The Role of International and Local Non-Governmental in Promoting the Right and Welfare of Children - Article Example

Running Head: WELFARE OF CHILDREN The Role Of International And Local Non Governmental (NGOs) In Promoting The Right And Welfare Of Children [Name Of Student] [Name Of Institution] THE ROLE OF INTERNATIONAL AND LOCAL NON GOVERNMENTAL (NGOS) IN PROMOTING THE RIGHT AND WELFARE OF CHILDREN INTRODUCTION "A global perspective on child welfare is overdue. The actualities of child welfare around the world — never adequate — are worsening" (McFadden, 1991). A decade and a new millennium later, in the year 2001, that statement still holds true, despite worldwide changes that are stunning in their enormity and impact. In the last ten years, "ethnic cleansing" has become a familiar term as we learned of atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and other nations torn asunder by fierce ancient ethnic and tribal feuds. The number of children conscripted as soldiers in armed conflicts has dramatically increased. Over two million youths died in armed conflict between 1989 and 1998 and UNICEF estimates that more than 300,000 children under the age of 18 are currently part of armies around the world. As Bishop Desmond Tutu has said, "It is immoral that adults should want children to fight their wars for them. There is no excuse, no acceptable argument for arming children" (Csete, 1998). Untold numbers of children continue to die as bystanders in war, civil unrest, and terrorism in the Middle East and elsewhere. More than six million children have been permanently disabled or seriously injured from these armed conflicts. The late Princess Diana helped bring to public awareness the impact of land mines on the lives and deaths of innocent children. Over 100 million land mines lie unexploded in 75 countries, a deadly threat waiting to be triggered by the mere touch of the small foot of an unsuspecting helpless child. BACKGROUND In the last decade we have — belatedly — become aware of the ravages of AIDS in Africa and other countries. Seventeen million children and adults have already died from AIDS, with 25 million more deaths anticipated in the near future. On the beautiful continent of Africa, the scientifically acknowledged birthplace of humanity and ancestral home to countless individuals, it is hard to comprehend the image of school-age AIDS orphans fighting for survival while caring for younger siblings in African villages left deserted and desolate by the effects of this disease. The last decade brought us glasnost and, with it, the discovery of more than a million Central and Eastern European children in orphanages. Despite heroic efforts by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to work with local governments to develop in-country family foster care and adoption programs, or to find adoptive families in other countries for these children, more than a million youngsters still languish in organizations in this part of the world. The new era of ever-increasing globalization that the past decade has seen has brought nations far greater economic interdependence. Despite the passage of child labor laws in many countries, children remain an integral part of the labor force, as evidenced by the astonishing estimate that one of five items purchased in Western countries is produced by a child laboring in a sweatshop. In developing countries, one of every four school-age children is employed as a child laborer; most work at least six days a week in bonded labor and to help support their families. Child exploitation, which often includes physical and sexual abuse, is not confined to the sweatshops or agricultural fields. Up to one million women and children are shipped across national boundaries and sold into modern-day slavery, including sexual servitude. Although sex tourism with children and child pornography has been known to exist for centuries, only one "World Congress Against the Sexual Exploitation of Children" has been held to date, with a second one scheduled for later this year in Japan. Advanced communications and widespread international access to the Internet make regulating the commercial sexual exploitation of children almost impossible. AIM Having said all this I would like to investigate the role of international and local non governmental (NGOs) in promoting the right and welfare of children in Ghana. Having lived and worked in this region of Ghana between 2000-2004, I knew the area before the war and during the first eighteen months of massive population movements. In May 2000, I was a team leader of a demographic and nutritional study (designed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) of Guinean and displaced Liberian children. This familiarity with the region, my research experience, and my language ability will combine with my anthropological training to facilitate the study ETHNOHISTORICAL SETTING This region of Africa, sometimes called the Central West Atlantic Region, comprises most of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the southeastern end of Guinea. It has very low population density, which favors accommodation of displaced persons. Internecine warfare depopulated the area in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, by both shipping captives into the Atlantic slave trade and by killing combatants. This chronic warfare influenced the development of highly fluid sociopolitical units, characterized by small groups of neighboring villages grouped under a leader who