said Castrogiovanni.
She says Somalia's government, commonly called the TFG, also uses minors. Castrogiovanni says she thinks this is mostly because the TFG does not have proper structures and procedures to determine the real age of recruits.
"I mean, we are not talking of a national army the way other countries do have a national army, meaning a very structured, controlled, centralized, and everybody is registered," she added. "There are several militia groups which are loosely associated with the TFG but maybe they are not accountable to the central TFG command structure."
It is rare that al-Shabab talks to the press. There have been many independent reports of the group recruiting child soldiers.
Somali Ambassador to Kenya Mohamed Ali Nur tells VOA the the Somali government has a strict policy of not using child soldiers.
"We have [a] committee in the forces who [are] just making sure that soldiers, if recruited, that they [committee] check how old [is] that boy or girl, and make sure that they are not underage," said nur.
In recent months, fighting has intensified between al-Shabab and the TFG. The United States considers al-Shabab a terrorist group linked to al-Qaida. The TFG was formed years ago through an international process to bring stability to the volatile country.
The African Union Mission in Somalia, AMISOM, has contributed troops to help stabilize the country and protect the government against al-Shabab attacks.
AMISOM spokesman Major Barigye Bahoku tells VOA most of the child soldiers his troops encounter say they were kidnapped by al-Shabab from Islamic schools and forced to fight. He says some parents who ask about their children or try to rescue them are killed.
Major Bahoku says at least three children every month surrender to AMISOM. He says the children describe horrific experiences.
" ...witnessing their comrades dying on the front line, how they are buried in shallow graves, how those who try to defect or run away are killed," he said. "It’s a horrendous situation."
Major Bahoku says his troops also encounter children firing on the battlefield.
"We try the best we can under the circumstances," he said. "If we are able to identify that these are underage children, we will possibly give them preference and maybe shout orders out to them to put down their guns and run away. Unfortunately we have got a language barrier problem."
UNICEF Somalia's Castrogiovanni says when children are in the line of fire, they are killed, maimed, or captured and jailed, with some lucky ones escaping. She says this is, in her words, "the worst one can imagine."
Somalia has been at war since dictator Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991.
12 children in Pakistan rescued from extortion gang operating as an NGO
Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/04/28/12-children-rescued-from-extortion-gang.html
LAHORE, April 27: A joint team of the Child Protection Welfare Bureau and the police on Wednesday rescued 12 children from a gang which was operating under the guise of an NGO at Shafiqabad.
This is the third incident in the city in which a fake NGO has been found involved in detaining children to ‘extort’ money from their parents.A CPWB team, assisted by the police, raided the one-room office of the “Save Life Welfare Foundation” at Shafiqabad, Bund Road on a complaint and rescued 12 children, aged between 10 and 16 years, from detention. The police
arrested four people, including NGO owner Muhammad Shafiq.
Mujahid, a rescued child, said he visited Data Darbar last week where a man came to him and inquired whether he was lost. “I told him that I am not lost and I am going back home but he forced me to go along with him,” Mujahid told the rescue team.
He said the man took him to a one-room house where more than 10 children were detained. “Later, the man asked me to give him my home address and promised that my parents will soon be here,” Mujahid said and also revealed that the gangsters would “torture and abuse me”.
Child Protection Officer Fayyaz Butt told Dawn that Shafiq, Ajmal, Asif and Arshad and their accomplices would force children to go along with them. Later, they would contact their parents and demand money for ‘reunion’.
“The gangsters would abduct children above 10 years of age on the pretext of rescuing them so that they could contact their parents\guardians to extract money.” He said none of those children was lost; some of them had come to visit the shrine and others were labourers.
The NGO, he said, had also requested the Data Darbar police post to inform it whenever a ‘lost’ child was found.
Mr Butt further said the bureau had also raided two such NGOs in the past and rescued the children. He appealed to the people to inform them about any such activity in their vicinity.
The children – Jamshed, Adnan, Irfan, Shahbaz, Allah Ditta, Mujahid, Wahid, Qaisar, Ramzan, Fakir, Shamim and Jehangir – belonged to Lahore, Peshawar, Kasur, Pasrur, Sialkot and Gujranwala.
