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June 2001

 28 June 2001 

Botswana Is a Model of AIDS Action
A decade ago, if a person in diamond-rich Botswana were to die early, it would most likely be from a road accident or malaria. Today, more than half of the women in their 20s are expected to die of AIDS.
"We are threatened with extinction," Botswanan President Festus Mogae, in New York for a three-day United Nations conference on HIV and AIDS, said Tuesday. "People are dying in chillingly high numbers. It is a crisis of the first magnitude."  An estimated 38.8% of Botswana's 1.5 million people are HIV-positive, according to a U.N. report, making the country the epicenter of the pandemic in Africa.
But it also may be a model for the international response, as Mogae's government prepares to launch the most ambitious combination of prevention and treatment programs on the continent. By the end of the year, the government hopes to begin treating with antiretroviral drugs as many as one-third of those with AIDS.
"We see before us the most dramatic experiment on the continent," said Stephen Lewis, a Canadian and the U.N. envoy to Africa. "If it succeeds, it will give heart to absolutely every country worldwide."
 

Helping Girls Go Straight
Tailoring rehab efforts to serve growing ranks of female offenders takes more than painting walls pink. Early motherhood, past abuse and self-esteem are among key issues.
Growing up in her Compton neighborhood, Dominique became a gangbanger almost by default. The rough crew she ran with were the only people she thought she could trust; they could relate to being 14 years old and on your own because your mother is in jail on a drug charge.
Girls like Dominique are filling up probation camps and juvenile halls at an alarming pace, so much so that Los Angeles officials have turned a formerly all-boys camp in Lancaster into a coed one to absorb the overflow.
 

ILO Tries to Eliminate Child Labor
The International Labor Organization has launched a program it hopes will remove millions of children from what it calls the most abusive forms of child labor in the next 10 years. The first projects are underway in Tanzania, Nepal, and El Salvador.
The International Labor Organization estimates 250 million children around the world are working. It says at least 60 million of them are working in the worst forms of child labor. They work as scavengers in garbage dumps, porters, miners, domestic workers, or prostitutes. It says they are used in pornography and slave-like conditions such as bonded labor.
 

Australia: Exercising restraint on children in care
Children who have been removed from their homes are being physically restrained by staff while in care, a report by the Community Services Commission has found.  More than half of all small residential homes for children in care allowed staff to use restraints. This included holding down and immobilising, a survey of community organisations showed.
Some also allowed using medication, restrictive clothing or equipment and isolation to control behaviour problems. One third of services which allowed the use of restraint did not train staff how to do so safely. While most services surveyed recommended restraint only as "a last resort", some said they used restraint in response to property damage.
 

 27 June 2001 

British Law Not Stopping Children from Carrying Guns

A June 21 UPI commentary says that the strict gun-control laws implemented in Britain to prevent children from accessing firearms are not working.  The article was written by Iain Murray, a British citizen who specializes in criminal-justice issues at STATS B, the Statistical Assessment Service, a Washington, D.C.-based public-policy organization.
Murray noted that despite the country's five-year-old law, a report by the British government's Youth Justice Board found that 26 percent of high-school students carried a weapon for aggressive or defensive purposes in the last year.  Furthermore, 23 percent of British students suspended or expelled from school said they had access to a gun in the last year.
Another study by the International Crime Victimization Survey showed that Britain's strict gun-control laws also are not helping to reduce gun crimes. While other parts of the world saw an overall decline in crime, it has remained steady in Britain and Australia, which also has a gun ban.
 

The Fetal Rights Debate
Even during her pregnancy, Brenda Peppers, an addict, smoked crack. Her daughter was eventually stillborn, and Peppers — who also suffered from a condition characterized by a breakdown of red blood cells — spent weeks in a coma.
After that trauma in 1996, Peppers never went back to drugs, but two years later, prosecutors in her home state of South Carolina slapped her with charges of abusing her unborn child by taking the cocaine. Now, after a guilty plea and two years' probation, the 35-year-old is challenging the 1997 state Supreme Court ruling that allowed prosecutors to press charges against her.
Peppers became one of about 200 women in 30 states who have been prosecuted in recent years for "fetal abuse."
In most fetal abuse cases, women have been arrested and charged with various crimes including possession of a controlled substance, delivering drugs to a minor, corruption of a minor, and child abuse and neglect. Others have been charged with assault with a deadly weapon and manslaughter.
 

Center faulted for abuse
A state investigative report released this week supports a 15-year-old boy's allegations that a therapist at Sunshine Youth Services abused him.
In the past year, the state Department of Juvenile Justice has investigated the facility for juvenile offenders three times. In each case, its Inspector General's Office has found the year-old center, 21808 State Road 54, or its employees to be at fault.
The most recent report stems from a March 8 incident at the state-contracted facility for offenders with mental disabilities. The teen, a detainee, said recreational therapist Bryan Landers, then 39, shoved him and threw him against a wall.
The report concludes that Landers used excessive force and an unauthorized technique -- grabbing the boy by the shirt and ripping it. The boy had welts on his neck, a bump on his head and a swollen lip. Landers also violated policy by going into a room alone with the boy, the report says.
 

Ireland: Special care unit tackles staff crisis
A successful recruitment campaign for staff for the special-care unit for disturbed children at Ballydowd, Dublin, has been conducted in Finland and Canada, the High Court heard yesterday. As a result, up to half of the staff at Ballydowd will be non-Irish.
Because of difficulties in recruiting staff, only one of Ballydowd's three eight-bed units is operational. However, with the recruitment of 14 more staff from Ireland, Canada and Finland, it is hoped a second unit will be open, at least on a partial basis, in July. There is a queue of children for places at Ballydowd, which is run by the South-Western Area Health Board. There are at present eight children in the unit which, when fully open, will cater for 24.
 

