Isabel Muoz Celebrates the 20th Convention of the Rights of the Child with Photo Essay

I love hearing positive stories about children’s rights and journalists that are making the effort to go out to remote areas of the world to tell their stories. However, there’s always a dark side to these projects because the story they tell are so moving and incredibly compassionate. A recent article published on UNICEF’s official website balances these two aspects of a human rights story perfectly. And with the 20th annual Convention on the Rights of the Child less than 12 hours away, the article, achieves the exact sentiment of desire for change by engaging the reader with a positive angle on the issue.

Isabel Muñoz is a Spanish photographer who has spent the past six months traveling and photographing children who work to support their families. The article is interesting and engaging, showing how one woman and three organizations (UNICEF, The Spanish National Committee for UNICEF and El Pais Semanal, a Spanish news publication) are setting out to make that difference.

The article then transitions to summarizing three for the stories told by Muñoz’s pictures including her actual photography. What made the article extremely effective was their use of real quotes from the children. Sita Tamang, 11, works as a domestic helper in Nepal, more than 300 km from her home. This is the quote UNICEF used in its article:

“After two weeks from my arrival, at the end of August, I waited for my father, who told me he would pick me up to take me back home,” she recalls. “But he never did.”

Those words are so powerful. By setting up a positive angle on a depressing subject, the article leaves the reader ready for advocacy. But compared to the feature on El Pias Semanal, it looks like a brief overview. The website ran over 2,000 words about the project, focusing on the journalist’s journey through 20 countries to find the story.

Translated from ElPais.com:
“There we went, white people, westerners and rich, at whichever poor, super populated city neighborhood or town, school o house with all our junk and intensions…and always we found open doors, generous people that have lent themselves, have understood, have employed their time to accompany us and follow something that perhaps they were not able to see… and the happiness was surprising.”

Great sourcing, great approach, great story. I can’t wait to see their coverage of the convention.

Check out a video of Isabel Muñoz’s trip at the story link here.

Child Labor in Uganda Fallas Off the Map

AllAfrica.com reported on Sunday Nov. 1 that a total of 1.76 million children between the ages of 5 and 17 are subjected to child labor in Uganda. As compelling as this headline is, the article is awful. It’s unorganized, vague, and all around badly written. Because of the following reasons, I was unable to comprehend details of the story.

1. The first statistic listed above was attributed to “an official” in the opening sentence of the story. I have no idea who the reporter is talking about and whether or not they are an official of the Uganda government.

2. The focus of the story, I think, is how these children are not receiving a primary or secondary education; however, this nut graph is unclear. It is mildly and arbitrarily introduced in the first quote, but the reporter doesn’t use a proper transition to tell me what the story is about.

3. “She explained that 57% of the children look for jobs after failing to get fees, adding that most of them are ignorant of the law and where to report cases of abuse by their employers.” This excerpt is confusing. What are fees? Why do children fail to get them? Where do they get them from? What do they have to do with education? Also, the word ignorant portrays these children as making the conscious decision not to report workplace abuse. THEY ARE FIVE YEARS OLD FOR GOODNESS SAKE! Do they even know what abuse is?

4. sh3,000 per day doesn’t convey how little money these children make to an international audience. This amount equals $40 (according to this blog).

5. The reporter hardly addresses what type of labor these children in Uganda are forced into.  This illegitimizes the statistics and dehumanizes the subject.    

6. Lastly, it is unclear who the last source in the story is. He sounds like he represents the side that constitutes child labor because of his negative perspective on child education. This definitely needs clarification and context.

Beyond this initial article, all other coverage of the subject is non-existent. I didn’t find anything on NYTimes.com or LATimes.com. Even a Google search revealed less than a handful of news resources. Child Labor in Uganda was a hot topic on the Human Rights Today website with over 15 related stories in the past 24 hours. However, these articles are hidden from the public because you have to be a member to the site to view any of their articles entirely.

I don’t know why such a breaking international story has received such poor coverage. Perhaps there’s not enough concrete information to create a thorough story, limited sources for U.S. media outlets or because no one cares. Could this be enforcing the “lost cause” stereotype of Africa?

One Child's Life Saved, Another Movement Towards Justice in Cambodia

My blog focuses more on individual cases of child labor, as opposed to my midterm that encompassed the issue on a grander scale (i.e. factory busts and accusations). Here we have another case of an 11-year-old Cambodian girl, Soam Srey Neang, who was sold by her adopted grandmother to a wealthy couple in the same country for the equivalent of US$400. She was forced to do domestic house work, such as cleaning floors, doing laundry and cut the grass, while being beaten with pincers, clothes hangers, brooms, whips and electric wires, according to Pean Rathamanith, a senior monitor for children’s rights at the rights group Licadho. Look to the right; she has the scars to prove it.

Several things strike me about this article. The first is the thoroughness of the original article from The Phnom Penh Post, Cambodia’s Newspaper of Record as they call it. What I’m noticing is the individual cases that are being dealt with, like others I’ve posted on this blog, are well represented and publicized in the country where it’s happening. This is immediately sparking change in the way these countries view child labor with regards to human rights. Even in this article, the police came to rescue Soam Srey Neang, the police came to arrest her “parents,” and even the last quote is blatant disapproval of the circumstances by a government official.

“A child labour programme officer from the International Labour Organisation, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to comment on the case, said he was “shocked” to read of the girl’s plight but argued that the arrest was a sign that the government and law enforcement officials were taking proactive steps to fight child labour.”

