20th November, the international day for children’s rights.
Did you say ALL children’s rights?
The international day for children’s rights is an opportunity for France to celebrate the adoption of the 1989 Convention on children’s rights. The French Ministry of Education this year stated on its web-site that it represents “A founding text” which “contributes to the gradual construction of citizenship and the acquisition of a humanist culture”. It specifies: “Particular attention must be applied to the protection of children and adolescents against all forms violence.”
The child as a personality in its own right has slowly emerged over the centuries. Children are now considered as human beings requiring special protection due to their vulnerability. The protection of childhood is an important aspect of public action. Social services have made enormous progress in the detection of multiple forms of abuse and the protection of children, without however systematically separating them from their parents.
We are no longer in the era of the Roman paterfamilias who had – under certain conditions – the right of life and death over their offspring. But, of course, serious family child abuse still subsists.
Gone are the days when tens of thousands of abandoned children wandered at the mercy of the most sordid trafficking, in the European big cities, to widespread indifference, apart from the concern by Vincent de Paul (1581-1660) and his works. But what misery and abuse is still suffered by children!
Gone, at last, in the not so distant past when it was thought that abuse left no traces. Gradually, corporal punishment, bullying, exposure to pornography have been classified as unacceptable violence. Paedophilia and incest have finally come out into the open. But what abuse still!
In April 2007, Ségolène Royal, one of the rare front ranking politicians to have very early denounced the ill-effects of pornography on children, at the time of the “great denial”, signed a minimalist format book titled “Les droits des enfants” (Children’s Rights). Published by Dalloz! That was 14 years before the scandal of “La Familia grande” (The big family) (2021) and Ségolène Royal had however been quite eloquent: “What one generation owes to another, is the limit. (…) there is no worse disruption than those who scramble such limits and confuse places. That is the reason why incest, a genealogical crime, and paedophilia, a generational crime, are so deadly for children and their rights”.
The woman politician revealed the Pandora of places of violence: “behind the closed doors in certain families, behind the walls of certain institutions, in places of leisure, sports or culture, in the street, but also nowadays, on the Internet”.
Do not be fooled into thinking that we are now free of such denials. One can still hear lenient comments, regarding children subjected to the affective deviance of their parents: “children are adaptable”. We still wonder at the “plasticity of their minds” whereas we are endlessly measuring the profound impact of all forms of abuse on the rest of life, notwithstanding the risk of repetition, when the victim becomes a perpetrator.
As for pornography: one deplores – that is new at least! – the effects of sexual deviations on children and adolescents. Beyond such deploring, it is urgent to act in concrete terms to protect minors from access to contents of a pornographic nature. On that subject, Alliance VITA “the supporter of the most vulnerable” has for a long time now been supporting children by denouncing the havoc caused by early exposure to pornography.
It remains a blind spot in the fight against violence committed on children. Declared as being inoffensive to them, legislative measures intended to meet the demands of adults are increasingly flouting their interests, such as the donation of gametes, and their anonymity, gradually being lifted, the right to insemination for single women or couples of women, thus wilfully depriving children of any paternal link. Their legalisation for the “benefit” of requesting adults, has been ratified to the detriment of the children so conceived. They are unconsciously being deprived of precious identity references.
Paradoxically, it is in the name of the “best interests of the child” that France has even come to endorse via falsified filiation certificates, the reproductive techniques which are detrimental to the child’s interests. That is the case of surrogate motherhood, which involves the splitting of maternity between two or three women (genitor, gestator, educator) and even the total masking of the mother (when two men are the sponsors). It represents a violence committed against women as well as an original violence committed against children. They are now subject to a paradoxical situation: giving thanks to the technique which has permitted their very existence, whilst being associated with an abuse.
How can one remain silent, moreover, on the forms of violence constituted by the onslaughts to life before birth, with in particular, the aggravating factor, of foetus “selection” according to their state of health? How also can one keep silent on the violence of early and irreversible treatments aimed at changing the sex of a child, with no possibility, on becoming adult, of changing back again? Not forgetting the children or adolescents living under the threshold of poverty, on the streets, in prostitution etc.
The decisions by MP’s cannot claim to be working for “the gradual construction of citizenship and the acquisition of a humanist culture” if they omit the defence of the most vulnerable against ALL FORMS of violence. The path is still long to achieve a society of non-violence to children.