A case has been registered against the accused under the Destitute Children Act’s sections 34 and 35 under which they can face imprisonment up to three years.
LAHORE, April 27: A joint team of the Child Protection Welfare Bureau and the police on Wednesday rescued 12 children from a gang which was operating under the guise of an NGO at Shafiqabad.
This is the third incident in the city in which a fake NGO has been found involved in detaining children to ‘extort’ money from their parents.A CPWB team, assisted by the police, raided the one-room office of the “Save Life Welfare Foundation” at Shafiqabad, Bund Road on a complaint and rescued 12 children, aged between 10 and 16 years, from detention. The police
arrested four people, including NGO owner Muhammad Shafiq.
Mujahid, a rescued child, said he visited Data Darbar last week where a man came to him and inquired whether he was lost. “I told him that I am not lost and I am going back home but he forced me to go along with him,” Mujahid told the rescue team.
He said the man took him to a one-room house where more than 10 children were detained. “Later, the man asked me to give him my home address and promised that my parents will soon be here,” Mujahid said and also revealed that the gangsters would “torture and abuse me”.
Child Protection Officer Fayyaz Butt told Dawn that Shafiq, Ajmal, Asif and Arshad and their accomplices would force children to go along with them. Later, they would contact their parents and demand money for ‘reunion’.
“The gangsters would abduct children above 10 years of age on the pretext of rescuing them so that they could contact their parents\guardians to extract money.” He said none of those children was lost; some of them had come to visit the shrine and others were labourers.
The NGO, he said, had also requested the Data Darbar police post to inform it whenever a ‘lost’ child was found.
Mr Butt further said the bureau had also raided two such NGOs in the past and rescued the children. He appealed to the people to inform them about any such activity in their vicinity.
The children – Jamshed, Adnan, Irfan, Shahbaz, Allah Ditta, Mujahid, Wahid, Qaisar, Ramzan, Fakir, Shamim and Jehangir – belonged to Lahore, Peshawar, Kasur, Pasrur, Sialkot and Gujranwala.
A case has been registered against the accused under the Destitute Children Act’s sections 34 and 35 under which they can face imprisonment up to three years.
Child protection guidance issued to mosques
Source: http://www.thisislancashire.co.uk/news/8991873.Child_protection_guidance_issued_to_mosques/
NEW guidance on child protection is being issued to Islamic teaching centres in Bolton.
The centres, known as Madrasahs, will be handed a new document prepared by the Bolton Council of Mosques (BCoM).
The Every Child Matters in Madrasah Guidance Document is to cover issues such as management and child protection, and will also include sample policies, procedures and forms for each Madrasah to use.
BCoM has been working closely with Bolton Council’s safeguarding team to ensure all mosques and madrasahs are aware of child protection law.
Safeguarding seminars also took place at BCoM. A BCoM spokesman said: “The madrasahs do some fantastic work, not just around Islamic theology and religious education, but with activities such as karate sessions in madrasah buildings, homework sessions, football competitions, youth club programmes, first-aid and fundraising programmes. The guidance document is a natural progression of the work BCoM has done with the mosques and madrasahs in Bolton.”
NEW guidance on child protection is being issued to Islamic teaching centres in Bolton.
The centres, known as Madrasahs, will be handed a new document prepared by the Bolton Council of Mosques (BCoM).
The Every Child Matters in Madrasah Guidance Document is to cover issues such as management and child protection, and will also include sample policies, procedures and forms for each Madrasah to use.
BCoM has been working closely with Bolton Council’s safeguarding team to ensure all mosques and madrasahs are aware of child protection law.
Safeguarding seminars also took place at BCoM. A BCoM spokesman said: “The madrasahs do some fantastic work, not just around Islamic theology and religious education, but with activities such as karate sessions in madrasah buildings, homework sessions, football competitions, youth club programmes, first-aid and fundraising programmes. The guidance document is a natural progression of the work BCoM has done with the mosques and madrasahs in Bolton.”
