Children in danger: Traditional adoption can be “living hell”

“I was four when I was left in the care of my uncle, who was childless. While I was small everything was fine, but when I turned nine my living hell began. I was no longer a child of the house, I was a slave of the house,” said Souleymane. Now 16 and dressed in rags, the sad-looking boy whose right hand is missing three fingers breaks into tears on recalling those years. “One day when I was hungry I took a bit of food from the pot. My uncle’s wife crushed my fingers with a hammer.” Like more and more children across Africa today, Souleymane fell foul of an ancestral custom now going wrong - informal or “traditional” adoption or entrustment. Under the once socially useful system, children would be sent away from home to live with relatives or friends who took on responsibility for the child’s education. Sent off from his remote village in Cameroon to his uncle’s family in the northern town of Garoua, in the expectation he would receive an education from one of its many schools, Souleymane wound up being forced to do domestic work, and finally ran away. “My uncle’s wife never lifted a finger. I cooked, cleaned, did all the house work,” he said. “All I ever got in return were beatings.” So for the past four years he has lived on the street. “I won’t ever go back,” he said. ONCE AN HONOUR, NOW A BURDEN In the old days, being asked to bring up someone else’s child was an honour. A child might be sent away too as a “gift” to infertile relatives, or to be brought up by relatives if their mother died. “It would have been unimaginable for a family to allow children it had been entrusted with to be in rags and bare feet. This would have been a disgrace,” said Youssouf Tata Cisse, a retired Malian researcher. But as poverty gnaws African society, children nowadays are being sent away because parents simply cannot afford to bring them up, said El Kane Mooh, West Africa advisor for Save the Children, Sweden, “They no longer have the means.” Because of impoverishment and migration, traditional family ties are breaking down and stories like Souleymane’s are becoming common, experts say.

Barefoot beggar children on the streets of Dakar, Senegal

“In this region, there is more and more abject poverty. The African family, in the sense that we know it, doesn’t exist any more. The fantasy of African solidarity doesn’t exist any more,” said Jean-Claude Legrand, a senior regional official with the UN children’s agency UNICEF. “The family is changing, there is a new dynamic, and protecting children is no longer the priority.” VULNERABLE TO SEXUAL ABUSE Many girls report not only exploitation but sexual assault by their new parents and families. Sylvie, now 28 and also living in Garoua, northern Cameroon, was “gifted” to an infertile big sister when she was two years old. “As soon as my sister went to work I would be at the mercy of the other wife and her children, who were bigger than me,” she said. And when she was eight, her uncle’s younger brother, “who was 18 and who often washed us,” raped her. “I suffered a lot. I still have flashbacks,” she said. Amelie, who slipped away from an abusive family ten years ago and now lives in Paris, was beaten when she tried to speak out. “The day that I said that one of my uncles had touched me, he beat me and whipped me until I bled. It was true, but after that I kept silent. I could not talk about these things,” she said. SUPPORT NEEDED To end such violence, the World Bank, which funds programmes for street children across West Africa, recommended in a 2002 report the indirect sponsoring of orphans’ education and that families burdened with extra children be helped by receiving food supplements and cash.

Begging for coins on the streets of Dakar

The UN meanwhile is focused on providing centres in towns and cities that orphaned and abused children can go to, to get help. “We have to listen to the voices of urban street children so they can share their experiences and demand assistance”, said Legrand at UNICEF. One such centre in the Beninese port city of Cotonou sees more than 500 children turn up spontaneously each year, and in Gabon the authorities have set up a hotline for children in trouble. Mooh at the children’s rights NGO Save the Children says there must be more effort placed on trying to stop children becoming orphans in the first place, and on educating rural families to stop sending their children away for traditional adoption. “Parents in towns don’t have the means to invest in a child, especially one which isn’t their own, when they cannot even send their own children to school,” he said. hb/ccr/ss