Treating child abuse as taboo painful: Mazari

Islamabad: Ministry of Human Rights has launched an awareness campaign to prevent child abuse on Tuesday.

Federal Minister for human rights Dr. Shireen Mazari initiated the campaign by visiting Islamabad College of Arts and Sciences in Islamabad and addressed the students regarding child abuse and shared suggestions to eradicate it.

On this occasion, some short documentaries were also shown to the student to give them awareness and to take different preventive measures.

Addressing the students, Federal Minister Dr Mazari said that child abuse has rampaged the society and on daily basis, we hear stories of heart wrenching child abuse incidents. “It is a painful fact that we treat this issue as social taboo and we are reluctant to speak about it instead of educating our children. As a result they are not able to understand the sensitivity of this issue,” said the minister.

She stressed the need to make it a shameful act for the culprits which requires exposing them. She said that child abuse could happen anywhere and in majority of cases, close relations are involved. “We need to take this issue seriously which requires us to recognize this issue and the parents should be open with their children while informing them about child abuse and preventive measures.

Federal minister said that Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) Child Protection Act already exits to ensure the protection of children. “We are going to establish Child Protection Commission under the umbrella of ICT Act,” she said adding that that besides, legislation and its implementation, awareness is an important element which could be helpful in fighting the child abuse.

Federal minister said that education institutions can play an important role to prevent child abuse and to educate students which would help them to identify the issue and to save themselves at first stage. She stressed that we can use the platform of the schools to give the counselling to our students.

Dr. Shireen Mazari also talked about teachers’ role. She suggested teachers to aware children about child abuse so that they could be able to identify if someone attempts to abuse them.

She shared that Ministry of Human Rights is running its Child Protection centre which provides the facilities of free education, counselling and free medical treatment to the children. In addition, Ministry of human rights has established helpline 1099 to report issues related to human rights abuses including the child abuse.

In the end, an interactive question answer session was also conducted in which students asked different relevant questions which were responded by Federal Minister. Principal of ICT, large number of faculty members and students attended the session.