Violating chilrens rights: Harmful practices based on tradition, culture, religion or superstition

The International NGO Council on Violence against Children has just issued a report on violating children's rights: harmful practices based on tradition, culture, religion or superstition.

Each year, thousands of children die worldwide and the childhoods and development of millions more are scarred by harmful practices perpetrated by parents, relatives, religious and community leaders and other adults.
All violations of children's rights can legitimately be described as harmful practices, but the common characteristic of the violations highlighted in this report is that they are based on tradition, culture, religion or superstition and are perpetrated and actively condoned by the child's parents or significant adults within the child's community. Indeed, they often still enjoy majority support within communities or whole states.
Many of the identified practices involve gross and unlawful discrimination against groups of children, including gender discrimination, and in particular discrimination against children with
disabilities. Some are based on tradition and/or superstition, some on religious belief, others on false information or beliefs about child development and health. Many involve extreme physical
violence and pain leading, in some cases intentionally, to death or serious injury. Others involve mental violence. All are an assault on the child's human dignity and violate universally agreed international human rights standards. The International NGO Council on Violence against Children believes the continued legality
and social and cultural acceptance of a very wide range of these practices in many states illustrates a devastating failure of  nternational and regional human rights mechanisms to provoke the necessary challenge, prohibition and elimination. Comprehensive, children's rights-based analysis and action are needed now. Above all, there must be an assertion of every state's immediate obligation to ensure all children their right to full respect for their human dignity and physical integrity. Harmful practices based on tradition, culture, religion or  superstition are often perpetrated against very young children or infants, who are clearly lacking the capacity to consent or to refuse consent themselves. Assumptions of parental powers or rights over their children allow the perpetration of a wide range of these practices, many by parents directly, some by other individuals with parents' assumed or actual consent. Yet the UN Convention on the Rights
of the Child (CRC), ratified by almost every state, favours the replacement of the concept of parental "rights" over children with parental "responsibilities," ensuring that the child's best interests are parents' "basic concern" (Article 18).

Source: http://www.crin.org/docs/InCo_Report_15Oct.pdf



Submitted by admin on Fri, 2012-10-26 13:25.