Children taking refuge in Liberia 'at serious risk'
Source: http://www.cafonline.org/Default.aspx?page=20084
27 April 2011
The refugee crisis in Liberia is putting the wellbeing of children at serious risk, it has been stated.
According to Save the Children, violence in neighbouring Ivory Coast has pushed more than 150,000 people over the border into Liberia, with 10,000 refugees having fled between 13 and 19 April alone.
Many Liberian towns are now experiencing "serious food shortages", the charity reports, while the pressure to raise money could be putting young people in danger.
Save the Children Emergency Team Leader Rae McGrath said that refugees who have fled with no money or food can be taken advantage of, with some teenage girls turning to prostitution in order to make ends meet.
"Young children may be at risk of being sent to work to bring in food," Mr McGrath observed.
He added that children who have been separated from their families could be particularly vulnerable.
Of the 157,000 refugees currently living in Liberia, just 2,700 are housed.
Earlier this month (7 April), the non-profit organisation reported that many refugees were in desperate need of hygiene items and medical supplies.
© Adfero Ltd
27 April 2011
The refugee crisis in Liberia is putting the wellbeing of children at serious risk, it has been stated.
According to Save the Children, violence in neighbouring Ivory Coast has pushed more than 150,000 people over the border into Liberia, with 10,000 refugees having fled between 13 and 19 April alone.
Many Liberian towns are now experiencing "serious food shortages", the charity reports, while the pressure to raise money could be putting young people in danger.
Save the Children Emergency Team Leader Rae McGrath said that refugees who have fled with no money or food can be taken advantage of, with some teenage girls turning to prostitution in order to make ends meet.
"Young children may be at risk of being sent to work to bring in food," Mr McGrath observed.
He added that children who have been separated from their families could be particularly vulnerable.
Of the 157,000 refugees currently living in Liberia, just 2,700 are housed.
Earlier this month (7 April), the non-profit organisation reported that many refugees were in desperate need of hygiene items and medical supplies.
© Adfero Ltd
United Nations High-level Meeting on Youth, 25-26 July 2011
Source: http://social.un.org/youthyear/high-level-meeting.html
As part of the International Year of Youth, the General Assembly will hold a high-level meeting on youth on 25 and 26 July 2011. The high-level meeting will have as its overarching theme “Youth: Dialogue and Mutual Understanding”.
The high-level meeting will comprise two consecutive informal interactive round tables on 25 July 2011 and two plenary meetings on 26 July 2011. The round tables will be chaired by Member States at the invitation of the President of the General Assembly and will address the following themes:
Round table 1: Strengthening international cooperation regarding youth and enhancing dialogue, mutual understanding and active youth participation as indispensable elements towards achieving social integration, full employment and the eradication of poverty;
Round table 2: Challenges to youth development and opportunities for poverty eradication, employment and sustainable development.
Flyer of the Event
Documents
United Nations General Assembly adopted a draft resolution A/65/L.63 on the Organization of the High-level Meeting on Youth
Time to let your voice be heard!
Letter to Youth-Led Organizations requesting their input to present to Member States for the formal outcome document process. The deadline is 15 May 2011. English | Français | Español | عربي | Chinese | Russian will be up soon
Participation of Youth Organizations
Online Pre-Registration
For New Youth Organizations non-ECOSOC Accredited: Your organization MUST create a new profile in our integrated Civil Society Organizations (iCSO) System by providing your contact details, specifying your areas of activities, the scope of your work and your involvement in youth issues. Approval of this profile can take up to 48 hours. The deadline is 30 April 2011.
Please note:
- Registration does not mean that your nomination is accepted;
- Only approved nominations will be notified by email by June 2011;
- You are requested to make your own travel and visa arrangements;
- The United Nations will not compensate any participant.
For Youth Organizations in Consultative Status with ECOSOC and New Approved Youth Organziations: Please visit this link to pre-register online for this event:
http://esango.un.org/irene/?page=viewContent&nr=14742&type=8§ion=8
Please note that you must click on the registration link (on the right menu) by using your assigned username and password. Once logged in, click on the link titled "Click here to Designate Representatives to this Event". An automatic email is sent to the NGO confirming each representative’s participation. Please be advised that the approval process might take up to one week. The deadline is 31 May 2011.
