Plans to outlaw the physical punishment of children would "criminalise parents", one of the church's top officials is quoted as saying.

He went on to say "it is not the role of the state to interfere" in parenting, apart from in "the most exceptional circumstances". Read more

She has encouraged these organisations to educate their various groups and family members to eliminate social ills and discrimination against women.

Vuniwaqa said she is looking to work closely with faith-based organisations in the coming financial year to help in the economic empowerment of women, elimination of violence against women, child abuse and neglect and poverty alleviation.

She was speaking as a guest speaker announced at the three-day Women in the Frontlines conference that took place at the Apostles Church in Lautoka last week.

About 200 women from around Fiji participated at the conference.

The conference in Fiji was one of five held in July and August. The other four are in the United States.

Women on the Frontlines website says it is committed to empower, equip and mobilise Christian women through conferences, training events, outreaches, missions projects and our Women in Ministry Network.

Although it is sometimes described non-denominational, it appears to be part of the fundamentalist evangelical Christian tradition.

It was begun by husband and wife James and Michal Ann Goll in 1997. After the death of Michal Ann, James passed the ministry on to Patricia King of Patricia King Ministries.

Patricia King is the President XP Ministries/Christian Services Association. She is described as "an accomplished itinerant speaker, author, television host, media producer, and ministry network overseer who has given her life fully to Jesus Christ and to His Kingdom's advancement in the earth."

Christian Services Association (CSA), a non-profit society, was founded in Canada in 1973 and in the USA in 1984.

It is the parent ministry of XP Ministries founded in 2004 in Arizona. CSA/XP Ministries is located in Maricopa, AZ and Kelowna, B.C.

Source

• Fijivillage
• Fiji Times
• Women on the Frontlines
• Image FaceBook

Last week, a middle school teacher was charged with assault over the beating of a student who was later hospitalised for his injuries.

The teacher also reportedly threatened to beat the 11-year-old's parents if they reported the incident.

Corporal punishment is prohibited in schools in article 40 of the Education (Schools and General Provisions) Regulations 2002.

But the crisis centre's team leader, Lesila Lokotui To'ia, said it was often used by both parents and teachers.

To'ia said it was not a positive form of discipline and the centre has been working to educate people.

"This is totally unacceptable, you know, and also the Crisis Centre's stand is that we have no, zero tolerance towards this and also any form of violence," she said.

The teacher was arrested after a call to a local radio station by the child's grandmother triggered an investigation.

Acting Chief Superintendent Tevita Vailea said teachers punishing students physically is clearly against the law.

He said the police were working with the Women and Children's Crisis Centre to eliminate the violence.

"To make sure that any victim of this kind of crime should have the courage to come forward and also in the long term, to create an environment in school that is more safe and more friendly and welcomes every member of society here," Vailea said.

Established in October 2009, the Women and Children Crisis Centre (WCCC) was pioneered by a group of women and some male advocate supporters.

The group was determined to develop an NGO that efficiently and professionally delivers quality support services to victims and survivors of violence against women and girls throughout Tonga.

Source

• radionz.co.nz
• radionz.co.nz
• www.vsa.org.nz
• endcorporalpunishment.org
• Image: image.slidesharecdn.com

iTaukei Affairs Board representative to the Labasa Inter Agency Committee on Child Welfare, Ravuama Naceba, has been in Dogotuki addressing the issue.

"When addressing the issue, we had offered the parents a choice on whether they wanted to continue exercising their freedom of religion or whether they wanted to be taken to task for denying their child's right to education," he said.

After considering their situation, the parents chose to allow their children to attend classes in the nearest school.

Ravuama said the committee needed to confirm whether issues such as the freedom of religion superseded the right of children to immunisation and education or whether it was subjective to these rights.

Source

• Fiji Times
• Image: 1.bp.blogspot.com

The Grey Lynn School children grilled National, Labour, Green and Internet Party politicians and independent MP Brendan Horan at the launch of a "tick4kids" campaign to bring children's issues to the fore in the election.

Jack, aged 11, asked them if they would consider having a student government that primary school children could be part of. All except Mr Horan said they would. Continue reading

The comments from Vatican Spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi, come as part of a response to the UN Committee's report into the rights of children.

However in a statement he also accused the Committee of going beyond its competencies and jurisdiction.

Lombardi said the Committee's remarks gave "indications involving moral evaluations of contraception, or abortion, or education in families, or the vision of human sexuality, in light of [the Committee's] own ideological vision of sexuality itself."

Lombardi also accused the UN Committee of neglecting to attend to information actually submitted by the Vatican regarding the Holy See's response to sexual abuse.

He expressed alarm, that instead, the UN relied on reports from groups invested in criticising the Church.

Lombardi also expressed amazement at the UN's lack of understanding that the Vatican does not control the behaviour of priests in every country of the world and is not responsible for law enforcement efforts outside of its own restricted jurisdiction.

He accused the United Nations committee of a "lack of understanding of the specific nature of the Holy See".

The UN report also came under fire from Fr Thomas Reese SJ a senior analyst for NCR, who called the report "missed opportunity".

Reece admits the Church's response to sexual abuse was disastrous, "When it comes to the historical record, the church deserves to be raked over the coals," he said.

However, in omitting to examine the Vatican's current policies, procedures and how they are now being enforced, Reece says the UN failed to do the hard work, making the recommendations meaningless.

Sources

• Vatican Radio
• NCR
• Image: Fox News

Suddenly Durga heard screams and huddled on the floor. Acting on a tip, police stormed the apartment in the heart of Bangalore. When they broke the door down, Durga crossed her arms in front of her chest and closed her eyes. She was only wearing a pair of panties — that's all the clothing that her owners had allowed her to have. Durga says: "I was ashamed."