Australia: Claims drug program allows criminal loophole
An anti-drug lobby group believes Queensland's drug diversion program provides a loophole for repeat drug offenders to escape criminal convictions.  The program came into effect at the weekend and gives offenders caught with up to 50 grams of cannabis the option of undertaking education and rehabilitation programs to kick the habit.
Herschel Baker from Australian Parents for Drug Free Youth says while he supports early intervention, carrying 50 grams of cannabis should not be considered a minor offence.
"When you look at Victoria, their diversion program excludes anybody with a previous drug conviction," he said. "Why Queensland, who had the chance of getting the best of drug diversion programs in Australia because we're basically the last ones to get the legislation through...[has allowed] a loophole this big is hard to understand.

 26 June 2001 

Canada: Police Association of Ontario Calls for Changes re Youth Violence
"The rate of serious crimes committed by young  offenders continues to increase at an alarming rate. We need to break this  cycle. We support the need to reform the offender but at some point this must  be balanced with the need to protect society", stated Bob Baltin, President of  the Police Association of Ontario.
The Police Association of Ontario, representing 13,000 municipal police personnel will be appearing to make submissions on the Youth Justice Act before the Ontario Crime Control Commission last night June 25.
PAO Administrator Bruce Miller pointed out that, "Lax federal laws and sentences continue to promote an environment which does not discourage unlawful behavior. We need a national strategy to combat crime that must include truth in sentencing, well-funded rehabilitative programs, minimum sentences and an end to "Club Feds". We continue to give out too many "Get out of Jail Free Cards" and the consequences lead far too often to tragic results".
 

Gambia: Children Take Up 'Arms' Against HIV/AIDS
The fight against HIV/AIDS in The Gambia has taken a new twist with the establishment and launching of 'Children Against AIDS' a coalition of school children who have decided to "mobilise adequate response to the AIDS pandemic" and show that age has nothing to do with the fight against the dreaded disease.
'Children Against AIDS' was established by a group of St. Therese's Upper Basic school students as more and more students became attracted by the noble ideals of the society. The society was launched on Saturday June 16 to coincide with the celebration of the Day of the African Child. In observance of the day, a procession was made in the morning from Sabena Airlines junction to St. Therese's Upper Basic school grounds.
 

Kenya: Government Neglects AIDS Orphans, Millions Lack State Protection
The government of Kenya is failing to care for millions of children who have been orphaned by AIDS or whose family members suffer from the disease, Human Rights Watch charged in a report released today.
HIV/AIDS has orphaned about a million children in Kenya and at least 13 million in Africa, and left millions more impoverished and marginalized in many African countries. The disease has also weakened the extended family and other communities to which orphans have traditionally turned.
The report, "In the Shadow of Death: HIV/AIDS and Children's Rights in Kenya," charges that the Kenyan government has failed to take responsibility for children who are at higher risk of human rights abuse when the disease ravages their families. As children are forced to become breadwinners, they are pulled out of school and often forced to take on potentially dangerous labor that is inappropriate for children.
 

Colorado: Teens' pick: Shape Up or prison
It's a field trip they'll never forget. And hopefully, one they'll never repeat.
Teens with a history of trouble are chaperoned by killers and thieves through "Old Max." There, more murderers and rapists taunt them and tell about the horrors of living in the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility.
"Shape Up," run by the Department of Corrections and the Colorado District Attorneys Council, gives delinquent teen boys and girls in criminal diversion programs a dose of prison reality. But unlike a similar controversial program called Scared Straight, the state is not trying to frighten them into conformity.
That could be the difference between success and failure of the troubled teens, state Shape Up coordinator Mary West-Smith says.
"Children can't be frightened into changing their lives."  But they may change if given the same information in a nonconfrontational manner, West-Smith says.
 

 25 June 2001 

UK Primary Schools Urged to Focus on Mental Health
As many as one in five primary school children experience psychological problems at any given time, a British charity said Wednesday. The group urged schools to do more to recognise and support mental health problems in young children.
Such problems can have serious implications if early signs are not recognized and interventions adopted, according to a report from The Mental Health Foundation called "I Want to be Your Friend But Don't Know How."
"Numeracy and literacy are important but children also need emotional and social skills," Ruth Lesirge, chief executive of the charity, told Reuters Health.  "It should be possible to identify children at risk of developing mental health problems and intervene early in the school setting," Lesirge said.. "Intervention in a mainstream setting helps us minimise the risk of stigmatization. In addition, working in a school setting enables us to find ways of offering early support and allows discussion with all children about their mental health and well-being."

The report also recommends that:

• there should be a mental health coordinator in every school who can develop good practice in promoting mental health problems and provide a link to specialist services
• the Office for Standards in Education assesses schools on their ability to work effectively with children suffering from emotional and behavioural problems
• all teachers should have continuing training in child development issues

AMA Passes on Supporting Medical Marijuana
Citing a lack of scientific evidence, the American Medical Association (AMA) declined to endorse the medical use of marijuana, Reuters reported June 19. Yet the organization said it was opposed to criminal sanctions on doctors who prescribe marijuana or patients who use it to relieve symptoms associated with cancer, multiple sclerosis, or other diseases.
"Our plea again is that no criminal sanctions be applied to marijuana use, and to encourage our patients to discuss this freely with their doctors," said Dr. Herman Abromowitz, an AMA trustee, during the group's annual House of Delegates meeting in Chicago, Ill.  He added that the AMA would not support compassionate use of marijuana until there was scientific data to support it. "To endorse something on the basis of anecdotal comments is not our policy," Abromowitz said.
 

