Pergamon Child Abuse & Neglect, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 117-123, 1997

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HENRY KEMPE MEMORIAL L E C T U R E - - 1 1 T H INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT

THOUGHTS FROM THE HUMAN RIGHTS PERSPECTIVE

MONCEF MARZOUKI

ANPPCAN, Tunisia Chapter, Ibn. E1-Jassar, Sonsse, Tunisia

I WOULD LIKE first of all to express my gratitude to all those who nominated me for this prestigious Kempe Lecture award; my thanks to the ISPCAN nomination and to the President, Kari Killen for her continued support in the difficult circumstances I am going through. I apologize for not being with you today. My government, as you may already know, has denied for some time some of my fundamental human rights, in particular, my right to travel abroad, as a punishment for my continued commitment to democracy and human rights in Tunisia.

The theme of this XI Congress being about families, stability and instability, I would like to share with you some thoughts from the human rights perspective.

This preoccupation has been widely shared during the recent years. As you know, 1994 was declared the International Year of the Family (IYF) by the United Nations, and a lot has been done to keep family concerns in the mainstream of national and international society since that time.

Last year, an international statement signed by 27 NGOs was submitted to the third commit- tee of the general assembly of the UN, requesting a followup of programs to IYF and including a "Declaration on responsibilities and rights of families" to be added to the many other declarations of the UN.

The question I would like to raise is, should we be very enthusiastic, or rather deeply concerned about such a sudden interest in family rights? Is it good news or bad that there are about 1,400 largely grass-root organizations, over 100 countries, and more than 27 international organizations trying to investigate and promote the rights of families? How should we interpret this phenomenon? Shouldn't we be aware that the number of NGOs, programs, and professionals dealing with such or such human rights is an indicator about the deterioration of this very right?

Let us remember that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN in 1948, 3 years after massive killing, torture, and racism had reached levels never before seen

Presented at the 1 lth International Congress on Child Abuse and Neglect, Dublin, Ireland, August 15-18, 1996.

Requests for reprints should be addressed to Dr. Moncef Marzouki, ANPPCAN, Tunisia Chapter, Ibn. El-Jassar, Sousse, Tunisia.

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in all of human history. The other reason for a legitimate alertness is that human rights in general, and children's rights in particular have turned during the last decade to be a subject of rich debate, and unfortunately, also of rhetoric, propaganda, and instrumentalization.

In many developing countries like mine, the more governments talk about human rights, the more these rights are violated and the more you need to expect the worst to come. So, my first attitude when I hear about a declaration of families' rights is to think, "Poor family, how distressing its' situation must be and what a marvelous new toy for a lot of politicians!!! Let us hope that we will never hear about a universal declaration of lovers' rights."

Saying this, we must have the greatest respect for the UN and NGOs texts on human rights because they are our most important landmarks. A declaration on family rights wouldn't be very different in its substance from all the other similar statements, with mainly four functions one can identify easily. The UN Convention on Children's Rights, for example, states that a child must have the right to leisure, but we read in the 1996 report of the International Labor Organization "that 73 million children under 10 are working in agricultural, mining, and prostitution fields," and that they are more or less in an almost slavery condition.

If, for instance, we replace in Article 27 "every child" by " some children" have the right " to a standard of living adequate for the child's physical, mental, moral, and social development ," we will have a very good description of the children's situation in the world right now.

When we read negatively all those statements, declarations on women's rights, child's rights, and so on, we are in fact in the presence of the most concise and complete description of the women's and child's most prevalent situation. Obviously the description is also a denunciation of this situation.

A declaration of human rights is adopted by states' parties with their different political backgrounds as a cross-cultural and a cross ideological bargained list of what are currently considered by general consensus to be the fundamental needs of a human being. These needs are stated as prerequisites for a decent and, I dare say, "no rma l" human life.

Unfortunately, this prerequisite which should be enjoyed by every human being remains in fact the privilege of a minority, and sometimes of a tiny minority. For a lawyer, the right is supposed to be a common and well shared privilege, but for a human rights activist, it is very often the privilege of the happy few.

