The theme of National Child Protection Week this year – “every conversation matters” – is an opportunity for examining the systems and institutions that undermine children’s rights and safety, according to Dr Safiyyah Abbas, a trainee in paediatric rehabilitation medicine and general paediatrics.
The legacy of settler colonialism is apparent in how governments in Israel and Australia are harming children, as well as in the professional and institutional silences surrounding such abuse, she writes.
Safiyyah Abbas writes:
Child abuse is a global issue with serious lifelong physical and psychological consequences. Child protection is the collective responsibility of communities and governing bodies to implement safeguards to protect children from harm and support vulnerable children and their families.
However, when systems undermine child protection efforts, or worse – they facilitate child abuse – we should be alarmed and galvanised to action.
The theme for National Child Protection Week is “every conversation matters.” Conversations are important for understanding when children may be at risk, and why. Conversations beget awareness, giving voice to children who would otherwise suffer helplessly in silence.
The accompanying overarching theme of National Child Protection Week is “every child in every community needs a fair go.”
This year Save the Children reported that 78,000 children have been displaced by escalating violence in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and 16.4 million children in Sudan are experiencing hunger from severe food shortages. The Australian Government expressed concern for the human rights violations in DRC and condemned the violence in Sudan, setting a precedent for conversations.
As the occupying power in Palestine, Israel has the obligation to the protection of the child under international law. In its genocidal war in Gaza for the past ten months, Israel has committed every form of child abuse on a horrific scale with impunity.
The deaths of over 14,000 children and wounding of thousands more, including at least 1,000 lower limb amputees, amount to state-sanctioned systematic physical abuse. Mark Perlmutter, Jewish-American orthopaedic surgeon, treated children with gunshots to their heads and chests in Gaza, stating that “no kid gets shot twice by a sniper by mistake”.
Israel has inflicted psychological harm through “repeated displacement, constant fear and witnessing family members literally dismembered before their eyes,” according to MSF International Secretary General Christopher Lockyear, leading “children as young as five to tell us that they would prefer to die.”
Rape and sexual assault have been reported amongst other abusive treatment by children held in Israeli military detention. Imposed neglect through a total siege of food, water, fuel, and medicine – including insulin pens for children – has destroyed any remaining vestige of humanity.
Peace is best protection
The latest threat to children is the outbreak of poliovirus due to Israel’s continuous destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure and the health system. Polio was eradicated in Gaza in 1985.
Annie Sparrow, associate professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, has written about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s need to protect Israel’s unvaccinated population whose support he needs to stay in power.
Whilst the need for vaccination is critical, there is a sickening absurdity in military pauses to vaccinate children who will return to the threat of bombs hours later. Protection of one group of children cannot occur without equal consideration for another group’s rights. As World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus remarked, “the best vaccine for these children is peace.”
In June, the UN added both Israeli forces and Hamas to its annual blacklist of parties that commit grave violations against children for the first time.
Whilst the Australian Government has repeatedly condemned Hamas for its attacks on October 7, it is yet to condemn Israel’s war crimes, instead maintaining a “warm and close relationship with Israel” and accusing the UN of unfairly targeting Israel, in effect stifling conversation on the rights of Palestinian children.
This is especially hypocritical given both Israel and Australia have ratified the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child, which affirms the rights of children to a life of freedom and safety.
Australia’s pitiful response to Israel’s abuse of children is less surprising when we acknowledge both countries’ legacies of settler colonialism, which persist in child detention practices.
“Israel is the only country in the world that automatically and systematically prosecutes children in military courts”, according to Save the Children.
Over 10,000 Palestinian children have been detained over the past two decades with the majority reporting various forms of abuse. Israel’s longstanding denial of Palestinian children’s rights to access to legal representation and their family also contravenes the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child.
Backwards step
Australia has taken a backwards step in child protection with the new Country Liberal Party leader in the Northern Territory, Lia Finocchiaro, announcing that she will lower of the age of criminal responsibility from 12 back to ten, after it was raised by the Labor Government in 2022. This runs counter to the recommended age of at least 14, according to recommendations by the UN and, surprisingly, is lower than Israel’s age of 12 years.
Australian health and human rights bodies, including the Australian Indigenous Doctors’ Association, Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP), and Australian Medical Association (AMA), have long backed calls for raising the age of criminal responsibility to at least 14 years of age.
Children are not merely small adults and should not be treated as such. Children have “relatively immature brain development when it comes to decision-making, organisation, impulse control and planning for their future,” said Dr Mick Creati, speaking on behalf of RACP in 2017. “We shouldn’t criminalise actions that may be developmentally normal for children of this age.”
Last month, AMA President Professor Steve Robson reiterated these calls: “The medical evidence is clear. Incarceration harms children mentally and impairs their physical development. Criminalising the behaviour of young and vulnerable children creates a vicious cycle of disadvantage and increases the likelihood of ongoing experiences within the legal system.”
According to Anne Hollonds, the National Children’s Commissioner, children who engage in troublesome behaviour often experience social disadvantage, including poverty, homelessness, and violence. For children of First Nations and migrant families, systemic racism and intergenerational trauma – products of our history of colonialism – are additional risk factors also acknowledged by the RACP.
Indeed, Indigenous children are over-represented in detention and out-of-home care with a 17-fold and 10.5-fold greater likelihood than non-Indigenous children respectively, demonstrating the persisting health inequities. The peak body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children, SNAICC, has called for governmental action to reverse these trends, including investment in community-led solutions.
Collective responsibility
As healthcare workers and other members of society, the protection of children is our collective responsibility. Conversations are crucial for advocacy towards change. We need to discuss child abuse enabled by governing bodies, but we also need our community and collegial bodies to lead these conversations to normalise ongoing discourse.
As we witness horrific child abuse abroad, most strikingly in Palestine at the hands of the occupying Israeli forces, we must engage in conversations to raise awareness and challenge the silence of our medical and governmental leaders.
But we also must scrutinise our own systems for harmful remnants of settler colonialism – only then can we understand the interconnected institutional challenges in child protection and why “every conversation matters”.
Child protection necessitates introspection about our own communities and our roles as individuals. As Nelson Mandela once said, “The true character of a society is revealed in how it treats its children.”
I hope that Child Protection Week will strengthen our moral fortitude to start conversations – especially when our leaders have let us down.
• Safiyyah Abbas is a trainee in paediatric rehabilitation medicine and general paediatrics, with an interest in public and global health.
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