Teenage belief in spiritualism as popular as faith in God
ALMOST as many teenagers believe in ghosts and horoscopes as believe in God, according to an extensive new survey.  While 41 per cent said that they believed in God, 40 per cent said that they were convinced that ghosts existed and over a third - 35 per cent - put their faith in the veracity of horoscopes, the survey of 34,000 13 to 15-year-olds found.
Nearly a third of those questioned thought it possible to contact the spirits of the dead, two out of every 10 believe that fortune tellers can see into the future and 22 per cent believe in black magic.
 

70 young killers will be freed early
SEVENTY child killers, including many of the most brutal young criminals in Britain, are expected to be freed early from prison following the release of the killers of James Bulger.
Lawyers acting for the murderers - who killed while they were under 18 - are taking advantage of the decision by the European Court of Human Rights that helped ensure the freedom of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson.
The 70 child killers were originally jailed indefinitely "at Her Majesty's pleasure" - in effect, life. But the European court ruled in December 1999 that tariffs for juvenile killers could not be set by the home secretary but only by their trial judges or the lord chief justice. This means their jail terms must now be reviewed by Lord Woolf.
 

Play areas to teach lost art of risk-taking
DESIGNERS of children's equipment are developing new "extreme" playgrounds amid fears that youngsters have lost their sense of danger.
Political correctness over safety and the fear of legal claims if a child as much as traps a finger have been blamed for neutering adventure in Britain's playgrounds.  Now, psychologists are warning that the trend is creating a new generation of timid youngsters. They say that "mollycoddling" children may prevent them from fully developing their sense of balance or the ability to weigh risks.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents admitted last week that British Standards may have gone too far towards ruining children's fun and that some local authorities were "ultra-conservative".
 

600 free child soldiers return home to Rwanda
Hundreds of Rwandan child soldiers were reunited with overjoyed parents this week just days after the army captured them in fierce fighting with their rebel masters.
Barefoot, rake-thin and traumatised, about 600 teenagers were paraded at a stadium in the north-western town of Gisenyi where weeping mothers embraced children long given up for dead.
"This is my child!," shrieked one mother, Nyiramarimo Di Mukasoni, as she spotted her teenage son on the platform.
But before hugging her son she demanded he tell her the fate of his brothers. "Where is Buhinja? where is Kigingi? where is your other brother?," she asked the bewildered boy.
 

 22 June 2001 

Demand for better child shelters
Fulton County commissioners want a proposal for new management of the county's troubled youth shelters within a month.
Oversight of the Dulaney House and Oak Hill Homes has been unclear because they are owned by the county government but operated by the Fulton County Department of Family and Children Services, an arm of the state. Together, the homes are the state's largest shelter for abused and neglected children.
"We need some leadership, and we need to recapture the purpose for which the shelters were established, especially Dulaney," said Keith Chadwell, deputy county manager for community services. "We've had problems because it has been allowed to deviate from its initial purpose as an emergency shelter."

Thailand: Disciplinary drug course holds out hope of a new future
Tears of love and understanding filled the air at Baan Fasai drug rehabilitation centre in Nakhon Pathom's Klong Yong district as young drug addicts were reunited with parents after a tough disciplinary training programme.
Eighty three boys on drug charges took part in the 15-day course. Most boys, from central juvenile observation centres, had three to four months left to serve.
The course was run by the National Youth Bureau, the Army's Territorial Defence Department, the Central Juvenile Protection and Observation Centre, and the Central Juvenile and Family Court.
The boys were allowed to return home on Tuesday after four of the court's judges gave them their freedom. The boys are on probation for 12 months and have to report to the court every three months.
 

1 in 5 kids receive online sex requests
Nearly one in five youths who use the Internet regularly have been targets of unwanted sexual solicitations, according to a study being published today. And 3 percent of them say someone they've come in contact with online has tried to reach them off-line by telephone, mail or in person.
"Internet victimization needs to be added to the list of childhood perils," said the study's lead author, Kimberly Mitchell of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center.
The survey of 1,501 10- to 17-year-olds who use the Internet at least once a month appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Eating Disorders Plague Young Japanese
Japan is one of the world's most style-conscious countries, but a growing number of young Japanese women shun fashion magazines and even avoid looking at themselves in the mirror.
Far from being uninterested in their appearance, these girls are recovering from a life-threatening obsession with being fashionably slim. The incidence of eating disorders in Japan ballooned roughly 10-fold between 1980 and 1998, with a particularly dramatic increase over the last five years, according to a government-sponsored survey.
One of the researchers involved, Doctor Gen Komaki of Japan's National Institute of Mental Health, has been treating such conditions for more than 20 years. Komaki predicts that eating disorders could become as big a problem in Japan as they are in the United States, where they affect an estimated one to 3.5 percent of the population.

Ireland: Calls for the conversion of orphanage to museum
A children's museum is one of the ideas suggested by local people for the renovation of the Belvedere Orphanage in Tyrrellspass, Co Westmeath. However, Westmeath County Council has signalled the possibility of social housing on the site.
The 1840s development was the brainchild of Jane, Countess Belvedere, who bequeathed £6,000 to build a girls' orphanage. It is a crescent-shaped development of 11 semi-detached houses. The orphanage closed in 1943 and Westmeath County Council bought the property in 1986. It eventually fell into decay, apart from one house, which is still occupied.
In a thesis on the history of the orphanage, Mr Danny Dunne suggested that it be used as a centre for the history of childhood. "There is no such thing in Ireland or in England as far we know," he said.
 

