News
Please find some of the past few weeks news headlines and summaries, related to children:
TACKLING TEENAGE PREGNANCY: UK Women to Get Pill without Prescription - The UK has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Western Europe, and a steadily rising abortion rate, and the government is looking at a new scheme which will allow one to get birth control pills without a prescription, and they are considering letting underage girls onto the scheme. The government also announced that it was looking into making early-stage terminations available in doctors’ offices.
Schoolboy killed in rare Indian school shooting - While school shootings seem to have almost become a phenomenon in the US, in India the thought was seen as absurd, until the unthinkable happened and two boys took turns shooting a fellow classmate to death.
African human traffic is catalyst for child abuse - “There are very few institutions ready to help them … there is no psychological support for these children. Their families do not understand, and sweep it under the carpet,” said Plan’s Serigne Mor Mbaye, who worked on the pilot research program in Togo.
LESOTHO: A desire to learn stifled by hunger - Children crowd into school rooms full of ambition, but soon hunger overcomes them and their concentration fades. Drought has left the country with high levels of food insecurity, and it is the children who are paying the heaviest price. The country has a high level of AIDS orphans, and those children are far worse as their guardians leave feeding them to last, if at all. While aid agencies have begun some feeding schemes, they have yet to begin for secondary school students.
IRAQ: Children with serious illnesses abandoned- Children in war torn Iraq have disproportanatly suffered has the war and instablitiy continues, with around 1.6 million children under 12 years old are now homeless according to the country’s Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. Many due to poverty and violence, however a large portion of children are left as they are sick, and families are abandoning them as they cannot care for them. “The problem is even more serious among new-born babies and there are many cases of children aged 1-12 abandoned,” said Mayada Marouf, a spokesperson for KCA. “Most of them have a life-threatening disease and their families cannot afford treatment.” Many children are not completely abandoned but left with relatives who can bare not to turn them away, and soon find themselves with a house full of children they cannot adequately care for.
DRC: “The blood keeps flowing” -The children of the Congo continue to suffer in large scale numbers as violence continues to tear the country apart. Hunger and disease are taking countless numbers of children, parents are left in fear both from violence and that their children will starve to death. According to MSF’s nutrition center see 40 cases a day - mainly children younger than five, who have been surviving on a diet of sorghum wheat, cassava and maize, which lack the nutrients they need. Additionally the nutrition center runs a ambulatory feeding program, for 1,200 vulnerable children in the district. Save the Children also runs a feeding center for the sickest of the children, children like 8 year old Sekabamdu Utamuleza, who after three weeks of treatment has failed to improve. The aid agencies working in the region are over burdened, and there is not enough medical staff to care for all the needy children.