offered protection from slave raiding in return for allegiance. Villages often contained speakers of several regional languages (from Mel, Southwest Mande, and Northern Mande language families), though Southwest Mande languages (including Loma) predominated. Political groupings also often consisted of congeries of villages with mixed majority language and culture groups. Under these uncertain conditions, kin groups tended to be highly mobile and often defined their ethnicity situationally. This ethnic and linguistic fluidity exists today although identities based on religion, ethnicity, and nationality have become somewhat more hardened in the past century. Given this general history, any assumption of monolithic ethnicity in the region is problematic. Two specific cultural organizations that have facilitated geographic movements and ethnic reclassification are the Poro and Sande societies, and the complex system of alliances between wife givers and wife receivers. These intricately connected organizations continue into the present, and understanding them is crucial to understanding the cultural resources available to self-settling refugees in the region. Throughout the Central West Atlantic Region, nearly all boys and girls are initiated into the Poro and Sande societies at adolescence. The influence of these age-grade societies on daily political, ritual, and social life has been similar throughout the region, facilitating cultural assimilation of populations in flux. LITERATURE REVIEW Significance of the Child-welfare Organization for Social Scientists The implication of the Organization for communal scientists, and psychologists in scrupulous, seems to obtain chiefly from two sources: (a) its strength as an globally agreed upon, ground-breaking, standard-setting utensil on the rights of children, and (b) its use as a tool to carry out the contributions of social scientists fascinated in the protection and dissemination of children's rights. Strengths of the Child-Welfare Organization The Organization on the Rights of the Child makes a whole break from preceding global approaches to children's rights. Although the local Organization does make supplies for the child's physical condition, safety, and teaching, it does this in a mode that makes the State accountable to the personality child. The pervading topic of the language all the way through the Organization is that of the person “child's best interest.” This is accurate even when the child's awareness may come into difference with the rights of parents. The young person has a right to be brought up by his or her parents, but he or she also has the right to be placed in an substitute family setting should this be essential. The child has a right to be protected commencing all types of cruelty, including that which occurs inside the relations unit. Under the Organization, the rights of the being child are supreme. Identified below are five aspects of the Organization that attest to its strengths that should be understood to emanate not only from the content of the articles but from the fact that the Organization has been accepted as a minimal standard by the 159 Member States of the United Nations. First, by creating a separate treaty on the human rights of the child, and by carefully referring to the child, using gender-neutral language throughout the text, the Child-welfare Organization embodies two important concepts: (a) Children are a special class of people requiring special consideration (C. P. Cohen, 1990a; Feshbach & Feshbach, 1978; Lifton, 1988; Takanishi, 1978), and (b) the dignity of the individual child should be recognized in his or her own unique situation (Melton, 1991; Tremper, 1988). Second, the Organization attempts to balance the rights of the individual child with those of the family and the state, a neither obvious nor uncomplicated task (C. P. Cohen, 1990a; Mnookin, 1978). Although the Organization is designed primarily to address the rights of the child as separate from those of the family or the state, its articles address the nurturance role of family, circumstances in which the state is expected to intervene on behalf of the child, and limits to both family and state involvement wherein the child's rights are concerned. Nevertheless, this balance is not perfectly defined and will require some interpretation as the Organization goes into force. Third, the Organization acknowledges that childhood is not a static state. Expressions such as “the evolving capacities of the child” and the “development of the child” are found throughout the text. Changes in abilities, maturity, and personality during childhood are to be considered in judicial interpretation because they can affect the notion of what is appropriate in the provision of care, protection, and freedom for the child. (C. P. Cohen, 1990a; Mnookin, 1978) Fourth, the Organization refers many times to the maintenance of the child's mental health, as well as to the preconditions for achieving these ends (e.g., adequate shelter, nutrition, health care, education). Essentially, these articles reveal that protection of the child's “mental” life is a significant part of his or her human rights. (C. P. Cohen, 1990a; Mnookin, 1978) Finally, by combining economic–social–cultural rights with political–civil and humanitarian rights, the Organization makes clear that the child's survival and physical development through certain basic protections is crucial, but not sufficient. The child needs more: provisions that foster his or