Side Events
Please use our online form to request a side event. This form can be used to request a workshop, panel or briefing discussion by ECOSOC Accredited Youth Organizations. Member States and UN Agencies are encouraged to contact us if they are interested in organizing side events during the High Level Meeting on Youth.
If you are unable to access the online form, please use our Word Version and email to us at youth@un.org with the subject "High Levl Meeting Side Event Request Form". The deadline is 15 June 2011.
Please note that due to limited space, we cannot guarantee that all requests will be honoured. Please be advised that the deadline for submission of this form online is 15 June 2011.
As part of the International Year of Youth, the General Assembly will hold a high-level meeting on youth on 25 and 26 July 2011. The high-level meeting will have as its overarching theme “Youth: Dialogue and Mutual Understanding”.
The high-level meeting will comprise two consecutive informal interactive round tables on 25 July 2011 and two plenary meetings on 26 July 2011. The round tables will be chaired by Member States at the invitation of the President of the General Assembly and will address the following themes:
Round table 1: Strengthening international cooperation regarding youth and enhancing dialogue, mutual understanding and active youth participation as indispensable elements towards achieving social integration, full employment and the eradication of poverty;
Round table 2: Challenges to youth development and opportunities for poverty eradication, employment and sustainable development.
Flyer of the Event
Documents
United Nations General Assembly adopted a draft resolution A/65/L.63 on the Organization of the High-level Meeting on Youth
Time to let your voice be heard!
Letter to Youth-Led Organizations requesting their input to present to Member States for the formal outcome document process. The deadline is 15 May 2011. English | Français | Español | عربي | Chinese | Russian will be up soon
Participation of Youth Organizations
Online Pre-Registration
For New Youth Organizations non-ECOSOC Accredited: Your organization MUST create a new profile in our integrated Civil Society Organizations (iCSO) System by providing your contact details, specifying your areas of activities, the scope of your work and your involvement in youth issues. Approval of this profile can take up to 48 hours. The deadline is 30 April 2011.
Please note:
- Registration does not mean that your nomination is accepted;
- Only approved nominations will be notified by email by June 2011;
- You are requested to make your own travel and visa arrangements;
- The United Nations will not compensate any participant.
For Youth Organizations in Consultative Status with ECOSOC and New Approved Youth Organziations: Please visit this link to pre-register online for this event:
http://esango.un.org/irene/?page=viewContent&nr=14742&type=8§ion=8
Please note that you must click on the registration link (on the right menu) by using your assigned username and password. Once logged in, click on the link titled "Click here to Designate Representatives to this Event". An automatic email is sent to the NGO confirming each representative’s participation. Please be advised that the approval process might take up to one week. The deadline is 31 May 2011.
Side Events
Please use our online form to request a side event. This form can be used to request a workshop, panel or briefing discussion by ECOSOC Accredited Youth Organizations. Member States and UN Agencies are encouraged to contact us if they are interested in organizing side events during the High Level Meeting on Youth.
If you are unable to access the online form, please use our Word Version and email to us at youth@un.org with the subject "High Levl Meeting Side Event Request Form". The deadline is 15 June 2011.
Please note that due to limited space, we cannot guarantee that all requests will be honoured. Please be advised that the deadline for submission of this form online is 15 June 2011.
How schoolboys began the Syrian revolution
Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20057082-503543.html
This story originally appeared on Global Post. It was written by Hugh Macleod and a reporter in Syria
DARAA, Syria -- It was the small act of defiance that catapulted Syria to the frontline of the Arab revolution.
And it came not from the organized opposition in Damascus or Aleppo or any other major Syrian city, but from the graffiti cans of school boys in a run-down border town half way to the desert.
"As-Shaab / Yoreed / Eskaat el nizam!": "The people / want / to topple the regime!"
Here on March 6 the slogan of the revolutions in Cairo and Tunis, which the boys had seen played out on their TVs, came flying from their paint cans onto a wall and grain silo in Daraa, the ancient and increasingly arid farming town on Syria's southern border with Jordan.