One of the men wrapped the small girl in a sheet and brought her to a hospital. Doctors treated her for a number of days. In addition to her burns, she was malnourished, infected wounds covered her fingers and her lips were scarred. "I dropped a glass once," says Durga, "and the woman got angry and pulled my fingernails out, one by one." Sometimes they poked her in the mouth with a needle. Durga was supposed to work, not speak.

It's estimated that millions of children in India live as modern-day slaves. They work in the fields, in factories, brothels and private households — often without pay and usually with no realistic chance of escaping. The majority of them are sold or hired out by their own families.

According to an Indian government census from 2001, this country of over 1 billion people has 12.6 million minors between the ages of 5 and 14 who are working. The real number is undoubtedly significantly higher because many children are not officially registered at birth — and the owners of course do their best to keep the existence of child slaves a secret. Aid organizations estimate that three-quarters of all domestic servants in India are children, and 90 percent of those are girls. Although both child labor and child trafficking are illegal, police rarely intervene — and the courts seldom convict child traffickers and slaveholders.

'She Told Me I Would Be Well Treated'

Durga grew up in Calcutta. When she was seven, her father died, followed two years later by the death of her mother. Her grandmother took in Durga and her three elder sisters, but she couldn't manage to feed all four of them. One girl had to go, so she sold off the youngest. Via an intermediary, a family of total strangers paid 80 rupees for Durga — roughly the equivalent of €1 ($1.33).

Durga traveled alone by train the nearly 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) to Bangalore. She can't remember the journey, but she recalls her arrival. "The woman picked me up at the train station," she says. "I was afraid but she told me that I would be well treated."

From that day onwards, she cleaned the couple's apartment every day, cooked, did the laundry and the dishes. Durga was never paid, was never given time off and was never allowed to leave the building. The woman beat her often; the man hit her less often. Durga didn't try to defend herself. "Grandma told me I should always be nice," says Durga.

Today, Durga is 12 years old. Her weight has returned to normal, and she has large eyes and full lips. She wears her black hair tied in a knot behind her head. Her white teeth shine as she speaks, lighting up her soft face. Durga lives in Rainbow Home, a children's shelter run by the Catholic organization Bosco. Fifty-six girls live here in two empty rooms, with no chairs or tables. The children play, sleep and do their homework on the floor. They eat together in the hallway.

The home takes up one floor of a school building. The walls in the old building are painted blue and pink, and the caretakers teach the children to wash themselves on a regular basis, and not to immediately hit someone whenever there is a conflict. "It's hard work," says a nun named Anees. "For many children this is the first home that they have ever had," she points out, adding: "They all come from very disadvantaged families and have already experienced too much." Continue reading

Sources

• Spiegel Online
• Image: Akemi Gardens

For more than 50 years now, we in the United States have been gradually reducing children's opportunities to play, and the same is true in many other countries. In his book Children at Play: An American History (2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first half of the 20th century as the ‘golden age' of children's free play. By about 1900, the need for child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time. But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing children's freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began to replace ‘pickup' games; adult-directed classes out of school began to replace hobbies; and parents' fears led them, ever more, to forbid children from going out to play with other kids, away from home, unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children's opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways.

Over the same decades that children's play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. It's not just that we're seeing disorders that we overlooked before. Clinical questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example, have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren in the US ever since the 1950s. Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. Over the same period, the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled, and that for children under age 15 has quadrupled.

The decline in opportunity to play has also been accompanied by a decline in empathy and a rise in narcissism, both of which have been assessed since the late 1970s with standard questionnaires given to normative samples of college students. Empathy refers to the ability and tendency to see from another person's point of view and experience what that person experiences. Narcissism refers to inflated self-regard, coupled with a lack of concern for others and an inability to connect emotionally with others. A decline of empathy and a rise in narcissism are exactly what we would expect to see in children who have little opportunity to play socially. Children can't learn these social skills and values in school, because school is an authoritarian, not a democratic setting. School fosters competition, not co-operation; and children there are not free to quit when others fail to respect their needs and wishes.

In my book, Free to Learn (2013), I document these changes, and argue that the rise in mental disorders among children is largely the result of the decline in children's freedom. If we love our children and want them to thrive, we must allow them more time and opportunity to play, not less. Yet policymakers and powerful philanthropists are continuing to push us in the opposite direction — toward more schooling, more testing, more adult direction of children, and less opportunity for free play. Continue reading

Sources

• Aeon
• Image: Mother&Child

Parliament will this week debate whether working children aged 16 or younger should be regarded as employees rather than contractors, when Te Tai Tonga MP Rino Tirikatene's private member's bill is introduced on Wednesday.

Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand, the Catholic agency for justice, peace and development, strongly supports Mr Tirikatene's Employment Relations (Protection of Young Workers) Amendment Bill.

In 2006, we interviewed 30 children aged 10-16 who delivered newspapers and advertising leaflets. Most made positive comments about their work, including enjoying the exercise, meeting people and earning money.

However, they also had concerns. Some had experienced unilateral cuts in their pay rates; others didn't even know what their pay rates were as that section of their contract had been left blank. Some had to find their own replacements if they were sick or had a work accident.

Most were left to supply their own equipment, and sort out their own tax and ACC payments. Despite experiencing injuries ranging from near-miss road accidents to dog bites, they had to take care of their own health and safety.

Some did not know the name of the person or company they worked for, and in one case had never met their supervisor.

By contrast, a small group of children in our study enjoyed much better working conditions than the others. They had stable, clearly explained pay rates and regular pay days. They received bike and clothing allowances, as well as sick leave and holiday pay. Continue reading

Sources

• The New Zealand Herald
• Image: Stuff

Lisa Beech is the research and advocacy co-ordinator for Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand.