Check out our new website!

Hello friends of Child Protection International,

We are please to announce the lauch of the new website for our budding organization. Check out www.childprotectioninternational.org to learn more about our mission, the group’s history and our current work!

The Situation of Children in Africa

There have been a few articles lately about the state of children in Africa. Earlier this week there was an article in the New York Times about the situation of unaccompanied children crossing the border from Zimbabwe into South Africa.  With the ongoing crisis in Zimbabwe, children have been illegally crossing the border into South Africa in search of food and money.  This article tells the story of a 16-year-old orphan who crossed the border with three friends and in the process was beaten for his money.

Then they staked claim to a patch of sandy soil under the punishing sun at the Showgrounds, an open athletic field that is the designated repository for refugees. The population hovers around 2,000. Each day new people arrive, and each day familiar faces depart.

The South African government issues temporary asylum papers to about 250 of these refugees a day, entitling them to six months without worry of deportation. Unaccompanied minors are ineligible for this status, though, leaving them in an odd limbo, with no specified place in the bureaucratic shuffle.

The perils facing boys are nothing compared to girls: an aid worker said “‘You’ll sometimes find boys sleeping in ditches and under bridges, but you won’t find the girls.  The girls get quickly taken by men who turn them into women.’”  In addition, the South African police have difficulty prosecuting rapists and robbers as most victims will be deported if they report any crimes.  

 

Equally sad is a story that was filed today in the BBC about children who are abducted by the LRA in South Sudan.  These children are abducted on the Western side of South Sudan, near Uganda.  The LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) has been fighting some twenty years under the leadership of Joseph Kony.  The article tells the story of an 11-year-0ld girl who was abducted by the LRA but later let free because she wasn’t keeping up with the rest of the group.  Children abducted by the LRA face a horrible life: boys become soldiers while girls are forced to have sex with the commanders of the army.  

Most frightening for those of us fighting for stability in South Sudan is a few lines near the end of the article: “Many fear those keen to destabilise oil-rich South Sudan ahead of an independence referendum in 2011 could use the group [the some 300 LRA fighters located in South Sudan] as a proxy force.”  Child Protection International has heard of other groups rumored to serve as destabilizing forces.  If South Sudan has any hope for a stable independence, these groups need to be controlled.  The greatest difficulty is the inaccesibility of the area, as a International Crisis Group worker states at the end: she “warned of a looming ‘humanitarian crisis in an area inaccessible to aid and assistance’”.