CHRAJ bemoans settling child rights cases at home

The Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) in the Savelugu/Nanton Municipality has bemoaned the increasing rate at which most families in the municipality opt to settle cases involving violations and abuses of rights of children at home.

Mr Ahmed Tijani Mahamud, the Savelugu/Nanton Municipal Director of CHRAJ, who bemoaned the situation, said the municipality had been recording cases of teenage pregnancy, some of which involved minors, but most of such cases were never reported to the appropriate state institutions.

He was speaking at a district level participatory workshop on child rights and protection at Savelugu on Wednesday, organized by the Regional Advisory Information and Network Systems (RAINS), a non-governmental organization, as part of its Childhood Regained project.

The workshop, attended by representatives drawn from state institutions in the municipality, including the Department of Social Welfare, was to develop a common understanding among stakeholders on issues of child rights and protection in the municipality whiles proposing concrete actions to address them.

The three-year (2014-2017) project, which is being implemented at Nanton-Kurugu and Zokuga in the Savelugu/Nanton Municipality, seeks to empower communities to protect their children against exploitative labour.

Mr Mahamud also mentioned other forms of violations of the rights of children in the municipality, which included parental neglect, not sending children to school and not providing educational materials to those in school and improper feeding, which sometimes resulted in teenage pregnancy.

He advised parents to report cases of violations and abuses of the rights of children, in terms of teenage pregnancies involving minors, to appropriate state institutions rather than opting to settle them at home.

He said settling such cases in the home sometimes led to inappropriate justice, which emboldened the perpetrators of such acts to further engage in such acts.

Mr Iddrisu Sanday, the Northern Regional Director of the Department of Children emphasized the need for parents to provide the needs of their children as well as respect their rights.

Mr Hardi Tijani, the Executive Director of RAINS, said by the end of the project, 2,500 children at risk of dropping out of school would continue formal education, 1,200 children would stop being engaged in exploitative labour and enter formal education or training and 1,500 women and families would sustainably fund their children’s access to quality education or training.