The convention on child's rights doesn't only describe the privileges of a minority, or the real situation of the majority. It is also a set of goals which aims to transform the unacceptable situation described by the text. The main objective, in fact, is to expand the minority's rights to the majority.

The last and most important dimension of the right's concept is responsibility. Claiming that I have the right to freedom of expression means that it is the responsibility of someone to let me express myself. I have the right to rights because I am a human being, but the very existence of my rights in my daily life depends on who can violate them or help to implement them. Therefore, when you talk about any human right, you question indirectly the responsibil- ity of someone, some institution, either because he is violating it or because he is not doing all his duty to have it implemented. Right and duty are not, after all, two different concepts, but just one, seen from two different angles. My right is your responsibility, and your right is my responsibility. This is why it is so dangerous in some countries like mine to deal with human rights issues, because by so doing, you are pointing to someone elses' responsibi l i ty-- you are evaluating a lack, an error, or even a misuse of this responsibility, and this will never be accepted.

It is obvious that responsibility of implementing a human right is mainly the state's responsi- bility. But it is also the responsibility of individuals, economic actors, religious leaders, public opinion makers, and others. A declaration on families' rights would be interesting and useful

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just because it would identify the different eras of responsibilities, the actors who are in charge of such and such part of it, their followup and monitoring.

As far as we are concerned, our part of responsibility has always been to identify and to raise awareness among us and among the public opinion about this specific violation of a basic child's right: His right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and psychological security.

Consciously or unconsciously, we have been trying from the first Congress and the first issue of Child Abuse & Neglect by sharing of our experiences and opinions, to build up together slowly and surely a holistic vision and holistic approach to the problem in order to help implement this right.

No model of cause can embody the complexity of the reality. The causes of the phenomenon are so numerous, their interaction so complex, the slightest difference in one risk factor so important for the output, that the most sophisticated model would not permit any scientific prediction. But here again, the usefulness of this model is to draw the different eras of our responsibilities as professionals.

The family can suffer from a long list of dysfunction, one of them being child abuse and neglect. This is not the problem, but its expression. It is a symptom of deep dysfunction at society, family, and individual levels. Thinking about it in a disintegrated way would be as effective as for a physician to work on cough or chest pain ignoring the other symptoms of the tuberculosis, its etiology, and the social and economic causes of the disease.

Child abuse and neglect is rarely the only symptom of the family 's dysfunction. The stress is never the child's only. It is the whole family's. Only the expression will change from one to another member of the family.

A new NGO "Help Age International" is drawing the public attention on the domestic mistreatment, but of older people, victims of passive neglect. This phenomenon is not as uncommon as it should be. It would be interesting to study the relationship between the two problems in countries where there are still large families.

Child abuse and neglect, like all the other child's rights violations, is the result of the complex and unpredictable interactions of individual, family, and social risk factors. It has been well documented in all our scientific literature that the characteristics of the child such as gender, prematurity, handicap, birth out of wedlock, and so forth, cannot lead by themselves to child's rights violations. To have a growing rate of girl infanticide in a country like China, there must be a female newborn, a cultural and economic background of a rural conservative male dominated society, and a legislation which does not allow families to have more than one child. The characteristics of the child are merely facilitators or trigger risk factors.

We do know also that the structure of the family, its cohesion, communication, and coping are the most efficient protective factors of the child's well being whatever his characteristic. But family is not a private matter, it is not an island in an ocean. When we talk about the modern world's challenges that the family faces, we talk generally about the mainly negative effects of its instability: urbanization, industrialization, raise of unemployment, overpopulation, environmental disasters. The problem is that stability does not, cannot, and shouldn't exist. As a matter of fact, the world has been and will always remain unstable, luckily should I add, because the most stable situation is death. Our first year medical students have to ponder over the idea that health is not the absence of diseases, can never be a permanent state, but it is the capability of the person to cope permanently with all sorts of outer aggressions and inner dysfunction. Health is therefore the capability to restore one's continually threatened equilibrium. This could be seen as the pessimistic part of the definition; the optimistic part would be to say that this unstable and dangerous world where we live is also full of all sorts of resources and that health is the capability of a person to enjoy the wealth, the beauty, the information that is permanently all around us. Therefore, as far as the family is concerned,

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our problem is how to strengthen its capability to cope with the negative effects of the permanent and normal instability of the world.

