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| Sunday, 25 December 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Excluded and invisible children of the world by Aditha Dissanayake
She nods and says "Yes, I can". "All of it?" he asks again in a voice filled with awe and staring at her with wonder. "All the pages?" he adds as if he thinks she might not have understood him the first time. "Yes", she assures him, ruffles his hair and says "In next to no time you will be reading all these words too". He walks off, thoughtful, solemn, but (hopefully) convinced. She can assure Danishke a street child enrolled at the Children and Youth Centre in Pettah, one, among 30-40 children supported by the Centre under the guidance of the State Child Protection Authority, with confidence because she knows he is in the best of hands that would teach him not only the ABCs of the alphabet but also the ABCs in life, moulding him into a responsible citizen, no longer excluded and invisible. According to JoAnna Van Gerpen, UNICEF Representative, millions of children all over the world are excluded from essential services and deprived of protection from abuse and exploitation, due to "poverty, HIV/AIDS, armed conflict, weak governance and discrimination". These children are invisible to the system because they "lack a birth certificate or the protection and support by responsible parents and the society". "You can see a child in front of you, but abuse is often hidden and invisible", says Dr. Kalyani Guruge, who works with children suffering from various kinds of abuse including physical abuse, psychological abuse and sexual abuse. She believes a cure can be found in listening to these children. "We adults must make time to listen to the children carefully". Misconception Quoting the estimated figure of child sex workers in Sri Lanka as between 10,000 and 30,000, according to the regional conference supported by UNICEF held in Colombo in 2004, Tharindra Abeyasinghe, a 19-year-old activist campaigning against commercial sexual exploitation of children explained that the misconception that "boys do not suffer from sexual abuse as much as girls" is the reason behind a large proportion of boys working as sex workers. "It is us who will take the country forward into the future and commercial sexual exploitation is eating away our peers. We the youth of the country believe that commercial sexual exploitation is a parasite, which should be permanently flushed out of our country". Dr. Hiranthi Wijemanne, Chairperson of the National Child Protection Authority attributes such factors as shyness, stigmatization, fear and shame to be the cause of silent suffering among children of all levels of the social strata in Sri Lanka. She points out that "most of the violations of the protection rights of children occur at home and are caused by close family members". Proving, however, that though excluded, they are not quite invisible thanks to the efforts of organizations like UNICEF, speaking on the day the report titled "The state of the World's Children 2006" was launched, 13 year old Devnika Harshani a student at the Children and Youth Centre, Pettah, said it best "We get help to do our homework here. We learn dancing, music and computer skills. I'm happy here. I told other children to come here, too!"
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"Can you read this?" asks six-year-old Danishke (not his real name),
pointing to the hundred and fifty pages of the A4 size report in the hands
of my colleague, Malini Govinnage of the Daily News. 
