In courts across the nation, judges continue to question a mother’s fitness by measuring her ability, or better put, inability, to speak English. In 2004, a Tennessee judge ordered into foster care the child of a Mexican migrant mother who spoke only an indigenous tongue, and last year, a California court took custody of the U.S.-born twin babies of another non-Spanish and non-English speaking indigenous mother from Oaxaca.
Yes, they are poor; yes, they rarely speak English, let alone Spanish; and yes, they are usually undocumented migrants. Regardless, these women are natural and legally entitled mothers. While the State seems to think her place in the world—her native tongue, level of poverty, cultural traditions, immigration status—deems her unfit to mother, she is rightfully entitled to remain united with her child. It is her human right. There is a universal consensus that the family is a fundamental unit of society, therefore entitled to respect, protection, and assistance. Arbitrary interference with the family is a violation of international human rights and humanitarian law. As such, don’t you think the State should be providing English lessons as opposed to taking children from their mothers for failing to learn English?
“I ran into a raindrop one day, and you know what it had to say?…’IM GONNA BE AN OCEAN SOMEDAY!’”
My students at Associação União de Caridade São Bonifácio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Education begins in the classroom but goes far beyond classroom walls. Education is the key to improved livelihood, health care, and the exercise of civil and political rights and social, economic, and cultural rights.
I am a firm believer that access to education alongside empowerment programs are key to promoting healthier behaviors and improving quality of life, not just for the child, but for future generations.
Empowerment programs are a vital form of advocacy in this respect; by melding school, family, community and cultural experiences to empower youth, these programs effectively create adults focused on improving the quality of life for those in their communities. Educating children—giving them the tools to advocate for their disenfranchised communities—serves as a catalyst for change in various respects. Empowerment programs create parents, spouses, lawyers, doctors, humanitarians, and more, of the most socially conscious kind.
But, what does it take? What exactly does empowerment entail?
The purpose of educational empowerment is not to impart information, but to foster particularized skills that serve a purpose within a child’s community. It’s contextual. For example, a child who comes from a household where domestic violence is common can be served by learning non-violence and dispute resolution; children who come from communities where health care and nutrition are lacking, can learn how best to improve these conditions; and, children who see early pregnancy or child marriage as the norm, can be taught sexual education and informed of reproductive health rights and the value of independent choice. Teaching life-skills, interpersonal communication, critical-thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making will indeed nurture a child’s voice. By encouraging youth to take up these responsibilities and participate civically, we are ensuring a better future for subsequent generations.
I am positive that educational empowerment programs of this kind will benefit all of us. I hope to explore this topic in more depth on these pages. The right to education is of utmost importance; the right to personalized empowerment, i believe, is a component of that right and vital to the advancement of disenfranchised groups.
When taught and empowered these children are more than just mere raindrops, they grow to be oceans!
On May 9, my home state of Guanajuato, Mexico did the unexpected–amended the state constitutionand banned ALL forms of abortion by guaranteeing the right to life from the moment of conception. I wrote hereabout Guanajuato’s lack of consideration for victims of rape and the criminal prosecution of women who sought medical attention for post-abortion complications. To make matters even worse, Guanajuato has now also denied victims of rape their human right to life, liberty, privacy, security of person, and right to health! Sadly, this is a HUGE step backward for an already conservative state.
The U.N. Human Rights Committee and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women have repeatedly expressed concern about the relationship between restrictive abortion laws, clandestine abortions, and threats to the lives of women. By criminalizing all forms of abortion, including abortion in cases of rape, the state of Guanajuato has now become the culprit behind preventable physical and mental health problems for its women. Where there is a lack of legal and safe abortion services for victims of rape, there will be psychological and emotional trauma, unwanted pregnancies, and unsafe abortions.
It is clear to me that the state is placing more weight on Catholic principles and idealism than it is on the facts. I am Mexican; I am Catholic; I get the values and ideals thing, believe me. They can say I’ve been “Americanized” all they want, but I still don’t get how placing those values above a dying woman’s right to life is justifiable, or how prosecution and criminalization in such grave cases is logical? Women–already victimized women–are suffering state supported human rights violations of the most preventable kind! Keep reading →
Children at Associação União de Caridade São Bonifácio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Brazil is well known for its high racial and socio-economic inequality. Though slavery ended years ago, a legacy of social discrimination against blacks is still evident today, where 67 percent of blacks are categorized as poor; blacks and “mulattos” earn half the income of whites; and a black Brazilian with a college degree earns, on average, less than a white Brazilian without a high school diploma. While the rich pay for private education and college preparatory tutoring, the poor attend inadequate, overcrowded, and under-financed public schools. Keep in mind, however, that suffering three and a half centuries of a slavery-based economy does not disappear over night.