Saying this, we must be very careful. Who can draw the line between the good use and the misuse of concepts such as coping, resilience, or community empowerment. Isn' t it possible that some people or some structures are using these concepts to avoid or to minimize their part of the responsibility, the end of the process, hence putting the blame on the victims themselves for being victims.

A family can have a lot of dysfunction with an acceptable environment. It may cope better than another with the same amount of social stress, and so forth, but very few families would be able to protect the child as well as any other of its members if the basic rights are not enjoyed. Coping beyond certain limits is not possible.

How could the poor families in Africa keep their structure, their cohesion, fulfill their mission, when they face the disastrous management of corrupted dictatorships, the renewal of the nineteenth century social Darwinism for which society must be at the disposal of the economy, the most important thing being to have the best economic indicators regardless of their human price? How far should be their resilience to balance the disastrous effects of the new economic policy imposed world-wide by the international monetary fund commanding weak and dependant states to balance their budget by heavy cuts in allotted resources to health, housing, and education?

No one can doubt that the child's well-being is a community problem related to the economic and cultural available resources which are the promoting factors and that their absence will constitute the major risk factors. No one can doubt that those conditions are related to policy in general, and to specific and sectoral policies in particular.

Unfortunately, the major trend of the negative aspect of the world's instability in the next years and maybe decades is the rapid growth of the social risk factors due to the new world economic disorder. Extreme poverty has been and is still the main disruptive factor for families world wide. Nothing can destroy the social link within the community and within the family like it.

You are never taken seriously when you talk in developing countries about freedom of expression, democracy reform of institutions, and so on. When you talk about child's physical punishment as a problem, people would simply laugh at you. For the majority, the daily concerns are about access to the health system, about food, housing, jobs, and other basic needs. It is up to you to show citizens the relationship between poverty and dictatorship, and to prove to the opinion makers that oriented market economy without democracy leads to the rule of all sorts of Mafia.

When something worsens dangerously, we hurry drafting a declaration of rights or we decide to organize an international year to celebrate what looks like one of our most important failures. Not surprisingly, 1996 has been declared by the UN as the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty.

It is true that we must be very apprehensive about the gravity of the situation. In the last UN report of June, 1996, it is highlighted that the gap between the richest and the poorest either in rich countries or in developing ones has never been so wide, and that 25% of the world population is reported to live in worse situations than they did 15 years ago. Poverty is more than an inadequate income. It is also a lack of access to basic services and amenities, lack of security, lack of self and others' esteem, and exclusion from cultural and political life of the society.

Therefore, we can fear during the decade to come more child abuse and neglect in the new social ghetto in rich countries. In Latin America, Russia, South Asia, and Africa, we can expect more street children, more child labor, more child prostitution, and mostly the massive violation of the first child right: his right to life.

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Ladies and gentlemen, we happen to gather for our XI Congress in Ireland, a country where a century and a half ago, about 1.5 million people starved to death, most of them children and women. As an African, I am struck by the resemblance between the 19th century Irish tragedy and the ongoing African one. It is true that the children's holocaust in Africa is less acute because they are starving more slowly than the Irish children of the nineteenth century, but the outcome is the same. Let me remind you that the infant mortality rate in a growing number of countries in Africa is rocketing up to 250% while it is only 5% in rich countries. The serial killer in both cases is the same: poverty.

Citizens at the time in the richest and the most developed country in the world, hundreds of thousands of Irish children were denied the fight to life just because they were poor and Catholic, which means different. Citizens today of a potentially rich world, millions of children are denied the right to life because they are poor and are also different in one way or another. In both situations, extreme poverty destroys families and children beyond any effective symp- tomatic treatment. In both situations, extreme poverty is not a fate, but mostly the consequence of ideological beliefs where there is no room for humility and humanity.

Let us remember that the laws of the liberal economy being more important than the laws of God, the fanatics of market oriented economy watched Ireland suffering the worst famine in its history, daring to say like Nassau senior, that " the best way to help the poor is not to help them."