California: A sound plan to end foster-care nightmare
IN A SHOW of compassion, the state Assembly has voted to spend $300 million during the next five years to shore up the state's troubled foster-care system, even while bracing for a financial shortfall and energy shortages.
Spurred by grim reports documenting the inadequacies of foster care, the Assembly has approved a series of costly reforms to help foster children prepare for college and otherwise adapt to life beyond the system.
The 11-bill bundle also addresses other systemic weaknesses by funding more training and resources for foster parents, reducing largely unmanageable case loads that are twice the recommended levels and holding foster-care agencies responsible for better delivery of their services and improving the plight of their clients.
 

Faith-Based Youth Homes' 'Lesson' 
In what may serve as a cautionary tale for President Bush's "faith-based initiative," the Texas Legislature has backed away from a plan that exempted church-run youth homes from state inspections.
In almost four years, only eight juvenile homes signed up for the Texas program, which was the creation of then-Gov. George W. Bush. At two of the homes, the state was called in to investigate charges of abuse by caretakers. On June 6, one of those caretakers was convicted by a Corpus Christi jury of unlawful restraint against a teenager in the home.
"I think there's a lesson here for the nation," said Darla Morgan, spokeswoman for state Sen. Carlos Truan, a Democrat who opposed the law. "As soon as the regulation stopped, people were hurt."
 

Boy Scouts Embroiled in Culture War
When the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Boy Scouts of America to continue its exclusion of gays a year ago this month, the landmark ruling might have been a hands-down victory for the venerable youth organization.
The past year has been anything but a time for unity among the troops, however. Instead, the Scouts have found themselves squarely at the center of an American culture war over gay rights — and in some cases, the battle cry against excluding gays is being heard from within. 
Opposition is coming from outside the Scouts' ranks as well. On Tuesday, the American Medical Association voted to urge the Boy Scouts to reconsider the policy because it could cause psychological trauma in young people.

Australia: Mixed reaction to NT's youth sentencing changes
For Mrs Danna Vale, the Northern Territory Government has come a long way since she pleaded with the Prime Minister a year ago to fix the Territory's compulsory jailing of young offenders.
While Territory legal workers disagreed, the Sydney Federal MP yesterday said she was impressed with the introduction of diversion schemes by the Territory police to avoid jailing juveniles under 18.
The measures were introduced after a national outcry over the Territory's mandatory sentencing spurred by the suicide of a 15-year-old youth in a Darwin cell last year.
According to Territory figures released by the Federal Attorney-General, Mr Williams, yesterday, 83 per cent of juvenile cases involving 855 individuals aged under 18 have been diverted since the new policy was implemented seven months ago.
 

 21 June 2001 

Project's goal: to defeat kids' drug use, crime
In hopes of steering children away from drugs and crime, city officials are starting an athletic program that combines the fun of sports with a focus on education.
About 100 at-risk kids will be eligible for the free program, Athletes Against Crime and Drugs, which is slated to begin in July at the Jerome Brown Community Center.
Emilia Raia, program activities director for the city, said children ages 8 to 17 will be taught the fundamentals of several sports while being mentored on issues such as drug and alcohol abuse, crime, anger management and problem solving.
"These types of programs are very successful," Raia said. "They take kids that are having problems and steer them toward something positive. They are doing something they love. And they are learning."
 

Report condemns S.F. juvenile justice system 
San Francisco's juvenile justice system has gone from bad to worse, with youths detained at a higher rate -- and for less-serious infractions -- than in the 1980s, according to a study commissioned by city Supervisor Matt Gonzalez and released Monday.
The report's authors, who work for a non-profit organization that advocates for alternatives to juvenile incarceration, faulted the failure of reforms promised by Mayor Willie Brown when he took office in 1996.
But the study was summarily dismissed by both the mayor's own criminal justice council and the head of the city's juvenile probation department, which provided much of the statistical data used in the report.
 

Ireland: Juvenile criminal justice system a shambles - judge
The "shambles" which was the juvenile criminal justice system meant that the High Court would have to order the detention of a 14-year-old boy in St Patrick's Institution, Mr Justice Kelly said yesterday.
He pointed out that the District Court had sentenced the boy to two years' detention in Oberstown Boys' Centre, but there was no place there for the boy and no indication of when a place might be available. In those circumstances, he had to continue the boy's detention in St Patrick's.
The boy had been detained at the National Assessment and Remand Centre (NARC) in Dublin, but had escaped from there a number of times. After he again escaped on Wednesday night, he was detained in St Patrick's. 
 

Sex Scandal at State Girls Prison Results in Firings, Lawsuit
Sixteen-year-old Alana Williams has been in trouble with the law for years, but nothing, she said, prepared her for life at Alabama's only juvenile lockup for girls.
Within moments of arriving, a guard cursed her and called her a ``cocky little heifer,'' Williams said. Later, she began hearing girls talk about performing oral sex on male workers.
Eventually, the teen-ager said she was physically intimate with a guard. Having sexual relations with staff members was an easy way for girls to get preferential treatment and goodies like Cokes _ plus it broke the monotony, Williams said.
``It's something besides sitting in your room,'' she said.
 

