Children and violence

The protection of children is a foundational right.

Failure to realise rights to survival and development, education and health may place a child in greater need of protection.

A child who is unprotected may be less able to realise their other rights.

It is critical that greater attention is dedicated to building a protective environment for children. 

Children who are protected from harm during their own childhood are likely to marry later, have fewer children and to provide better care for their children.

The resulting improvement in child survival and development at the household level has a large macro-social effect.

The benefits of greater protection and education of children add up to a virtuous circle of social development (Mehrotra & Delamonica, 2002).

The failure to fully acknowledge and understand the extent of violence against children in Tanzania has created a smokescreen that has justified the failure to conceptualise, design and fund a national child protection system.

The normalisation of violence towards children is an indictment our attitudes towards children.

Building a protective environment for children must be a priority for action.

Protective interventions cross all points of the child’s life course, but during middle childhood and adolescence the needs for protection deepen, as the child increasingly interacts with and is at risk from wider society.

• As the child’s experience of the world expands so too do opportunities for them to come into contact or conflict with the law.
• Children in adolescence need to assimilate the moral lessons they have started to learn with what they see reflected in the behaviour of adults and State authorities.
• The importance of human behaviour in reinforcing the child’s sense of a moral world is critical at this point in the life cycle.
• Children model their behaviour on that demonstrated by adults.
• When children witness the impunity and violence with which the police treat street children, when corporal punishment in schools is endemic and when the voices of girls are quashed in negotiations for marriage it is inevitable that a culture of violence is inculturated in the next generation.

Combined with the increasing number of female headed households that now constitute almost 25 per cent of all households (Government of the United Republic of Tanzania, 2007) there is a risk that we are sowing the seeds for family dysfunction that characterises poor families in many Western countries and that has been such a challenge for their schools and communities.

An investment in protecting children from abuse, violence and neglect would leverage the well-known synergy, or feedback loop that generates a national return into the future.

This will require that protective services for children become more nuanced children's needs, sensitive to the chronic stress that many children live under and less reliant on simple technical interventions.

It will require that child protection interventions work with the whole child, that professionals understand what children need to develop effectively, and that processes are established and funded for agencies to work collaboratively and to ensure that children do not fall through the cracks in services.

Protecting children requires that we enter the ‘domestic domain’ and engage with sensitive cultural and behavioural norms.

Relatively simple investments in promoting behavioural change in care-practices could leverage large-scale benefits for children.

The Government has a tendency to avoid engaging in the domestic domain, as can be seen in the refusal of the Law of the Child, 2009, to outlaw underage marriage or prohibit corporal punishment which would impinge on a parent’s freedom to treat their child in line with customary traditions.