The local secret police soon arrested 15 boys between the ages of 10 and 15, detaining them under the control of Gen. Atef Najeeb, a cousin of President Bashar al-Assad.
In a gloomy interrogation room the children were beaten and bloodied, burned and had their fingernails pulled out by grown men working for a regime whose unchecked brutality appears increasingly to be sowing the seeds of its undoing.
On Friday, Syria saw the bloodiest day of its 5-week-old uprising, as security forces gunned down close to 100 protesters across the country. Security forces fired on mourners the following day, killing at least nine at funerals for those who died in Friday's massacre. On Monday, the violence continued. This time, security forces stormed the city of Daraa, where it all began.
More from GlobalPost on Middle East unrest
Complete coverage: Anger in the Arab World
The ever increasing numbers of people killed by security forces have fuelled the growing protest movement, the demands of which have intensified from simple requests for reform to the all-out ouster of Assad.
The story of Daraa is the story of the Syrian uprising: A single incident of brutality by a lawless secret police which ignited protests that swept the country.
Family blood
The disappearance of Syrian citizens, even children, inside the cells of one the state's notorious security branches may not have been anything unusual for people accustomed to living for half a century under emergency laws.
But the arrested boys were from almost every big family of Daraa: the Baiazids, the Gawabras, the Masalmas and the Zoubis.
In the largely tribal society of Syria's south, family loyalty and honor run deep. So when security forces opened fire on the families of the missing who had marched to the governor's house to demand their release, the regime had started a fatal feud.
"When the people saw the blood, they went crazy. We all belong to tribes and big families and for us blood is a very, very serious issue," said Ibrahim, a relative of one of the boys arrested.
The 200 people outside the governor's house quickly grew in number. "We were asking in a peaceful way to release the children but their reply to us was bullets," said Ibrahim. "Now we can have no compromise with any security branches."
Security forces prevented ambulances from ferrying the injured people to hospital, said Mohammed, a 28-year-old relative of another one of the boysi. "We will not forget that."
Instead the injured were taken to the Omari Mosque in the heart of Old Daraa.
Mosque stormed
With the boys still in prison the protests grew in size and frequency. Three protesters were killed on March 18 after security opened fire on a demonstration calling for an end to corruption and the release of the children.
Two days later furious crowds set fire to the offices of the Baath Party, calling for freedom and an end to emergency law.
Assad attempted to defuse local anger by sending high-ranking officials to Daraa to reassure the town's leaders that he was personally committed to bringing to justice those who had opened fire.
The 15 children were released, having spent two weeks in jail. But the marks of torture on their sons only fuelled the rage of local tribal leaders.
Now the demonstrators against the regime numbered in the thousands.
In the early hours of March 23, security forces stormed the Omari mosque, which had become a focus for the growing protest movement. Troops threw in stun grenades before opening fire, killing five people, including a doctor who was working to treat those injured in previous protests.
Locals said the men who stormed the mosque were Syrian special forces, with many claiming they belonged to the army's fourth division, under the command of Maher al-Assad, the president's brother.
The local governor and security chief were sacked, but the move did little to abate the anger of locals.
"Why didn't President Assad visit Daraa himself and say sorry to the people," said Mohammed. "We are 100 percent Syrian and he should show us real sympathy and respect."
Funeral protests
The Daraa protests grew exponentially, falling into a familiar and tragic pattern: The funeral for those killed a day earlier swells into a rally against the regime. Security forces open fire, killing more and guaranteeing an even larger turnout at the next funeral. It's a pattern underway today.
On March 24 the government issued a decree to cut taxes and raise state salaries by 1,500 Syrian pounds ($32.60) a month.
A day later tens of thousands turned out for funerals in Daraa shouting, "We do not want your bread, we want dignity." Security opened fire and killed 15.
A group of enraged protesters tore down the statue of Hafez al-Assad, the former president, whose name still inspired fear in most Syrians. Pictures of Hafez's son, Bashar, were ripped and burned.