London Police to Take Softer Approach to Marijuana Possession
As part of a pilot program, police in London, England are being told to take a more relaxed approach with marijuana offenders, Reuters reported June 15. The program, which will be implemented in Lambeth, located south of the London area, directs police to give those caught with cannabis possession a verbal warning rather than an official caution or arrest.
"The officer will seize the cannabis, and it will be signed for by the suspect. It will be sealed and disposed of," said Commander Brian Paddick, who created the program. "The person in possession has to accept the warning; otherwise, they will be arrested."
The intent of the initiative, said Paddick, is to enable police officers to focus on more serious drug-related crimes.
"I've never met anyone who had to commit crime to fund a cannabis habit, but crack-cocaine users commit robbery, burglary, and car crime," Paddick said.

'Safe Night' Program Addresses Youth Violence 
A program created in Milwaukee, Wisc., in 1994 is spreading throughout the country as a focused way to address youth violence, Youth Crime Alert reported in its May 2001 issue. The Milwaukee Health Department, along with the Milwaukee Violence Prevention Coalition, developed Safe Night as a drug and violence prevention program. The small, community organized and funded effort was designed to provide a safe place for at-risk youth to take part in a fun, organized activity and participate in a brief violence-prevention program.
The key to the program is community collaboration between youth, parents, neighborhood and service groups, law enforcement, local business, educators, and faith-based groups. Geared towards middle school-aged youth, Safe Night requires participants to sign a social contract agreeing to abide by three rules: no weapons, no drugs or alcohol and no arguments.
 

State agrees to mainstream more disabled kids 
To settle a 10-year-old federal lawsuit, Connecticut has agreed to place more of its 4,000 mentally retarded public school students in mainstream education classes. The settlement also requires that more students with mental retardation be sent to neighborhood schools and be allowed to participate in extracurricular activities with nondisabled students.
Under a strict timeline, the state will offer support to schools and provide more-aggressive monitoring of districts' compliance with the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Although it applies only to Connecticut, experts say the case is likely to affect the way other states treat children with mental retardation, a label under federal special-education laws now known as an "intellectual disability." 
 

 20 June 2001 

Nigerian Child Bill Ready for National Assembly
A bill that will harmonise all existing laws relating to children and provisions of the United Nation's Convention on the Rights of the Child has been prepared by the Federal Government and ready for submission to the National Assembly.
Speaking at the weekend in Abuja at the commemoration of Year 2001 Day of the African Child, the Minister of Women Affairs and Youth Development, Hajia Aisha Ismail, said the bill had been reviewed to ensure that it adequately addressed all the needs of the Nigerian child.
 

Denver Council approves test run of under-21 areas in nightclubs
A divided Denver City Council approved a plan Monday night to allow people between 16 and 21 to attend clubs that serve alcohol, but in separate facilities. The plan, approved 8-5, will be in effect for a six-month trial period while the city evaluates current cabaret licensing ordinances that ban people under 21 entirely from the clubs. 
 

Helsinki: Welfare, health care, needs 70,000 new workers
A committee set up to examine labour requirements in social welfare and health care presented Osmo Soininvaara, the Minister of Health and Social Services, with a report of their findings on Monday. They predict that the field of social welfare and health care will need at least 61,000 - 67,000 new employees by the year 2010. Around 50,000 people will be needed to replace the retiring personnel, and at least 12,000 new workers will be needed, half of them to make up for the shortages in care personnel for the elderly.
The committee feels that education should be increased and that more people should apply for training in that field. This could be done by decreasing training in other areas and by increasing adult education.
 

Rebirthing' Therapists Get 16 Years
Two therapists received the minimum prison term for their roles in the suffocation of a 10-year-old girl who died while wrapped in blankets during a ``rebirthing'' session.
Connell Watkins, 54, and Julie Ponder, 40, were sentenced to 16 years Monday in the death of Candace Newmaker. They could have faced the maximum of 48 years behind bars.
The girl was covered in blankets and pillows meant to simulate the womb and was encouraged to push her way out during the April 2000 session. Therapists hoped she would emerge ``reborn'' to bond with her adoptive mother.
 

AMA appeal on excluding gay youth
With their sights trained on the Boy Scouts, members of the American Medical Association have proposed a resolution that would ask national youth groups not to ban gays because such policies could drive young people to suicide.
AMA members proposing the resolution, discussed Monday at the association's annual meeting, said reversing policies that exclude gays could help ``lower the increased risk of suicide in the adolescent homosexual population.''
Patricia Dunn, public policy director at the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, said several studies have shown that gay, lesbian and bisexual youths face an increased suicide risk. A Massachusetts survey published this month in the American Journal of Public Health found that gay high school students were about four times more likely to have attempted suicide as heterosexual students. The AMA proposal also says that teen suicide rates are lower in states that have anti-discrimination laws.
 

Child Soldier Recruitment Rises in Congo
Rising numbers of child soldiers are being thrust into front-line combat by groups of fighters wrestling for control of the Democratic Republic of Congo, an Amnesty International report said Tuesday. 
he report blamed Rwanda, its rebel allies and Congolese militias for press-ganging minors during almost three years of war in the vast mineral-rich country, leaving thousands of children damaged for life. "The psychological impact is devastating," Amnesty International Researcher Veronique Aubert told Reuters. "These children have witnessed things or been responsible for things that traumatize them for the rest of their lives." 
 

