Child in Iraq, as described in this news release.
Children
By Amal Kashf Al-Ghitta
Friday, March 10,
2006
Iraq’s children have suffered more than just
successive wars and economic sanctions. The loss of parents
and family resources has boosted child labor, homelessness, and inclinations
toward violence and rebellion. Children often now live in homes
where 25 people live in a space of 40 square meters. Even intact families may
comprise parents and five children in a single
six-meter room.
The increase in child labor reflects
families’ dire economic situation: children are frequently a family’s only
breadwinners, and they work cheap. Contractors in municipal services, for
example, prefer to use children in order to cut costs. A child may be used for
agricultural labor or for janitorial work. Many work in piles of garbage, either
removing them to another place or collecting
empty bottles and cans to sell.
Other children load and transport items in
the markets, where they must pull carts weighing 60-70 kilograms and carry boxes
weighing 15 kilograms in temperatures of 50 degrees centigrade. Two children may
unload a truck
carrying 1,000 kilograms of food items.
Not surprisingly, Iraq’s child workers suffer
from a wide array of serious health problems. Children who work in the garbage
dumps are prone to skin
and respiratory problems, while those who work with paints eventually become
addicted to the intoxicants that they inhale. And all working children are
vulnerable to malnutrition, as their diet
typically lacks the items necessary to build body tissues.
Nor is there any official authority to
protect children and defend their rights in case of incapacitation or sickness.
On the contrary, children are often beaten by family members if they do not
provide the daily wage expected of them, or by their bosses when they are
inattentive or make a mistake. Indeed, Iraqi children are exposed to beating
without regard for their age, thus growing up insecure, hostile and violent.
Moreover, they are prone to being kidnapped by criminal gangs, trained to steal,
or, worse, placed at the mercy of terrorists for use in attacks.
The deterioration of families’ financial
situation has also left poor children deprived of educational opportunities. For
many children, even when they do attend school, the collapse of infrastructure,
the unavailability of electricity and water, and high temperatures in the summer
are hardly conducive to successful study. The small number of schools, the poor
condition of buildings, and the collapse of relationships between students and
teachers is also at fault. Older children sit in classrooms with much younger
children, growing frustrated and violent, rather than becoming role models for
others to emulate.
Iraqi girls suffer no less than boys – and
often more. At one end of the spectrum of deprivation, their opportunities are
more constrained. When a family’s income is insufficient to pay school fees for
every child, girls are typically denied an education, owing to the traditional
belief that marriage is a girl’s final destiny. They must perform household
chores and are subject to beating if they do not carry out orders issued by male
family members. In poor households, they are also likely to receive less food
than boys, placing their physical health and development at even greater risk.
At the other end of the spectrum, rape,
adultery, early child bearing and abortion have become ordinary matters.
Increasingly, Iraqi girls interpret anything given to them as a means of having
sex with them.
Orphans, whose number has increased sharply
over the past quarter-century as a result of wars, economic sanctions, and
terrorism, are especially vulnerable to the cruelest type of physical and
psychological violence. Having lost their homes and parents, they sleep in
alleys, sell cigarettes or newspapers, and beg. Grandparents are often unable or
unwilling to care for them, and the pathological education given to them by
criminal gangs often puts them beyond the reach of any institution’s ability to
rehabilitate them.
Simply put, children in Iraq have been
reduced from human beings worthy of care to tools of production and instruments
of violence. We are quite literally breeding a new generation of disorder.
Amal Kashf Al-Ghitta, a
member of the Iraqi National Assembly, directs the Islamic Foundation for Women
and Children. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in
collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
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Categories: Releases