her psychological development toward a viable, productive, and healthy adulthood. (C. P. Cohen, 1990a; Mnookin, 1978) METHODS The research plan calls for three types of data to be gathered with the help of a male and a female research assistant, and to be coordinated through the use of the case study method. The case study method, is ideally suited to this research, in which disputes and contestation are the predictable outcomes of the stresses produced by population influxes. I will use this method to accomplish the following tasks: ( 1) take specific situations of crisis or conflict as foci for presenting and analyzing multiple points of view; ( 2) record actors' articulations of ordinarily muted assumptions; and ( 3) explore the range of perceptions, actions, and justifications used by actors in context. Familiarity with this range of choices will help me formulate the questions for my second quantitative survey using terms and categories that are salient to interviewees. Through the case study mode of data collection and analysis, I will compare sociological patterns with ideologies of identity and actors' self-explanations of migration, settlement, and household formation as these identities and self-explanations change and emerge over time. This method highlights the multiple temporalities of social process as cases develop and play out over time. The method also explores connections among personal, social, and political histories and cycles whose beginnings and endings extend beyond the duration of a particular social drama. It is each case's contingent nature that makes this method a crucial instrument for looking at the ways that local, regional, and global systems interact and are experienced. I wish to explore through these means the role-played and future plans of the international and local NGOs in Ghana. Furthermore, I wish to study the impact that their services have made on the children in that district so far. I will conduct the research in the Upper west and East towns that have a population of 500-1,000 persons, at least 30 percent of whom are self-settled Liberian nationals. Surveys, interviews, and participant observation will focus equally on displaced persons and those living in the village before the Liberian war began. The intention of this methodology is to avoid "international centrism," which promotes children as objects of study and consequently de-emphasizes the effects of forced migration on host populations, as well as differentiations among hosts and the complex networks that link hosts and the activities going on for the welfare of the children. I will document the development of particular international child welfare organizations, trace them back in time, and place them within the periodicity of the domestic cycle, because the time factor in social child-welfare organization is crucial to this aspect of the research. OTHER ASPECTS Each organization's intentions have important effects on the situation "on the ground," but in ways that may have been radically altered from their original intentions as a result of their interactions with other forces, structures, and desires. To pursue such a project, I believe two things are necessary. First, the research must be extremely limited and modest to begin with. It must grow out of fine-grained ethnographic and historical analysis that takes the time to ask how the interaction of local, regional, and global forces are experienced and debated within a very limited frame. Although studying the social life of not just things, but a town, seems like theoretically well-trodden ground, it is potentially the starting point for exploring the extremely complex factors that go into experiencing late modernity for the welfare of the children and to do something for their better future. CONCLUSION To understand what this Organization can mean to those interested in enhancing children's rights, we believe that one must look beyond the Organization itself to the world in which this Organization was adopted. In the current atmosphere of decreasing East–West tensions and the diminution in world conflict, the potential for turning international attention to improving the quality of children's lives seems stronger than ever before in human history (United Nations Children's Fund, 1990). Potential support, financial and otherwise, for the concepts and principles embodied in the Organization may be in greater supply with each passing year of relative peace and stability. Although there is a need to temper hope with patience and a realistic understanding of the change process, it seems reasonable to suggest that people advocating the Organization's standards should also advocate for the funds needed to create legislation and implement programs that benefit children at the local, national, and international level. Such efforts are essential to make the Organization's principles a reality. Lest we hesitate, we might wish to reflect that an investment in children, perhaps more than any other, is a true investment in the future. REFERENCES American Psychological Association. (1989). Resolution on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Washington, DC: Author. Castelle, K. (1989). In the child's best interest. New York: Defense for Children International/USA.. Cohen, C. P. (1989a). Juvenile justice provisions of the draft Convention on the Rights of the Child. New York Law School Journal of Human Rights, 7, 1–15. Cohen, C. P. (1989b). 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