The Irish were blamed for their poverty, just as the Africans today, but thinkers like Adam Smith, Jerry Bentham, politicians like Sir Robert Peele, Lord John Russell, the British prime ministers who did nothing to stop the disastrous effects of the famine, were not blamed as much.

The Irish children would have been saved in 1846 like the African children could be saved today only by a culture and a policy of solidarity. Unfortunately, despite all the existing Declarations of Rights, we are very far from them.

Mina Swaminathan, an Indian scholar, correlated the situation of the family in 135 countries with their level of economic development and their political system. Families will enjoy better policies in support of women and children, more generous provisions by the governments in rich countries with socialist philosophy, like the Scandinavian countries, than in countries with strong market economy philosophy like the United States.

In developing countries with socialist philosophy, they may have some help, but the worst of the worst would be to live in a developing country with a market economy philosophy. Families will be merely abandoned to their fate and the output in child work, child prostitution, and children's diseases will be disastrous. Many good professionals dealing with specific child's issues are reluctant to integrate the political dimension in their thought and practice. They have some good reasons to explain their attitude, more often bad ones.

I would like to quote Judith L. Evans: "Many within the early childhood community fear that the energy it would take to get involved in the political process of creating policy would be a drain of already limited resources. Yet for the long term, it is important to focus our attention on policy. If we are not involved in the policy process, others will be. We have a responsibility to bring our knowledge, skills, and experience to the creation and implementation of policies that support young children and their families."

The message is not "give up everything and go on politics, there lays the solution of all our problems." What I want to say is that to assume our part of responsibility in implementing the child's rights, as professionals as well as members of a specific community and citizens of a common world, we cannot avoid work on three complementary levels: restoration, protec- tion, and promotion.

We have to not choose between concentrating on risk factors of the negative effects of the social environment and working on the resilience of families and individuals. The facilitators of risk factors cannot be changed. All we can do is to help the child overcome his or her stress.

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In this field of restoration where we deal with a very specific child in a very specific situation with a very specific need, goodwill is not enough, and there is no room for amateurism. Activating the inner resources of specific families and increasing their capacity to deal with this dangerous and unstable world by specific preventive programs remains our field of protec- tion. But if we want to be really effective, we cannot stop here. The role of child care facilities, social support systems, legislation, and sectional policies in promoting basic families rights are too important to be ignored.

We cannot avoid getting involved in the political battles that are raging around us. Our part of responsibility at this level is to fight against the spreading social Darwinism ideology and to campaign and lobby locally, nationally, and internationally for a culture and policy of solidarity. The practical problem would be how?

After working in the restoration field during many years, one feels that time has come to move up to the field of protection and promotion. I do believe that for our own personal and professional development and satisfaction, we should never stop during all our active life going up and down exploring the three dimensions of our commitment to the child's well being. It is not possible, or even productive, for an individual to work at the same time on restoration, protection, and promotion, but this can be a policy of the great NGOs which can mobilize permanently specialized and interactive teams. Lobbying for a culture and a policy of solidarity is not a problem in a democratic state. Conflicts are accepted as normal and even constructive.

Democracy is, in fact, a peaceful civil war, where violence has been replaced, like in sport or chess, by its symbol. The political parties have replaced the tribes, words the swords, elections the final battle where the loser loses power, but not life.

In this kind of situation, there is enough room to maneuver safely and to use the democratic mechanisms to influence public opinion and policy makers. Families are the first society consumers, and in developing countries, the first producers. Their political weight is very important and lobbying with and for them is always fruitful.

In a dictatorship, the violence needed to maintain social and political injustice is very important. It hasn't yet been replaced by its symbol. Conflicts are deeply hidden by repression. Campaigning for a culture and a policy of solidarity in such regimes would lead you to question the responsibility of the different political and economic actors in the basic rights violations and they may not like it, leading to a dangerous situation. Professionals have then the choice between working endlessly on symptoms like firemen using spoons to stop a woods permanent fire, or to address the roots of the problem, the lack of democracy and social justice. The choice is never easy. Good professionals are not interested in becoming politicians, but avoiding policy would simply mean to avoid an important part of one's responsibility.