Briton gets eight years jail for underage sex in Cambodia
A Briton who sexually abused girls as young as seven while on a "business trip" to Cambodia, has been sentenced to eight years jail by a British court.
The conviction was made under new legislation, which allows people to be prosecuted in Britain for offences committed overseas.
Mark Towner travelled to Cambodia last May and hired two seven-year-old girls for sex. The judge said Mark Towner was guilty of "grave, horrendous offences" and was a danger to young children.
 

 19 June 2001 

UK: Ban all children from working on farms, says union 
THE tradition of allowing children of farmers and their workers to lend a hand on farms in the hope that they will follow in their parents' footsteps should be banned, trade unionists said yesterday. Instead, farm children under school leaving age should be provided with "child care facilities" and should be kept away from "working areas" of farms for their own safety, the Transport and General Workers' Union said.
In a move which could threaten personal freedom in the countryside, one of Britain's largest unions, which has a division representing agricultural workers, demanded an end yesterday to what they described as "child labour" on farms. It also called for the age at which children are allowed to drive agricultural tractors to be raised from its current level of 13.
 

Killers of UK Toddler Get Hearings
Two teen-agers who were 10 when they tortured and killed 2-year-old James Bulger go before parole boards this week to determine whether they should be freed. Both young men, now 18, have served the minimum eight years of their sentence at a detention center.
Jon Venables' board interview was set for Monday at a secret location. He could be freed within days if the panel decides he is no longer a risk to the public. Robert Thompson was expected to attend a separate meeting Wednesday. There was no indication of when a decision would be made.
Thompson and Venables lured the toddler from a busy shopping center in Bootle, near Liverpool, on Feb. 12, 1993. They dragged the child to a railway line 2 miles away, beat and stoned him to death, then left his body on the tracks. 
 

Badge of 'Honor' : 12-year-old took on Scouts' anti-gay policy
When Steven Cozza was 12, a seventh-grader at Petaluma Junior High, he did a very brave thing. While other kids were playing soccer and looking for ways to fit in crowd, Steven started a petition drive to pressure the Boy Scouts of America into dropping its anti-gay policy.
Outside the Lucky supermarket in Petaluma, he gathered signatures, never expecting that he was laying the seeds for a grassroots national movement. In a matter of weeks, Scouting for All, formed by Steven; his dad, Scott; and former scoutmaster Dave Rice, had taken off.
"It just went banzai," says Steven, who's now 16.. What's remarkable isn't merely the fact that Steven stood up for gay rights at age 12 -- but the fact that he's not gay himself.
Steven's story is captured in "Scout's Honor," a new documentary by San Francisco filmmaker Tom Shepard airing this week.
 

Researchers seek causes of teen violence
Adolescence is a gold mine for anyone prospecting for perpetrators and victims of violence. But just why the teenage years are fertile ground for violence is tougher to pin down. That's the sobering message of a recent study by a RAND research team. 
The report, "Stopping Violence Before It Starts," attempted to identify early predictors of adolescent violence. These include personality traits, demographic characteristics, and social influences that work on seventh-graders and that could increase their likelihood of engaging in violent behavior a few years later.
"The basic story is that there's no single cause of violence, which means there's no magic bullet," said Phyllis Ellickson of RAND. 
 

Canada: Demand for tougher Youth Criminal Justice Act
The Chrétien government should put public safety first and adopt Ontario's proposals for real, effective change to the federal law on young offenders, Solicitor General David Turnbull told a meeting of police chiefs today. 
"Ottawa's proposed Youth Criminal Justice Act is utterly inadequate to protect the public and hold offenders accountable," Turnbull told the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police (OACP) annual conference. "When young people break the law, they should get a sharp lesson in the consequences." 
Ontario has drafted more than 100 amendments to the federal Youth Criminal Justice Act that would make young offenders accountable for their crimes. Ontario's No More Free Ride for Young Offenders Act improves Ottawa's bill, and would result in:
• adult time for adult crime; 
• mandatory jail time for weapons offences; and 
• public notification of violent young offenders. 
 

Coalition: Banning child armies
Childhood is brutal enough in countries rent by war, famine, and disease. Now there is confirmation that some 300,000 children worldwide, many as young as 9 or 10, have been forcibly recruited into combat by armies, militia groups, and revolutionary forces, brutalized by officers and other recruits, and made to kill, spy, torture, and take unspeakable risks with their own lives.
The practice is condemned by some countries but not nearly enough, and even the United States, where the armed services accept recruits at 17, resisted an international protocol that would raise the combat age to 18.
A report issued this week by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, which includes Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, details horribly the deprivations children are forced to undergo every day in countries at war. A new generation of lighter-weight automatic weapons has helped create these child armies, but it is the wanton kidnapping, beating, and threats by government and rebel forces alike that tear the children from their homes. 
 

 18 June 2001 

US: New Homes Away From Foster Care 
To ease the difficulties of young adults leaving the system, federal and private aid provides remodeled duplexes and a secure start.
Shayla McAllister's 18th birthday was approaching fast. A foster child since she was 4, McAllister would soon leave the foster care system, her main support network. Though she dreamed of owning a car and becoming a physical therapist, her prospects seemed dim: According to one study, about 50% of former foster children without some kind of support end up homeless. But McAllister beat the odds. Since March, she has been living in a remodeled duplex in South Los Angeles, thanks to a transitional housing program for young adults who leave the system.
 

June 16th Youth Day in SA
Hundreds of singing and dancing young South Africans joined President Thabo Mbeki on Saturday as he retraced the steps of a protest march thousands of Soweto schoolchildren staged 25 years ago.
The march, known as the Soweto uprising, became a turning point in South Africa's history. It brought a new era of intensified opposition to the apartheid government, both at home and abroad. 
 