In one week of protests in and around Daraa at least 55 people were killed. Across the country the pledge to Daraa became a unifying chant: "With our souls, with our blood, we sacrifice to you Daraa."
This story originally appeared on Global Post. It was written by Hugh Macleod and a reporter in Syria
DARAA, Syria -- It was the small act of defiance that catapulted Syria to the frontline of the Arab revolution.
And it came not from the organized opposition in Damascus or Aleppo or any other major Syrian city, but from the graffiti cans of school boys in a run-down border town half way to the desert.
"As-Shaab / Yoreed / Eskaat el nizam!": "The people / want / to topple the regime!"
Here on March 6 the slogan of the revolutions in Cairo and Tunis, which the boys had seen played out on their TVs, came flying from their paint cans onto a wall and grain silo in Daraa, the ancient and increasingly arid farming town on Syria's southern border with Jordan.
The local secret police soon arrested 15 boys between the ages of 10 and 15, detaining them under the control of Gen. Atef Najeeb, a cousin of President Bashar al-Assad.
In a gloomy interrogation room the children were beaten and bloodied, burned and had their fingernails pulled out by grown men working for a regime whose unchecked brutality appears increasingly to be sowing the seeds of its undoing.
On Friday, Syria saw the bloodiest day of its 5-week-old uprising, as security forces gunned down close to 100 protesters across the country. Security forces fired on mourners the following day, killing at least nine at funerals for those who died in Friday's massacre. On Monday, the violence continued. This time, security forces stormed the city of Daraa, where it all began.
More from GlobalPost on Middle East unrest
Complete coverage: Anger in the Arab World
The ever increasing numbers of people killed by security forces have fuelled the growing protest movement, the demands of which have intensified from simple requests for reform to the all-out ouster of Assad.
The story of Daraa is the story of the Syrian uprising: A single incident of brutality by a lawless secret police which ignited protests that swept the country.
Family blood
The disappearance of Syrian citizens, even children, inside the cells of one the state's notorious security branches may not have been anything unusual for people accustomed to living for half a century under emergency laws.
But the arrested boys were from almost every big family of Daraa: the Baiazids, the Gawabras, the Masalmas and the Zoubis.
In the largely tribal society of Syria's south, family loyalty and honor run deep. So when security forces opened fire on the families of the missing who had marched to the governor's house to demand their release, the regime had started a fatal feud.
"When the people saw the blood, they went crazy. We all belong to tribes and big families and for us blood is a very, very serious issue," said Ibrahim, a relative of one of the boys arrested.
The 200 people outside the governor's house quickly grew in number. "We were asking in a peaceful way to release the children but their reply to us was bullets," said Ibrahim. "Now we can have no compromise with any security branches."
Security forces prevented ambulances from ferrying the injured people to hospital, said Mohammed, a 28-year-old relative of another one of the boysi. "We will not forget that."
Instead the injured were taken to the Omari Mosque in the heart of Old Daraa.
Mosque stormed
With the boys still in prison the protests grew in size and frequency. Three protesters were killed on March 18 after security opened fire on a demonstration calling for an end to corruption and the release of the children.
Two days later furious crowds set fire to the offices of the Baath Party, calling for freedom and an end to emergency law.
Assad attempted to defuse local anger by sending high-ranking officials to Daraa to reassure the town's leaders that he was personally committed to bringing to justice those who had opened fire.
The 15 children were released, having spent two weeks in jail. But the marks of torture on their sons only fuelled the rage of local tribal leaders.
Now the demonstrators against the regime numbered in the thousands.
In the early hours of March 23, security forces stormed the Omari mosque, which had become a focus for the growing protest movement. Troops threw in stun grenades before opening fire, killing five people, including a doctor who was working to treat those injured in previous protests.
Locals said the men who stormed the mosque were Syrian special forces, with many claiming they belonged to the army's fourth division, under the command of Maher al-Assad, the president's brother.
The local governor and security chief were sacked, but the move did little to abate the anger of locals.
"Why didn't President Assad visit Daraa himself and say sorry to the people," said Mohammed. "We are 100 percent Syrian and he should show us real sympathy and respect."
