Education - Children's Rights - Essay Example

? Education- Children’s Rights Commentary One article - http www.guardian.co.uk/law oct/18/children-lost-human-trafficking This first article is titled ‘Children lost from care in human trafficking’. In the guardian of Tuesday 18 October 2011, in this article the county council of Kent reported about twenty five foreign youngsters had mysteriously vanished from the care agencies where they had been placed. The young persons were aged between 12 and 17 years old. First, it is illegal that these children were in the United Kingdom because they had been trafficked there. The county council of Kent said that it did not know what had happened to the children who had gone missing from their foster parents or children’s homes. The disappearance of these children has sparked a lot of concern that has led to fresh calls to reform how trafficked children are cared for in the country. The rights of many children are being abused at different levels all over the world. For example, in this case, the children who have been trafficked into the United Kingdom are forced into cannabis farming, prostitution and benefit fraud among others (Archald, 2010). According to international legislation, in the case of children, the use of force or other forms of intimidation, such as fraud, deception, abduction, the abuse of power, or a position of vulnerability doesn’t need to be present in order for the crime to be termed trafficking. The UN Protocol to Avert, Suppress and Penalize Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children also describes child trafficking as trafficking in human beings. The International Labor Organization convention 182 defines it as a form of child labor. The children fall back into the hands of people operating in various criminal networks across the world. The news of the mysterious disappearance of these children is said to have come on Anti-Slavery day when data was released by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre and the Homes Offices in the United Kingdom (Pardeck, 2006). Over the past years, the number of children who had been sent to the Home Office had gone up significantly. Vietnam is seen to have produced the largest single group of victims, totaling to forty eight. It is closely followed by Nigeria with twenty nine and Romania with twenty three. Children were trafficked for a number of reasons such as sexual exploitation. The female children were made to work as prostitutes so as to earn money for whoever introduced them to the act. These children are being denied their right to education. The aims of education are not being taken seriously by the perpetrators (Pardeck, 2006). For example, children were born in societies that acknowledged their rights. Children’s rights have been totally ignored because they cannot defend themselves their rights are totally violated the right to education being the most affected. The director of Kent County Council is on record saying that there is no way of preventing the trafficked children from leaving the care given to them by the council. This could only be ensured by keeping the children under lock and key, which would be a gross violation of their right. Pardeck (2006) suggests that the council should encourage these children to talk to them so that they can establish grounds of trust. Theoretically, Aristotle insisted on the value of children education (Pardeck, 2011). He stipulated all forms of practices that would ensure that children continued to grow in all manners and means. Trafficking and abusing children is one major impediment to their education and a gross violation of their rights. He states that for children to grow up bright and intelligent, they need education. This education cannot be possible if the children are involved in activities such as prostitution. The education should at all times be consistent with general aims that have been set. This is through set syllabi all over the world. He insisted that children should ensure that they are accommodated in the aspects of education. This meant that there was a need to understand the children and their overall dynamics (Howe & Covell, 2005). This would create a scenario where they will be allowed to be children whilst getting the knowledge and skills that they desired. Howe & Covell (2005) state that according to UNICEF, there is an estimated 250 million children aged 5 to 14 in child labor worldwide, excluding child domestic labor. The United Nations and the International Labor Organization consider child labor exploitative, with the UN stipulating, in article 32 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child that: States Parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development (Hart, 2001). In conclusion, children trafficking should come to an end. Trafficking of children comes with very many issues such as those related to them missing their education and other serious opportunities in life. Children who have suffered from the hands of traffickers who have subjected them to these ill should be helped to get out of such situations and get an education. They should be given hope for the future and their right to education. Bibliography Archard, D. (2010) Children, Rights and Childhood, London: Sage Publishers. Hart, S. (2001) Children's rights in education, New York: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Howe, R. and Covell, K. (2005) Empowering children: Children's rights education as a pathway to citizenship, University of Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pardeck, J. (2006) Children's rights Policy and practice 2nd Ed., New York: Routledge. Commentary Two article - http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/feb/15/poor-children-behind-sutton-trust This second article is titled ‘Poor children a year behind in language school’. According to the author of this article, Children from the poorest homes are almost a year lagging behind middle class pupils by the time they begin school. But good parenting practices, such as reading to children and having fixed bed times, can meaningfully reduce this gap. He urges the Government to fund parenting classes, especially in deprived areas. The Sutton Trust study looks at the results of a sequence of vocabulary tests carried out by 12,500 British children at the age of five. It finds those from the poorest homes are almost a year behind in their results. It also looks at the aspects common to poorer children that might impact their development. It finds that just under half of those from the poorest fifth of families were born to younger mothers under 25. We now have sound evidence on policies and program that increased achievement. About two thirds of these affected children do not live with their biological parents. There are also remote factors that boosted children's growth on both the poorest and the richest homes. These included "sensitive parental behavior", such as guaranteeing regular bedtimes and reading daily to the child. Regular bed times between the ages of three and five led to growth gains of two-and-a-half months. Daily reading at the age of three improves vocabulary development by nearly two months. And children whose parents arranged monthly library appointments were two-and-a-half months ahead of an equivalent child at the age of five who had not made similar trips. According to study, better parenting can lessen the achievement gap between middle-income and poor families by up to nine months. However, just below half of children from the poorest homes are read to every day at the age of three, likened to 78% of children from the richest fifth of home. The author states that the UK had invested 4.3% of GDP on early year’s education in 2006. But they insisted on a more effective early year’s strategy that would avert greater numbers of children from underprivileged backgrounds "falling behind their more privileged peers before school has even begun". Sutton Trust chairman Sir Peter Lampl says the findings are both appalling and encouraging - revealing the stark educational disadvantage experienced by children from poorer homes before they reached school. But it also exhibited the potential for good parenting to overcome some of the undesirable impacts that poverty could have on children's early development. Pardeck (2011) suggests that there should be more support for families from early learning experts and health professionals and special outreach projects to expand contact with susceptible families and that the expansion of free nursery education should be focused on the 15% most disadvantaged families. Dwyer (2006) says that a vital component of all early years' provision, public or private, is the employment of competent teachers as part of the team around the child. Kids’ brains grow fast and need stimulus like this to be healthy. But these kids live in disordered environments, with parents immersed in struggles to find jobs, provide food, escape homelessness and abusive relationships. So they frequently don’t get the kind of nurturing early experiences that have been shown to significantly improve the wiring of their brains, determining intelligence and behavior (Martin, 2005). Brain development is affected by malnutrition, smoking, drugs or alcohol. After birth, babies learn based on the number of words they hear, and the type whether angry or supportive. From age 2 to 6, they are like verbal sponges, expanding their vocabularies by an average of eight to 10 words a day. But a parent preoccupied by a television even just in the background means less talk time and can affect a baby’s language development. The average child in a welfare home hears about 600 words in an hour, while a child in a college-educated, white-collar home hears 2,100, researchers found (Archard, 2010). For all those reasons, good early childhood programs are vital. They decrease welfare rolls and prison costs, and have been shown to reduce the need for special education services nearly in half. What they do best is change behavior. Achievement in life depends at least as much on character skills, such as self-confidence and the capability to get along with peers, as it does on reading and math skill. And that develops very early on (Kate, 2011). According to Dwyer (2006), early childhood education improves life choices later, when the stakes are high. “If you want to avoid poverty,” he says, “you at least complete high school, you get a job, and you get married and then have a baby, in that order.” If you don’t do those things, in that order — which tends to happen to kids born to poor parents — your chance of being poor rises from 2 percent to as much as 70 percent. In conclusion the government should ensure the children from poor family are given specialized care and ensuring effective early year’s strategy that would prevent the underprivileged children from lagging behind. The parents from the poor background should also ensure their children have the best environment to support their proper learning and development of brain. Bibliography Archard, D. (2010) Children, Rights and Childhood, London: Sage Publishers. Douglas, K. (2011) Children's Rights, A Book of Nursery Logic, London: Sage Publishers. Dwyer, G. (2006) The relationship rights of children, Cambridge University: Cambridge University Press. Martin, G. (2005) What’s wrong with children’s rights? London: Sage Publishers. Michael F. (2007) Children's rights and power, charging up for a new century, Oxford: Blackwell Press. Pardeck, T. (2011) Children's rights: policy and practice, London: Sage Publishers. Read More