Northern Ireland: Children learn safety message
UP to two million children went to hospital in the UK last year with accidental injuries - hundreds of them in Northern Ireland. Accidents are the main cause of death, disability and injury to youngsters. House fires are the biggest cause of deaths in the home and road accidents are the main factor outside.
This week is Child Safety Week and children in Holywood are doing their bit to learn about the many dangers which lurk.
Four-year-olds in the playgroup at Redburn Community Centre will be learning about the dangers of fire while playing with an interactive fire engine.
The parents and toddler group will be examining safety in the home and protection in the sun.
And the after school club of five to 11- year-olds will look into 'stranger danger' and bike and scooter safety.
Over 55s are also taking part. They are checking that all old medicines have been thrown out of their homes to make sure grandchildren or young visitors cannot take them accidentally.
Julie Harkness, community development officer, said: "Accidents are the biggest killer of children in the UK and cause thousands of injuries each year.
"Community activities are an excellent way to raise awareness of the issues," she said.

Canada: Parenting quality not a question of colour
When it comes to race, too often throughout Canada and in much of the world troubling assumptions are casually bandied about as if they were fact. For this reason, we were relieved this week to see the justices of the Supreme Court of Canada raise good, tough questions about this most difficult of social issues.
In hearing arguments this week in a bitter custody battle over a mixed-race four-year-old boy, judges aggressively challenged lawyers who blithely said custody of the boy should revolve on the race of his parents.
The crux of the case is whether the white mother or black father of Elijah Van de Perre should be awarded custody of the little boy. The case was heard by the country's top court after the mother appealed a March 2000 decision by the B.C. Court of Appeal that, largely on the basis of race, awarded custody to the boy's father.
The saga of Elijah could be read as a sad commentary on a host of issues in our society, none of them more troubling than the blatant assumption that he'll experience racism as he grows up.
 

Report: Kids Stuck In Limbo
A new report shows that hundreds of abused and neglected children matched with adoptive parents are stuck in foster homes, and the state's child advocate is blaming bureaucratic delays.
"There are no other barriers," Child Advocate Jeanne Milstein said. "The courts have done their jobs."
The June 8 report was compiled by a federal court monitor who oversees the Department of Children and Families, which handles state adoptions.
The report found that nearly 1,500 children 12 and under whose biological parents' rights have been terminated are eligible for adoption.
There are foster parents willing and qualified to adopt more than 70 percent of those children, but DCF has failed to give final approval, according to the report. 
 

 15 June 2001 

Irish bishops' concern at dual system for abuse victims
Dr Eamonn Walsh, chairman of the Bishops' Commission on Child Abuse, said at their summer meeting, which ended last night, that the bishops had decided to set up a new Child Protection Office and a Bishops' Committee on Child Protection.
It has already commissioned the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland to conduct a Research Project on Child Sexual Abuse. Its findings are expected to be published in early 2003.
Speaking at a press conference in Maynooth, Bishop Walsh said the perception that the bishops had been caught "on the back foot" by the eruption of child abuse scandals was accurate. "It was as if 40 years of bad debts all came together," he said. But a belief that the bishops were "still asleep and doing nothing" was wrong. They had put in place structures "where child protection is a priority".
The new child protection officer will be Mr Paul Bailey. He takes up the post on July 2nd. He is former president of the Irish Association of Care Workers and was director of the Los Angeles Home for Homeless Boys (Dublin) and deputy director of the Oberstown Boys Centre at Lusk, Co Dublin. 
 

Nigeria ratifies ILO convention on child labour
NIGERIA formally joined the ongoing global war against child labour yesterday when it ratified the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 182 on the elimination of worst forms of child labour.
The ratification of the convention was disclosed to the plenary session of the 89th session of the ILO by the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Employment, Labour and Productivity Ambassador Geofrey Preware. It came on the heels of the body's launching of a new initiative known as the "Time Bound Programme". The scheme is aimed at accelerating the salvaging of millions of children from most abusive forms of child labour at a session addressed by Tanzanian President Benjamin Williams Mkapa.
According to him, the present administration was "aware of the need to go beyond ratification," hence government, he said, "is actively engaged in the provision of the institutional framework and the logistic infrastructure to sustain the implementation of ratified core conventions all of which were unanimously recommended for ratification in accordance with our constitutional provisions by the National Labour Advisory Council, a tripertite body." 
 

Juvenile Court thanking helpers 
In an ideal world, Judge Greg Adams wouldn't need so much help. But "It's not an ideal world, not in Georgia," said Adams, the chief presiding judge of DeKalb's Juvenile Court. Adams and the rest of the Juvenile Court system rely on an extensive network of volunteers to help and protect children in the system. The number of cases is simply too high for court staff, public school personnel and the state's Division of Family and Children Services to handle.
"Volunteers are a lot more important now than they have ever been," Adams said. "There are more demands on them than ever . . . . We are always looking for more volunteers."
Court-Appointed Special Advocates --- commonly known as CASA --- are a group of volunteers who, as their name suggests, act as advocates for deprived children in court. 
At any one time, Adams said, there could be as many as 1,200 children in the county Juvenile Court system who have achieved the legal status of "deprived."  CASA volunteers help these children acquire social services and educational assistance such as mentoring or tutoring. A CASA volunteer will follow through with written reports that follow the child's progress, and perhaps testify at hearings about the progress of his or her case.
"We have, at any given time, 400 volunteers for Juvenile Court," Adams said. "To me, it's important for the court to say thank you to the people who give their time." To that end, the Juvenile Court judges and the Juvenile Court Foundation are sponsoring the DeKalb County Juvenile Court Volunteer Reception on Monday at 5 p.m. at Maloof Auditorium in Decatur.

