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This and Every Day: June 1 raises awareness as Child Protection Day“Parents are those who should protect children. But I have escaped my father. My father beats me severely, when he is drunk. He once threw me out of the window on the second floor. So, I had my head stitched. He throws me outside at night and beats me until I lose consciousness,” tells Yeranuhi with tears in her eyes. She is a pupil at Yerevan special school No.3 for orphans and children deprived of parents’ care. And though she has painful memories, she recalls also a June 1 once when the school took her and her classmates to Victory Park – the first time she ever took a merry-go-round. No matter if children are really protected or not, the law in Armenia does provide their protection. Armenia has joined almost all international conventions and treaties on child protection, but some say protection is not a matter for documents. “That children in Armenia are an absolute value is just a myth. Children are too frequently exposed to violence. The state has to undertake definite steps in that direction, because many families perceive the cruel beatings as a kind of educational method,” says the head of the Children’s Association of Armenia, Varuzhan Sedrakyan. Yeranuhi’s case is not unique. Many of about 1,000 pupils in the 12 special schools in Yerevan for children deprived of parents’ care have appeared in the institutions also because of having escaped from their families. “It’s a violation of children’s rights to force them to live in places other than their families, especially as 80 percent of more that the 800 children in Armenian asylums have parents,” says the UNICEF representative in Armenia Sheldon Yett. He says one of the basic rights of a child is secondary education. Official data says 90 percent of children are attending schools, but in fact the number is lower. “Our surveys show children are simply registered at schools, as 10 percent of those who are obliged to go to school (the 90 percent who are registered) do not attend mainly because of social problems and because they work,” says Yett. According to Sedrakyan’s data, the number of children not attending schools has nearly doubled in the last five years and the problem is sharper in the rural communities. “Children’s inclusion in the schools in Armenia is quite good compared to some other countries. But the lack of serious attention to the problem is concerning. Figures are concealed as was the case with child mortality rate in the soviet times. The tendency of being left out of school grows and the index will decrease in several years, if the tendency remains,” Sedrakyan says. The number of working juveniles and the conditions of their work remain unstudied in Armenia. However, Yett says UNICEF is planning a large-scale survey to outline the extent of children’s rights violations in Armenia. He believes the reduced number of kindergartens and children’s lesser inclusion in pre-school institutions are also samples of violation of their rights for education. “The number of kindergartens decreased about 50 percent after independence. The premises were sold and now only 20 percent of children go to kindergartens. This means psychologically and mentally children are mainly unprepared when they go to school,” Yett says. Sedrakyan is confident juvenile delinquency is a result of regular violations of children rights and neglect to children. “Armenia needs a separate ombudsman for children and special judges for children. When a child gets ill, we take him to a pediatrician not a general doctor. The same should be with the judicial system, because children need special attention,” says Sedrakyan. Nutrition, an important part of healthcare, is another basic right of a child. Despite the double-digit economic growth of the country, Armenia is still in the list of those countries of Eastern Europe and the CIS, where a significant part of the population gets poor nutrition. The report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization World Food Survey Program says 13 percent of young children in Armenia suffer from chronic malnutrition. 33 percent of rural children suffer from anemia as a result of malnutrition.
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