CHILE-CHILDREN: Day-Care Educators Should Play Key Role

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Gonzalez

SANTIAGO, Jul 23 1997 (IPS) - Chile ranks third in the world behind Japan and Germany as the world’s worst abusers of children, according to the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) and the government is looking to day care providers to help end this problem

The total number of reported cases of sexual abuse of minors is expected to top 4,000 this year, says Carlos Verdejo, a lawyer with the National Service of Minors (Sename). The actual number, however, could be closer to 30,000 as experience has shown that, for every formal report, six or seven cases go unreported or remain in the preliminary stages at health care centres or police stations.

Verdejo spoke at a seminar Monday organised by the National Council of Child Care (Junji) and attended by some 100 public day- care centre educators. It is the Junji day-care teachers, and child care educators and assistants in general, who should become active agents in the prevention of child abuse, according to the strategy of President Eduardo Frei’s administration.

Sename statistics showed that in 1996 there were more than 3,000 reports of sexual offenses in Santiago, home to more than five million inhabitants. More than 50 percent of the cases – 1,715 – involved minors (under 18).

The majority of the reported cases of sexual abuse of children occurred in the victim’s home, with 1,150 of the cases reported by the victim’s mother, 154 by the father and 140 by the abused minor. The great majority (83.7 percent) of the victims were female.

Nearly 25 percent of the victims were 13 to 15 years old, and just over 18 percent were aged from four to six. In 29 percent of the cases (497), the offender – usually the father – lived with the victim.

Only 122 of the reports (seven percent) led to legal action against the individual accused of abuse, which the experts said was indicative that impunity remained the norm for child abusers.

Although many victims of sexual abuse committed outside the home are unable to identify their attackers, it is also frequent that girls who are raped and their families keep silent due to shame or fear of reprisal.

One common indication of abuse is physical injuries which the child attempts to explain as the result of an accident.

“A marked tendency is for direct family members to deny the aggression of which minors have been victims,” said Maria Eugenia Jana, the regional Secretary of Justice.

Jana underlined that sexual and other types of abuse of children were present at all socioeconomic levels in Chile, not only among the poorest sectors, which is a common misconception.

One fundamental aspect of tackling the problem is providing attention to the parents, either as victimisers or as part of the family affected by sexual abuse of a minor, delegates heard. The income and educational levels of parents frequently conditioned the possibility of helping them, in terms of the intellectual handling of the problem or the possibilities for behaviour changes.

The seminar highlighted the key role that child-care educators could play, due to their familiarity with the children and, through the children, with the parents and family. With the methodical observation of children’s behaviour, cases of sexual abuse can be detected, experts declared.