Children's Commissioner overdue

By The Editorial Board 08 December 2021, 10:15PM

We believe that the foremost priority of any Government should be ensuring the welfare of the country's most vulnerable members. 

There are none more vulnerable than children. 

But especially so, the sub-set of Samoa’s most vulnerable children, who have lead lives deprived of opportunity and hope that education provide and often turn to dangerous and illegal labour or crime to make up the difference. 

Senior Justice Vui Clarence Nelson made the suggestion of creating a National Children’s Commissioner in a Cabinet submission made last month.

The idea had been percolating while Justice Nelson sat on the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in Switzerland this year. The commissioner could take the form of an office with a mandate that cuts across all Ministries’ to ensure each has a policy focus on child-welfare or at the very least an advocate.   

“There are a number of other pressing issues such as the passage of the long awaited Child Care and Protection Bill,” he said.

We could not agree more. 

Day after day the pages of this newspaper chronicle the depredations that some of Samoa’s most neglected children must live under, from the brutal to the heart wrenching. 

Children are the victims in roughly 40 per cent of cases of domestic violence, an out-of-control problem on which too little progress is being made.

“Parents and caregivers thinking that physical punishment is necessary to raise or discipline their children,” the Samoa Victim Support Group says, of the underage residents of their overflowing shelters.

But apart from being actively abused, children are deprived of necessities required to live full and enriching lives.

The rising drop-out rate among our primary and high-school students makes for depressing reading. 

Secondary school completion rate declined between 2016–2018 for Year 12 (from 62.65 per cent to 54.1 per cent) and Year 13 (from 71.4 per cent to 35.95 per cent) for both male and female students.

The completion rate for Year 13, was similarly low and falling, the study found, from 44.4 per cent in 2016 to 35.95 in 2018. 

Primary school completion rates have remained steady at a more respectable 80 per cent but are not nearly enough to produce an educated population.

These problems are all inextricably linked. One of the most significant causes is child labour, being pulled into which most often comes at the expense of these opportunities.

A recent report found that nearly 15 per cent of children aged between 5 and 17 in Samoa had been forced into jobs often in hazardous conditions such as those with the potential exposure to fumes or working with unsafe machinery.

The figure reflected the inequalities of life in Samoa, with a large wealth and geographic divide between children forced into work and those 

For four years now, the United States, in its contributions to international human rights discourse, named Samoa as one of the countries with some of the “worst forms of child labour” and noted that too little action was taking place to remedy the problem.

And then for those who are truly out of options and turn to crime as a possible way out, efforts to rehabilitate them so that they might re-enter society as productive young adults. 

Last year, Justice Nelson and a district court judge conducted an inspection of the youth wing of the Tanumalala Prison concluding that the juveniles looked like “caged animals.”

“Your Honours, these children are kept in heavily barred cells and sleep on the concrete floor without falas or even a blanket which at this time of year at that altitude is criminal,” he wrote in comparison to its adult wing. 

“We saw one sheet being shared by a cell of 6 boys, wet washing dripping onto their floor as there is nowhere else to hang it because they are not allowed out of their cells at any time.”

Samoa is an unusually young country demographically; its median age is barely above 21.

So the question of how we treat our children and, especially, how we treat the most vulnerable of their number is more than just a moral question.

Questions of character and willingness to contribute will carry significant practical implications when our very young nation begins to age.

So far we have a system in which children can slip through the cracks too easily. 

If we do not rapidly change course, the ramifications of this neglect of out most vulnerable children will very soon grow and manifest as our next nationwide generational social problem. 

By The Editorial Board 08 December 2021, 10:15PM
Samoa Observer

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