Monday’s Irish Times announced that Ireland would be
Implementing best practice on the right of children to be heard http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0301/1224265369793.html
A child’s right to be heard is the essence of the guardian ad-Litem program. Think about it. Voiceless, helpless children enduring unspeakable horrors, sometimes for many years with no one to turn to for help.
The World Health Organization defines Torture as extended exposure to violence and deprivation. That is how I see child abuse.
In my experience as a guardian ad-Litem, a child often doesn’t even know that these terrible adult behaviors are wrong or they they have not done something to cause them.
Unspeakable crimes are committed against children but its not a crime in most third world nations, and it is rarely discovered if child protection services are under-trained or under resourced in industrialized nations.
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Continue reading ‘Ireland Implements guardian ad-Litem Program’
According to World News 380,000 Haitian children were made homeless when their orphanages were destroyed in the earthquake.
Before the earthquake, UNICEF estimates that tens of thousands of Haitian children were being sold as servants to rich Haitians each year.
Developing nations are often unable to provide even the most basic safety for their nations children (child endangerment, slavery, basic care) through the proper writing and passing of laws and standards that all sensible people could agree on. Enforcement is another issue entirely.
Continue reading ‘A Million Haitian Orphans’
Perhaps the test of how a nation treats its youngest citizens will determine how nations are are viewed in the twenty first century.
After an apparently preventable death of a 12 year old girl in Australia, public outrage over lack of standards for child care prompted legislation at a federal level that has now come to pass.
When I spoke at the UN in 2008, a woman from Uganda said to me that there were not even words to describe the child abuse that took place in her country, and no programs to help abused children (at the end of the UN talk, you can hear her statement) http://www.invisiblechildren.org/home/ click on the link at the bottom of the page).
That puts definition to being a third world nation.Link to Australian eGov article; http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/32942 Continue reading ‘Australia Begins National Child Care Standards’
As a long time guardian ad-Litem, it always appeared that sex abuse was minimized or under-reported in the child abuse cases I worked on. Uncomfortable to to talk about and often difficult to prove.
The impact of sex abuse on children lasts for ever as is well documented by the medical community www.avahealth.org (watch the videos on this site, the The Relationship of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE’s) to Adult Health Status at the bottom of the home page is terrific).
This article about sex abuse of children in Australia’s child protection system makes me wonder if their reporting is just more honest than ours, or if they really do see more of it.
http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/wa-has-worst-rate-of-child-abuse-report/story-e6frg13u-1225822209261 Continue reading ‘20% of Western Australia Child Abuse is Sex Abuse’
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