olivia

Olivia Whiting

Core 1

 

 

How Poverty Effects Children’s Safety in Africa

 

           

              Bam! A child in Africa just died. Many African children’s lives are ruined due to wars or diseases, are killed in wars or by remnants of war, are discriminated due to gender or age, or are victims of sexual violence or rape. All of these factors affect the children of countries in Africa everyday. These are few of many factors that affect their health, education, and childhood. Most of all, poverty is an affect of unsafe children all around Africa.  Safety includes their protection from sexual predators and discriminators, family deaths, and wars.  This issue needs to be addressed seriously, now.

           

To begin, the appalling issue of sexual predators. Women, young girls, and young boys are victims to gender or age discrimination, and many different forms of sexual assault. They are extremely unsafe and so vulnerable, and are exposed to many horrible doings.  According to UNICEF, “Each year, tens of millions of children are victims of exploitation, violence and abuse.”   Children are taken from homes and schools, and are forced to into labor in sweatshops and are sold into prostitution.  Many young girls are “needlessly deprived of parental care and forced into early marriage”, as UNICEF states.  In Chad, 71% of the females are married off during childhood. The girls are not respected at all, have no rights and are molested everyday.   This is a horrendous problem, and all these young girls have their childhood taken from them, which prevents them from fulfilling “anything close to their full potential”.  

 

Then comes the issue of effects of family deaths on children in African countries.  If families are not kept together, children can be taken advantage of and end up living or working on the streets. They will most likely be abused, and live in poverty into their adult life. As the bar graph here shows, there is a high poverty rate in Mali and Niger for many reasons. Children are sold into labor in early childhood, which can have deadly long term effects. From a UNICEF website statistic table, 65% of children in Niger are involved in child labor, whereas in Mali, a neighboring country has only 30% of children involved in labor. Niger has the most recorded percentage of child laborers in the world at the moment, and these children need to be saved. Also, due to family deaths, young girls and boys are forced into becoming the head of a family at such a young age, that they are not ready at all, and are rushed into growing up.

    Finally, the issue of war denies children their rights to an education, disallows fun, and influences them to make the wrong decisions. Children are exposed to horror and pain so early in their life, and it stays with them forever. According to UNICEF, “Children do not start wars, yet they are most vulnerable to their deadly effects.” Also, a good quote from UNICEF is, “Armed conflict affects their lives in many ways, and even if they are not killed or injured, they can be orphaned, abducted, raped and left with deep emotional scars and trauma from direct exposure to violence or from dislocation, poverty, or the loss of loved ones.   The children’s education is also disrupted due to the absence of essential teachers and education supplies. Even when a war is over, the after affects and remnants can still kill. Remnants of war are abandoned explosives and weapons, and landmines.  Landmines alone can steal lives from 15,000 to 20,000 lives every year. The most likely victims are men, the farmers. But children are sometimes given the job of herding animals and fetching water, and become curious of the disguised bombs.  This is a destructive remnant and even with all the efforts being made to extinguish all the landmines, there are many to be uncovered still that any minute now could capture yet another innocent life.