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HUMAN RIGHTS DAY: What About Teens’ Rights?

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Dec 9 2004 (IPS) - When officials from the public prosecutor’s office in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro state conducted a surprise inspection of a juvenile detention centre they found 13 youths locked in a cramped and windowless cell.

When officials from the public prosecutor’s office in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro state conducted a surprise inspection of a juvenile detention centre they found 13 youths locked in a cramped and windowless cell.

Describing the space as “inhumane,” the officials told Human Rights Watch (HRW), “guards had beaten the youths repeatedly and that many had respiratory and skin problems resulting from the close quarters in which they had been confined.”

“Juvenile detention centres in Rio de Janeiro are overcrowded, filthy and violent, failing in virtually every respect to safeguard youths’ basic human rights. Beatings at the hands of guards are common,” concludes HRW in a report released this week.

But such mistreatment is not unique to Brazil nor to the developing world, says another report, released in November, which laments the global community’s lack of progress in guaranteeing the rights of adolescents and children.

“More than a million children and teenagers across the world are locked up, the majority of them under arrest or awaiting trial,” says the assessment by development organisation Plan, titled ‘I’m a Teenager. What Happened to My Rights?’

“A significant number of teenagers behind bars have not even committed a criminal offence, but have been locked up for ‘status offences’ – which means offences that would not incur legal penalties if committed by an adult – such as truancy, begging, vagrancy and alcohol use,” the document says.

Released 15 years after the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) came into being, the report was timed to assess how today’s teens, the first generation to grow up with the new convention in place, have been affected by it.

The report also serves as recognition of the fact that today’s global population of teens, ages 10 to 19, is the largest ever, numbering 1.3 billion people, says Carol Wilding, president and chief executive officer of Foster Parents Plan, the Canadian member of Plan.

“Unfortunately, enjoying your youth and your childhood is very much a luxury in most developing countries. These children are forced to take on the role and the responsibilities of being an adult, physically, emotionally, economically – and they’re just not ready for it,” she told IPS.

“Yes, around the issue of child labour, as around other issues – particularly child soldiers – the CRC has brought a lot of these issues to the forefront… but we need to be doing more about them.”

The challenges are different, but no less daunting, for teens in the industrialised North, according to Wilding. Put starkly, “in the North there are a lot of diseases of excess and the issue in the South is more (one of) diseases of poverty.”

According to Plan’s report, “In the developed world, the present generation of teenagers will turn into the most obese and infertile adults in the history of mankind, doctors warn. The drinking, eating, sexual, drug-taking and smoking habits of adolescents are creating a public health time-bomb.”

But northern teens have not escaped the mistreatment meted out to youth worldwide, adds the document.

“It was reported in 1999 that children held in the Baltimore City Detention Centre in the U.S. endured particularly grim conditions, confined to poorly lit cells crawling with cockroaches and rodents. Violence in the jail was rampant, with frequent fights leading to lengthy ‘lock downs’, during which entire sections were restricted to their cells, sometimes for weeks at a time.”

The Plan assessment paints a bleak global picture: “The hopes of teenagers – and hopes are something which they have in abundance – are being dashed against the rocks of bitter realities of experience.”

The CRC, ratified by 192 nations – the notable absence is the United States – guarantees children (up to age 17) the right to: protection from all forms of physical and mental violence; the highest possible standard of health treatment; education, including free and compulsory primary schooling; rest and leisure; arrest or detention only in conformity with the law and “only as a measure of last resort,” among many other rights.

According to the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) annual report, released Thursday, “There have been significant advances since the convention was adopted in the fulfilment of children’s rights to survival, health and education… and a growing recognition of the need to create a protective environment to shield children from exploitation, abuse and violence.”

“Worryingly, however, in several regions and countries some of these gains appear in danger of reversal from three key threats: poverty, armed conflict and HIV/AIDS,” says UNICEF.

Dec. 10 is international Human Rights Day.

Wilding described an 11-year-old girl she met in Malawi who had lost both her parents to AIDS and has no brothers and sisters. “She’s 11 but she looks like a 50-year-old. She’s robbed of her childhood, she’s robbed of her parents; she takes care of an ailing grandmother who has leprosy.”

“She has no time to just be a young girl or to play,” adds Wilding. “And the teen years are tough years. Whether you live in the North or the South, you’re going through a lot of changes; and if you’re a young girl, you’re going through a lot of physical changes, and you’re trying to cope with those.”

So is the news all bad for the rights of teenagers? Not according to Plan.

Wilding says one of their successful programmes is Youth as Peace Builders, in Colombia, aimed at “kids who are teens who live in an environment on a day-to-day basis that is very violent and full of gang wars.”

The project uses youth to train other young people about their rights, including the rights not to be abused, not to be violated or put into a situation of violence.

“When these kids and youth understand that,” according to Wilding, “their actions and behaviour on a day-to-day basis – whether it be in a schoolyard, whether it be at home with their siblings – changes dramatically, to the point where you have teens intervening to settle fights in a schoolyard.”

Other positive changes, she adds, occur after children are given the opportunity to make choices in their lives.

“I met girls in Kenya who were teens a number of years ago – way out in the middle of nowhere we drove – they were being trained as traditional birth attendants. And I said to them, ‘what about you, and marriage, and having children?”

“And they acknowledged, ‘we would never want to have our children out here. We don’t think this is the right way to be bringing children into the world’.”

“These were young girls, women, who – being educated – could see that they wanted to change a habit or break a tradition, so that they didn’t follow in the same footsteps.”

Schooling is key, stressed Wilding.

“If we can realise the right for children to have an education – if we could do just that – that would be a huge advancement, because if you keep these kids in school and keep them educated, the domino effect – in terms of marrying at a later age or in terms of making the right life choices for yourself, boy or girl – it’s proven time and again the impact that can have.”