HIV pandemic devastating children’s lives, futures

The government of Kenya is failing to care for millions of children who have been orphaned by AIDS, or whose family
members suffer from the disease, according to a report released on Monday by the New York-based Human Rights Watch.

The organisation’s report, “In the Shadow of Death: HIV/AIDS and Children’s Rights in Kenya”, claims that the Kenyan government has failed to take responsibility for children who were at higher risk of human rights abuse when the disease ravaged their families.

As children were forced to become breadwinners, they were pulled out of school and often forced to take on potentially dangerous labour that was inappropriate for children, the report said. HIV/AIDS has orphaned about a million children in Kenya, and weakened the extended family and other communities to which orphans have traditionally turned, it added.

Many children were unable to inherit property to which they were entitled, because they were unable to navigate legal processes that are cumbersome and ill-suited to claimants who are minors, Human Rights Watch stated.
[for more details, go to: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/kenya/]

“The rights of children have been the missing piece of the AIDS crisis,” said Joanne Csete, a children’s rights researcher with Human Rights Watch and author of its report. “If their parents had died in any other way, these children would have been at the top of the agenda. But because the parents died of AIDS, with all of the stigma that implies, they’re at the bottom.”

UNICEF last week published “conservative estimates based on incomplete data” that six million children in Eastern and Southern Africa have been orphaned by AIDS, and that the disease accounted for 70 percent of the region’s children under 15 years who had lost one or both parents. A further 700,000 of the region’s children were infected with the disease: over 60 percent of the world’s infected children, it said.

The dissolution of families from HIV/AIDS increased the likelihood of children being forced into exploitative labour, and diminished their already meagre opportunities for education, according to the UNICEF report, “Child workers in the shadow of AIDS in Eastern and Southern Africa”. “Just when children should be in school, their burdensome new role as family breadwinner forces them to drop out; their escape hatch from poverty is firmly shut,” it added.

Children worked primarily in commercial agriculture and subsistence farming, but others toiled as domestic servants, unpaid family caretakers, street vendors and prostitutes, according to the UNICEF child workers report. “Many of these are physically and sexually abused; others are treated as slave labour,” it added.

The Kenyan Ministry of Labour recognised the problem of child workers, especially in agriculture, but cited poverty and AIDS as key constraints to the elimination of child labour. The labour ministry also cited said inadequate legislation, poor enforcement of existing laws and the breakdown of families as factors hindering its efforts to tackle child labour, UNICEF reported.

In Kenya, AIDS was forcing children - and not just orphans - into the labour market as the disease further ravaged a distressed economy, in which an estimated 3.5 million children aged six to 16 were working, it said. Directly or indirectly, HIV/AIDS forms the context in which these child labourers live and work.

In a rapid assessment undertaken in the Kiambu and Nyeri districts of central Kenya (where tens of thousands of children work on tea and coffee plantations during harvest seasons), the inability of parents to provide for their children’s basic needs was significantly increasing children’s vulnerability to sexual abuse and HIV/AIDS, according to UNICEF.

“Informants noted that the children’s exposure to the harsh living environment of the plantations often led to premature sexual intercourse, early pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases,” it said. Eleven percent of children interviewed about their work cited sexual abuse as a problem, with fully 20 percent of those aged six to eight complaining of sexual abuse,” it added.

Nationally, the spread of HIV/AIDS - which has officially been declared a national disaster in Kenya - may eventually afflict more than 40 percent of 13- to 19-year-olds, according to research cited by UNICEF.

Monday’s Human Rights Watch report - coinciding with the UN General Assembly’s first special session on HIV/AIDS - focused on Kenya as an illustrative case of the government doing little to protect the human rights of children orphaned, or otherwise affected, by the epidemic.

Children interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that because of HIV/AIDS, they had had to withdraw from school so they could earn money for the family or care for a sick relative, and in some cases to find livelihoods on the street or in domestic labor.
Several girls described prostitution as their only way to make a living.

Almost all of the orphaned children had faced obstacles to inheriting the house or land to which they were entitled, while many of them did not have good enough information on HIV/AIDS to understand why their parents had suffered and died, and to combat the stigma they faced, according to the report.

Human Rights Watch called on the Kenyan government to do more to help children to stay in school, and urged it to make the legal system more accessible to children claiming their property. It also encouraged the government to ratify the International Labor Organisation (ILO) convention on hazardous labour for children.

All in all, leading Kenyan government officials had not spoken out forcefully enough to reduce the social stigma associated with HIV/AIDS, according to Joanne Csete. Human Rights Watch called on President Daniel arap Moi to break the “conspiracy of silence” that has fostered discrimination against children affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis.

“If families are not there to help these children, then the state has the responsibility to provide protection,” it added.