The next day, The Phnom Penh Post had an update story naming Soam Srey Neang’s owners, quoting new sources on their thoughts about the outcome of the case and updating readers on the girl’s status. It even included a photo of the suspects.

After searching Soam Srey Neang on global news media organizations’ websites (NYTimes.com, BBC.com, CNN.com and MSNBC.com), only the latter had any sort of mention of this story. And all it had was a link to the story by The Phnom Penh Post, but not one to the follow up. After searching Google, the results aside from the original story were video and audio clips for a singer with the same last name. One German website, ShortNews.com, had a 100-word feature of the story covering the basic facts, but that was it. No follow up.

A trend that the case of Soam Srey Neang reinforces is the ‘why’ of all the subjugation of young children. Why do parents abandon their children? Why do people sell children? How can a life cost only US$400?  

Poverty. Hands down, no questions asked; in every situation where an individual child is exploited, recognized or rescued, they were put into that situation involuntarily because their families’ monetary need. I guess the real question is, how can we give these families something more to live for? How can we assist them for less than the cost of their child’s life? 

Children Absorb the Equivalent of 50 Cigarettes in the Average Work Day

In Malwai, Africa, the world’s fifth largest tobacco producer, over 78,000 children are currently working on plantations where they attain the equivalent of 50 cigarettes worth of nicotine a day, according to a recent report from Plan International. They work up to 12 hours a day, for less than 20 cents an hour. They don’t wear gloves or any protective material, their clothes haven’t been ages and they can’t remember the last time bathed.

What’s crucial about this situation is the health of these children. Plan International went to Malawi to survey conditions and interview children would reported illness symptoms such as difficulty breathing, severe headaches, abdominal pain, muscle weakness, and coughing. The report said that by touching tobacco plants unprotected for one day induces the same amount of nicotine as smoking 50 cigarettes.

“Sometimes it feels like you don’t have enough breath, you don’t have enough oxygen. You reach a point where you cannot breathe because of the pain in your chest. Then the blood comes when you vomit. At the end, most of this dies and then you remain with a headache,” one child said.

The above quote was published on Plan International’s website release as well as in an article on CNN.com, my original source of information. The CNN article highlighted all the facts of the report and presented tons of numeric data emphasizing the grand scale of this situation (“The 44 children [a reporter from Plan International] interviewed were working full-time on both large estates and small family farms, but none were working for their own families, and 36 of them were orphans”) as well as incorporated expert advice about these medical conditions (“After reading the Plan report, Spiller, who has researched Green Tobacco Sickness (GTS) in children working on tobacco farms in the U.S., told CNN that the Malawi children's symptoms were "absolutely" consistent with GTS”).

The only downfall of this reporting is that it was done and published over a month after the report was first released. Sources such as BBC News published a photo story August 25, the day the report came out. The Zimbabwean ran a thorough 1,400 word feature over the subject on September 3, only a week after the report was published.

September 9, BBC ran another article, although it had nothing to do with the facts of the case concerning the Plan report. Instead, they broke a story about President Bingu wa Mutharika deporting four senior foreign tobacco buyers for flouting minimum-price rules.

Every country has their unique way of covering a story. Looks like the United States not only lost points in the category “immediacy,” but also their tone to the article was much more economically based than human rights based. CNN analyzed the cost-effect model whereas The Zimbabwean encompasses the story from a civil rights perspective, incorporating information and interviews from NGOs. If each article had incorporated information from the other, both would have been a more comprehensive and reader friendly pieces. My question is where did BBC find their news and why haven’t more organizations found new angles to the tobacco situation in Malawi?  

Death of Child Bride, A Tragedy in Yemen

September 11 was tragic day in America eight years ago. But the date marked another tragedy this year in the Arab world’s poorest country, Yemen. The Yemen Organization for Childhood Protection reported that Fawziya Abdullah Youssef, 12, died of excessive bleeding during child birth of a still born baby. Youssef was one of hundreds coerced into a situation like this.

Exploitation of young girls in Yemen is customary. NYTimes.com said that more than a quarter of females are forced into marriage before 15, and up 50 percent in rural areas of the country. Youssef was no exception.

A reporter from Middle East Online gave details of her family life: raised in an impoverished family, her father suffering from kidney failure, forced to drop out of school and married off at age 11. She became pregnant only a year later.

This is a trend in societal circumstance for the girls married off. Their families need the money and they pay the cost, corporally, mentally, and emotionally. In essence, they are robbed of a childhood and, in the case of twelve-year-old Fawziya, a life. It’s almost as if it’s their job.

"These marriages are the result of poverty, ignorance and illiteracy, and lead to the destruction of the lives of these young girls, whose opinion is not taken in consideration," said Ahmed al-Qorashi, director of Yemen Organization for Childhood Protection.

Middle East Online posted Youssef’s picture with the caption, “Tragic and outrageous,” a sign that activists in the country are fed up and pushing for change. In February, the government passed a law stating the legal minimum age to be married as 17. Last year, a divorce court granted an eight-year-old girl’s request to divorce her 20-year-old husband.

Positive change is coming, but old habits are still hard to break. The divorce lawyer on the case above said in the article on Middle East Online saying she was currently working on a divorce case for a girl whose father married her off at age two. I repeat, age two.

It’s at this point where we must ask ourselves, “Why?” Why do these parents feel so desperate that they would auction off their own daughters? Why can’t they seek help of the government? How can we stop exploitation of girls too young to know what a husband or a marriage is?

The Yemen Organization for Childhood Protection has cut the ribbon on the issue, now it’s our turn to follow up.