Mission & Justice

Natasha Robinson; 13/9/08

Northern Territory school students have slipped behind the rest of the nation’s children in reading, writing and numeracy, with a third of children in Years 3, 5 and 7 failing to meet the national benchmark for reading. The first nationally compared literacy and numeracy results confirm the extent of the crisis in indigenous education in the Territory. They show that the Territory is producing fewer numbers of high-achieving students than other states. The National Assessment Program summary report, released yesterday, reveals that 36per cent of Territory students in Year 5 failed to achieve the nationally accepted minimum level of achievement in reading, and 33 per cent of Year 5 students did not reach the national benchmark for writing.

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11/9/08

Five countries, led by Iran, account for all executions of children in the world, Human Rights Watch said, urging an end to the practice. Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen are the only countries that continue to impose the death penalty on people younger than 18 when they committed a crime. The United States outlawed execution of juvenile offenders in 2005. The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged the United Nations, which holds its annual General Assembly next week, to pressure for greater protections for children. “We are only five states away from a complete ban on the juvenile death penalty,” HRW spokeswoman Clarisa Bencomo said.

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Jamie Walker; 1/9/09

Harrowing new accounts of children suffering in mandatory detention have triggered calls for a royal commission into Australia’s immigration enforcement system. A new book, Human Rights Overboard, promises to reopen old wounds - even though Kevin Rudd has guaranteed that children will never again be held in immigration detention. Using the first-hand accounts of former child detainees and their parents, the book details the impact of mandatory detention on boatpeople and other unlawful entrants before the policy was watered down. A boy, 3, was so unhappy that he “executed” his toy truck with a length of string. “He said to his mother, ‘I have killed my truck because it is tired of being sad’,” according to one witness’s account.

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Nurit Wurgaft; 1/9/08

The murder of a child almost always makes the entire country skip a heartbeat, especially if news of the death is preceded by the child’s disappearance and extensive searches. During the past 30 years dozens of children have disappeared or been murdered in Israel. Many of these cases remain unsolved to this day.

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30/8/08

Poorer women are now less likely to breastfeed than they were a decade ago, increasing the chance of their babies becoming ill and being hospitalised, a new study shows. A large-scale review of national health surveys has revealed no change in the number of mothers overall who breastfed their babies in the past decade. But the Melbourne researchers behind the study in the Medical Journal of Australia say the broad figures mask an increasing divide between the richest and the poorest Australians. Infants in the highest socio-economic group are more likely to be breastfed than in previous years, with a rise from 53 to 66 per cent between 1995 and 2005.

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Matt Wade; 30/8/08

Despite a wave of scandals, child-trafficking remains a huge problem for India, reports in Chennai. Charities are normally keen to get some publicity to raise their profile and help with fund-raising. But that’s not the case for orphanages and adoption agencies in Chennai, India’s fourth biggest city. They have closed ranks after years of negative stories about an adoption “scam” at a local orphanage called Malaysian Social Services.

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Adam Sage; 27/8/08

Teenagers are to be banned from buying alcohol in France, as health advisers dismiss the cherished Gallic belief that children should be initiated in the art of wine drinking at an early age. With British-style binge drinking gaining ground among French youth, officials say they want to send a clear message against adolescent consumption. Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot said she was planning to make it illegal to sell alcohol to the under-18s, with legislation likely to be introduced next year.

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Sean Parnell; 27/8/08

The Bligh Government has been accused of covering up the case of a Queensland couple who unwittingly adopted an Indian girl now alleged to have been stolen from her parents. The two-year-old Chennai girl was allegedly kidnapped in 2000 and sold to an Indian adoption company, Malaysian Social Services, as part of a child-trafficking scam that is now under investigation in several countries. A Queensland couple adopted the girl, now aged 9, with the approval of Indian, Australian and state authorities, not learning of the devastating allegations until years later. The Queensland Department of Child Safety first learned of the case in May last year, having been notified by the office of the then federal attorney-general, Philip Ruddock.

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Editorial: 27/8/08

There have been several cases reported recently of young girls, some as young as seven or eight, being married off by their parents to men in their 50s, 60s or even older. In some instances, parents are literally selling their daughters to older men purely for financial reasons —- to settle debts or to gain a substantial dowry for their own use. The practice is repugnant. Young girls are being treated as potential sex slaves, commodities to be bought and sold at whim to satisfy the lusts of old men. It has to be stopped. The Grand Mufti has spoken against it and so too has the Saudi Human Rights Commission (HRC). Only this week, the head of the commission, Turki Al-Sudairi, called on the Saudi authorities to put an end to these marriages. There are several issues at stake in what is incontestably a human rights violation.

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Nasser Arrabyee; 27/8/08

About 600,000 children do hazardous work in Yemen, said a report prepared by the child parliament in cooperation with Unicef and the Swedish organisation, Save Children.The report said that the hazardous work includes carrying stones, carpentry and car repair workshops. The reasons behind such practices are poverty, family break-ups and failed marriages, said the report that called for finding solutions for the child labour.

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