In recent years, Brazil’s government has begun experimenting with affirmative action programs as a means of rectifying these inequalities. The original version of the program reserved forty percent of its admission slots for blacks and fifty percent for graduates of Brazil’s notoriously inadequate public grade schools and high schools—where most black Brazilians study.
Prior to 2001, a young black child from favela Dona Marta in Rio de Janeiro could not conceptualize a future as a doctor or engineer. Today, with affirmative action and a quota system, this vision could in fact become a reality.
Associação União de Caridade São Bonifácio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Nonetheless, the birth of affirmative action in Brazil has generated a controversial debate on whether affirmative action and quotas help or hinder. Some say quotas are analogous to handing a homeless man a million dollars without first teaching him how to manage money; others say it gets one foot in the door and that is what matters most. In this debate, can’t both sides be right?
After speaking with middle class Brazilians frustrated with these new plans, it is widely apparent they believe the government is misdirecting its efforts. “Rather than remedying the problem at the college level,” they say, “the government should focus on improving the public school system at the primary level.” The state recognizes that the problem of access to education starts at the grade school level and within the public schools, yet the most significant efforts to rectify the injustice are not made until the college level. The comments made by these college students are neither racist nor hateful in nature. The Brazilian generation of today is highly aware of inequality, and also poignantly aware that neosporin alone will not heal the institutionalized social problems impoverished youth face.
NGO Familia Brasil
Though the quota system welcomes this population into college, without a strong basic education, how will any of these children succeed in college? Studies have found that many students who did not have the requisite scores for admission–as do most of the students admitted via quota–found it difficult to succeed academically and more than 30 percent of these students drop-out before the end of the academic school year.
The question for Brazil should not be whether affirmative action works, because it is apparent that affirmative action does improve the lives of many Brazilians. The question for Brazil should be how best to provide sustainable change for a larger percentage of impoverished youth—not just those that make it through high school. Sustainable change is most often bottom-up, and here, it requires a more precise and scrutinize evaluation of the public schooling system and the reasons many impoverished, most often black, youth do not reach or finish college.
Because many of the poorest children come from generation after generation of no basic education, a generational change must occur; directing the focus on the formative years of childhood and educational development, while also guaranteeing admittance at the college level, will sustain such a change.
The success of a child from a favela in Brazil is dependent on much more than an open-invitation to study at the local university. Raising younger siblings, seeing constant violence and drug-trafficking, witnessing prostitution and fleeing home–this is the reality of a child in a favela. Raising a child does indeed take a village…the village needs to speak for these children and demand long-awaited change.
I have created my first ever youtube on this topic. Hopefully, the first of many. It paints a vivid picture of the issues, yet barely begins to illustrate the complexities facing Brazil’s youth. The issue of access to education in Brazil is very dear to my heart; I have spent much time there and hope to someday see a change.
Below is the text of an online petition which will be sent to individuals in Guanajuato regarding failed access to abortion services for victims of rape and the criminalization of women seeking post-abortion care. Please sign the petition here.
The petition is in both English and Spanish.
—–
Dear Friends, Family, and Colleagues,
Women are suffering human rights violations because of Guanajuato state laws and practices that do not guarantee access to safe, legal abortions, but rather prosecute women who arrive at public hospitals for post-abortion care. I write to you, as a native of Guanajuato and advocate for human rights, along with the support of the undersigned because of a deep concern for the reproductive health of women in the state.
Though Guanajuato permits legal abortion only after rape, over the past eight years, the state has denied every petition by a pregnant rape victim for abortion services. Over the same period, about 130 women have been sentenced for seeking or providing illegal abortions. Thus, not only do victims of rape–women with a legal right to an abortion–fail to realize they can access public healthcare services or are refused opportune treatment, but those women suffering from complications that arise from illegal abortion procedures fear going to public hospitals and being arrested under the suspicion of having induced an abortion.
Not allowed abortion by law and practice, many women turn to the black market for medications that induce abortions; these same women, often after hemorrhaging and near death complications, avoid trips to the public hospital for fear of criminal prosecution. Fear, humiliation, degradation, and physical suffering should not be associated with women and their right to safe and confidential reproductive care.
Lack of access to bonafide medical services, including legal abortion following rape and safe and confidential medical care for post-abortion complications, is a violation of a series of the fundamental human rights of women, an affront to their personal dignity, and a violation of their right to a sexual well-being.
On March 2, 2009, the Mexican Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Mexico City health law that permits abortion, stating the law was “ideal to protect women’s rights, since the criminalization of pregnancy termination contravenes the freedom of women to decide about their bodies, their physical and mental health, and also their lives.”
In acknowledgment of the Supreme Court’s reasoning and Mexico’s international human rights obligations toward women, Guanajuato must reform its abortion laws and Criminal Procedure Code to make them consistent with international human rights standards—increasing public health care information and services for women while removing criminal penalties for all abortions, particularly in cases of rape. Criminalization of abortion does nothing to reduce the incidence of abortion, but rather increases the practice of illegal abortions and consequentially increases maternal death rates. Moreover, the Health Secretariat in Guanajuato should ensure their medical personnel are trained to respect women’s rights to abortion and confidential health care. Guanajuato would do well to introduce a campaign asserting the rights of women and their reproductive health.
“Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit.”
What does this mean for the numbers of people haunted by memories of their past, continuously plagued by post-traumatic memories of human rights violations? This drug may have the ablity to weaken those memories, to give individuals the ability to walk into a room which should elicit traumatic memories and not have those memories surface. Wonderful, right? Keep reading →
You know, I can’t help but think of the mothers who willingly sell off their daughters.
Is willing the appropriate word? Perhaps not.
I feel empathy, sympathy, and sadness for them. I am sure they suffer when they say goodbye to their girls or at least feel pain and guilt.
Restricted to a culture that obligates them to dispose of their young girls, these mothers might even consider the hand-over of their daughter as a foreseeable consequence of their circumstance – something they went through, that all young women go through, something natural.
Imagine the sad existence that they must be living if they feel obligated to sell off their daughter for pay – I mean, that reeks of desperation. Hunger, poverty, disease. In a world where sadness and suffering swim around you, the loss of a loved one is nothing but natural.
Imagine also being the mother of a young girl sold as a loan bride to an Opium trafficker in Afghanistan. These daughters given in marriage by their Opium-farmer fathers who have no other way out of debt after the U.S. government burnt down their Opium fields, must face a future of rape and hardship – back turned to their mothers and family. Already struggling to survive, the mothers of loan brides are forced to accept their husbands financial arrangements, forced to let go of their daughter’s hand, forced to imagine their daughter’s tragic future and her suffering.
My heart goes out, not only to the child brides, but to their mothers, forced to rid themselves of their children for compensation. It’s one thing to have your child ripped from your arms; it’s another to hand-over your daughter, willingly or not, because your perspective of the world is sadly no other.
There are an estimated 51 million child brides worldwide. In countries such as India, Niger, and Uganda, more than half of girls are married before they turn 18.
Eleven-year-old Rekha, left, stands with her groom Bheeram Singh, 16, after their marriage in Rajgarh, India. Photo Provided by AP
The life sentence of a child bride reeks of higher rates of domestic violence, maternal mortality, high school drop-out, and HIV/AIDs. If death is not of consequence, life-long complications such as obstetric fistulas—a debilitating condition caused by obstructed labor—result in social ostracism resulting from incontinence. Continued poverty and a poor quality of life go hand in hand with sacrificed education, sexual exploitation, and physical and physiological harm.
Moreover, studies have shown that early marriages tend to ensure that a woman is firmly under male control with no choice over birth control, education, and health, leading to a life of domestic and economic subservience.
Despite continued efforts to address and reduce the number of child brides worldwide, attempts continue to hit a brick wall—social tradition. Keep reading →
There are 1.1 billion people, or 18% of the world’s population, who lack access to safe drinking water. About 2.6 billion people, or 42% of the total, lack access to basic sanitation.
What does this mean for the world’s women & children?
Unsafe water and the lack of basic sanitation and adequate hygiene contribute to the leading killers of children, under five, roughly 1.5 million children yearly. These children are dying of diarrhoeal diseases, pneumonia and under nutrition. Believe it or not, 5,000 children are dying every day as a result of diarrhoeal diseases.
Photo provided by UN Water for Life
Because women and girls bear more of the consequences of poor water, sanitation, and hygiene, their basic right to water deserves utmost protection. They fetch the water and care for the children and other household members who fall sick from water-related diseases. Most other household chores – including cleaning latrines and garbage disposal – also fall to women and girls. In addition, girls’ school attendance is affected the most by inadequate water and sanitation facilities in schools and by time spent traveling long distances to drinking-water sources. Beyond that, many women lack access to private sanitation facilities. As reported by UNICEF, many women limit their food and water intake–living in fear physical attacks when attempting to relieve themselves.
Water, free of infection and pollution, is not a commodity to be undervalued–it is a luxury. Too enjoy the safety and convenience of having water that has been treated under managed conditions, piped into homes or compounds, is truly a blessing.
Men, women, and children exist, in the millions, all over this world who lack access to something we regard as absolutely trivial, common, basic. Yes, the right to water is fundamental, basic, and as follows, everyone deserves to consider it such. Access to water is a fundamental human need–a human right, internationally interpreted under the right to life and the right to health.
Protecting these vulnerable women and children is a must, and thankfully, all that we–those sitting comfortably on our porches with a tall cup of ice water–must do is support the work of fine organizations such as UNICEF. Click here to donate. Help UNICEF provide access to safe water and sanitation facilities while also promoting safe hygiene practices in more than 90 countries worldwide.
On May 9, my home state of Guanajuato, Mexico did the unexpected–