Ladies and gentlemen, the results of a whole life of hard work may seem suddenly so miserable, so unstable, so far from what we expected compared to the always and ever increasing problems. We all experience, at one time or another, doubts, frustration, and discour- agement. It is so common to begin one's professional or political commitment with enthusiasm and to end one's life bitter and even cynical. It is not easy to keep one's high spirits with such a burden. But we have to. We have to be strong to fulfill our part of responsibility. We have to be strong because our children build their own strength with ours.

I think that the best way to keep discouragement, bitterness, and cynicism away is to adopt what the Palestinian writer, Emile Habibi, called the pessioptimistic attitude. "No one is allowed to be optimistic in this wor ld - - so many ugly people, such cruelty, stupidity, avidity all around us, so many horrors, so many children without childhood! No one is allowed to be pessimistic in this world: So many wonderful people working so hard to alleviate the suffering of children, such devotion to the noblest ideas, such greatness, creativ- ity, beauty all around us."

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The pessioptimistic attitude is the only realistic one because it takes into account the different aspects of reality. It allows neither naivete nor despair. It will be our best protection against naivete, because it will impose us to be patient and rigorous, aware of the complexity and armed to face it. It will be our best protection against bitterness because we do know that our efforts can be more or less fruitful and that we are not expecting any final and permanent solution. Haven ' t we been warned by Lao Tzu in the "Tao Teh Ching" that we must never expect a world without pain, because this would mean a world without pleasure, that light cannot exist if there is not darkness.

There is no way to escape this fundamental and eternal characteristic of the universe: Ambivalence. The hope of a world without evil and its most unacceptable part, the suffering of children, is not permitted. But as good pessioptimistic professionals, we do know that we are going to win a lot of battles, that all we have to do is to keep trying and that the process, because it is life itself, will never end.

When our part of responsibility in implementing the children's rights has been correctly identified, when we feel that it has been correctly assumed, no success can lower our alertness, no failure can hurt or disappoint us, the award of our struggle being the struggle itself.

Ladies and gentlemen, I deeply regret not being with you today because I am not going to share your knowledge, to break my professional and political isolation, and to be comforted by your high spirits. I must confess that there is another reason some of my best friends in this Congress know very well, because we often talked about it. I was told that Ireland is the most green country in the world, and I rejoiced at the idea of fastening my starved eyes on all that green. Only people living in dry countries like mine where the predominant colors are the yellow of the sand, the brownish red of the bald mountains, the cruel blue of a next to permanent empty sky know the value of the green; not surprising that it has turned for centuries to be our symbol of abundance, fertility, wealth, beauty, and peace, the symbol of hope, the holy color for Islam. The paradise of Allah might look very much like Ireland, probably with more palm trees.

In Tunisia for the first day of the new Moslem year, the richest as well as the poorest families would gather for lunch around a plate called "Mouloukhia." This is a thick powder of a local plant boiled in a horrible amount of olive oil, cooked for hours. It is a heavy, rich, and not so tasty plate, but it is the only green meal in the Tunisian cuisine.

For the majority of the Tunisian families, it would be hazardous, and not convenient to have another meal for that day. How could we have a good year, that is to say a green year, if we don' t start it with a plate of mouloukhia?

Around my own family table, I used to see summarized the human condi t ion-- the magic background of all culture, the naive symbolism of a peasant nation, the moving human weak- ness, the modest hopes of modest families, their silent prayers to an unpredictable God for the rain to come, the earth to be fertile, the children to have plenty to eat.

Such are the hopes we are sharing here, modest, but obstinate as life itself. What I hope when I am at last a free man in a democratic country is to come to Ireland and enjoy all the green I missed this time. What I hope for you is to keep trying and trying, regardless of failures or success, to remain always strong, backed by faith and pessioptimistic attitude, because your children as well as the world's need you badly.

May I, to end, even if it doesn' t sound English, wish you a good day and a . . . green Congress in the green Ireland.

This article is being published without benefit of author's review of the corrected proof as this was not available at press time.