Funeral protests
The Daraa protests grew exponentially, falling into a familiar and tragic pattern: The funeral for those killed a day earlier swells into a rally against the regime. Security forces open fire, killing more and guaranteeing an even larger turnout at the next funeral. It's a pattern underway today.
On March 24 the government issued a decree to cut taxes and raise state salaries by 1,500 Syrian pounds ($32.60) a month.
A day later tens of thousands turned out for funerals in Daraa shouting, "We do not want your bread, we want dignity." Security opened fire and killed 15.
A group of enraged protesters tore down the statue of Hafez al-Assad, the former president, whose name still inspired fear in most Syrians. Pictures of Hafez's son, Bashar, were ripped and burned.
In one week of protests in and around Daraa at least 55 people were killed. Across the country the pledge to Daraa became a unifying chant: "With our souls, with our blood, we sacrifice to you Daraa."
Video: It's Time to End Child Labor in US Agriculture
Source: Utne Reader http://www.utne.com/Politics/Video-Its-Time-to-End-Child-Labor-in-US-Agriculture.aspx
Human Rights Watch has launched a campaign to end child labor in US agriculture. "Children can legally work on any farm at age 12, with their parents’ permission, and it's not uncommon to see children as young as 7 and 8 in the fields," according to a new Human Rights Watch report, Fields of Peril. "During peak harvest season, the children work up to 14-hour days, and earn far less than minimum wage. There is no minimum age for children working on a small farm with parental permission."
The organization has produced a short video on the issue. Pass it around!
Read more: http://www.utne.com/Politics/Video-Its-Time-to-End-Child-Labor-in-US-Agriculture.aspx#ixzz1Kjqh78KW
Libyan children suffering rape, aid agency reports
Children as young as eight have been subjected to sexual assaults, according to accounts given to Save the Children
According to The Guardian:
Libyan children as young as eight have suffered sexual assaults, including rape, amid the worsening conflict across the country, a British aid agency has warned.
Although Save the Children said it could not confirm the reports, the charity said the accounts by children were consistent and they were displaying signs of physical and emotional distress.
The allegations come from 200 children and 40 adults who have fled from Misrata, Ajdabiya and Ras Lanuf and are now in temporary camps in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.
The families told the charity's staff that children as young as eight had been sexually assaulted, sometimes in front of their relatives.
In one reported case, mothers claimed a group of girls had been abducted, held hostage for four days and raped, and were unable to speak when they were released.
Michael Mahrt, Save the Children's child protection adviser, said: "The reports of sexual violence against children are unconfirmed, but they are consistent and were repeated across the four camps we visited.
"Children told us they have witnessed horrendous scenes. Some said they saw their fathers murdered and mothers raped. They described things happening to other children, but they may have actually happened to them and they are just too upset to talk about it – it's a typical coping mechanism used by children who have suffered such abuse."
Mahrt said some children were displaying signs of physical and emotional distress: being withdrawn, refusing to play and waking up crying in the night.
The charity, along with other agencies, is conducting a 13-day assessment of the situation. It called on "the international community to ensure that all parties respect children's right to be protected from violence and abuse".
The charity said it was increasing its child protection work in Benghazi, training social workers to provide youngsters with psycho-social support
Before we launch the new Training and Consultancy Service this summer, we want to invite as many stakeholders as possible to join us in a one-day strategy workshop in June. I've compiled a list of 102 organisations. They include donors, businesses and charities. Compiling the list is the easy part. Getting the right contact information -- without phoning each one -- is the hard part. If you're interested in participating, drop me a line.
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
I started my new job on April 18 as the Consultancy Manager for the Keeping Children Safe Coalition. Being in charge of organising child protection training and consultancy for organisations involved in international development and/or relief is a daunting task. But I'll be working with wonderful, dedicated people.
There is nothing more important than making sure that children are safe from abuse, violence and neglect. I'll share with you my journey in getting the service off the ground, especially the ups and downs. Maybe we can learn from each other. I would hope so. I especially need to know how we can help you and your organisations to keep children safe. We want the service to be world class.
I welcome your thoughts and ideas, and look forward to hearing from you.
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