Global Policy Forum

By Amal Kashf Al-Ghitta*

Iraq's children have suffered more than just successive wars and economic sanctions. The loss of parents and family resources has boosted child labor, homelessness, and inclinations toward violence and rebellion. Children often now live in homes where 25 people live in a space of 40 square meters. Even intact families may comprise parents and five children in a single six-meter room.

The increase in child labor reflects families' dire economic situation: children are frequently a family's only breadwinners, and they work cheap. Contractors in municipal services, for example, prefer to use children in order to cut costs. A child may be used for agricultural labor or for janitorial work. Many work in piles of garbage, either removing them to another place or collecting empty bottles and cans to sell.

Other children load and transport items in the markets, where they must pull carts weighing 60-70 kilograms and carry boxes weighing 15 kilograms in temperatures of 50 degrees centigrade. Two children may unload a truck carrying 1,000 kilograms of food items.

Not surprisingly, Iraq's child workers suffer from a wide array of serious health problems. Children who work in the garbage dumps are prone to skin and respiratory problems, while those who work with paints eventually become addicted to the intoxicants that they inhale. And all working children are vulnerable to malnutrition, as their diet typically lacks the items necessary to build body tissues.

Nor is there any official authority to protect children and defend their rights in case of incapacitation or sickness. On the contrary, children are often beaten by family members if they do not provide the daily wage expected of them, or by their bosses when they are inattentive or make a mistake. Indeed, Iraqi children are exposed to beating without regard for their age, thus growing up insecure, hostile and violent. Moreover, they are prone to being kidnapped by criminal gangs, trained to steal, or, worse, placed at the mercy of terrorists for use in attacks.

The deterioration of families' financial situation has also left poor children deprived of educational opportunities. For many children, even when they do attend school, the collapse of infrastructure, the unavailability of electricity and water, and high temperatures in the summer are hardly conducive to successful study. The small number of schools, the poor condition of buildings, and the collapse of relationships between students and teachers is also at fault. Older children sit in classrooms with much younger children, growing frustrated and violent, rather than becoming role models for others to emulate.

Iraqi girls suffer no less than boys - and often more. At one end of the spectrum of deprivation, their opportunities are more constrained. When a family's income is insufficient to pay school fees for every child, girls are typically denied an education, owing to the traditional belief that marriage is a girl's final destiny. They must perform household chores and are subject to beating if they do not carry out orders issued by male family members. In poor households, they are also likely to receive less food than boys, placing their physical health and development at even greater risk.

At the other end of the spectrum, rape, adultery, early child bearing and abortion have become ordinary matters. Increasingly, Iraqi girls interpret anything given to them as a means of having sex with them.

Orphans, whose number has increased sharply over the past quarter-century as a result of wars, economic sanctions, and terrorism, are especially vulnerable to the cruelest type of physical and psychological violence. Having lost their homes and parents, they sleep in alleys, sell cigarettes or newspapers, and beg. Grandparents are often unable or unwilling to care for them, and the pathological education given to them by criminal gangs often puts them beyond the reach of any institution's ability to rehabilitate them.

Simply put, children in Iraq have been reduced from human beings worthy of care to tools of production and instruments of violence. We are quite literally breeding a new generation of disorder.

About the Author: Amal Kashf Al-Ghitta, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly, directs the Islamic Foundation for Women and Children.