B.C.'s kids ministry needs stable leadership, clear vision, says children's commissioner
One of the province's most sensitive government ministries needs strong leadership, long-term stability and clear vision to provide kids with the support they deserve, says the province's children's commissioner. Paul Pallan released his annual report Wednesday as the new Liberal government faced criticism for tinkering with the Ministry of Children and Family Development.
A restructuring of the former ministry for children and families could threaten progress made in delivering integrated government services for children over the past five years, he said.
"We're starting to see the first signs now there is a value in an integrated ministry," Pallan said. "We're seeing less fragmentation and we're seeing improved communication between programs that are serving kids." 
 

5,000 streetkids in Palaro event 
Over 5,000 streetchildren from 17 cities and municipalities in Metro Manila are expected to converge during the launching of the Palaro ng Batang Lansangan at the Rizal Memorial Track and Field Oval on Saturday, starting 8 a.m. with President Arroyo as guest of honor. Local government units are expected to send participants to compete in sports activities and fun games.
“The PNBL is a year-round PSC program offering opportunities for sports and recreation among streetchildren in the hope of rebuilding their lives as productive citizens,’’ said PSC Commissioner Cynthia L. Carrion, Organizing Committee Chair.
The PSC is committed to use sports as an effective tool to develop the personality of the country’s less fortunate children. We also aim to inculcate in them the basic values of discipline and hard work,’’ PSC Chairman Carlos D. Tuason said. 
 

Indian Tribe Implements Unique Anti-Drug Program
The Comanche tribe in Lawton, Okla., has implemented an anti-drug program centered on horsemanship to try to reach children in the tribe's public housing, UPI reported June 8. "I want our Comanche children to reconnect with their culture," said Don Parker, who started the program. "We are going to give them something to do besides running up and down streets on skate boards and listening to rap music, which is not part of their culture."
Parker, executive director of the Comanche Nation Housing Authority, found inspiration for the program by looking back to history, when the Comanche were considered some of the world's best horsemen.
With a $332,400 grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Parker purchased 50 wild mustangs that will be used in an anti-drug program "I thought: How many Indian families can afford horses for their children? The answer was obvious: not many," Parker said.
"We want to take the interest of our kids away from this drug culture, this epidemic that is destroying our families," Parker said. "The Comanche people are reintroducing the horse for the Indian country to share in using the spirit of the horse to fight drugs on the streets."
 

 14 June 2001 

US: Mentoring groups consider merger 
For the past 25 years, Indianapolis youths have looked for adult mentors in two places -- Big Brothers of Greater Indianapolis for boys and Big Sisters of Central Indiana for girls.
That could change next week, if the leaders of both groups vote to merge at a meeting Tuesday. They've been studying the issue for a year and will brief parents and volunteers at a private meeting this week.
Indianapolis is one of only three regions that have kept their Big Brothers and Big Sisters chapters separate. More than 500 others have combined operations. 
 

UK: Caring fathers help children to thrive
CHILDREN who are close to their fathers are more likely to do well at school, stay out of trouble and have a large circle of friends, says a report today. Fathers are as important as mothers in shaping children's futures, says the part government-funded research. Their involvement in family life significantly increased their children's chances of achieving good GCSE results and reduced the likelihood of them of having a criminal record by the age of 21.
The findings of the report, What Good are Dads?, came from a study of British and international papers on fatherhood dating back 20 years. Charlie Lewis, professor of psychology at Lancaster University, who co-wrote the study, said the results challenged the view that fathers played only a minor role in family life. 
 

Thailand: Schools told to quietly assist those deemed most vulnerable
Child activists want urgent measures to stop schoolgirls entering prostitution. They recommend workshops at schools and campaigns to create self-esteem.
In a discussion on prostitution among schoolgirls at the Foundation for Children yesterday, Senator Wallop Tangkananurak, representing 18 child protection groups, said schools should talk to girls who were likely to enter the trade. Workshops would keep them on the right path. They would have to be run carefully so the girls did not become the target of criticism among friends.
The workshops could also target the boys who were likely to become their clients. The workshops would not be aimed at girls who were already in prostitution because it was hard to bring them back. Surang Chanyam, from the M Power Group, asked reporters not to emphasise the financial returns from prostitution but to focus on the dangers. Young people should be taught how to protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases.
Senator Montri Sintavichai, also director of the Child Protection Foundation, said some young prostitutes were spending 15,000-20,000 baht a month. He said teachers and parents were failing to keep girls on the right path. 
 

Barnardo's defends shock adverts
Children's charity Barnardo's shocking new series of anti-child abuse advertisements has prompted concern from the advertising industry's own advisory body. The £1m campaign in national newspapers aims to show the effects of child cruelty in later life.
The charity has already modified two of five images of abuse victims, in the light of concerns from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). But it remains locked in dispute with the advisory body about whether two other images in the new campaign breach advertising codes.
The campaign - which uses fictional case studies instead of real people - will continue for the next six weeks and will be re-run in the autumn. 
 

Working mothers 'damage children'
Family life is being driven to breaking-point as women struggle to work full-time, raise children and look after the home, according to a new survey.
Three-quarters of working women in the UK think that children "suffer emotionally" if both parents work full-time, while 73 per cent believe that couples in full-time employment are more likely to experience marriage breakdowns. And 87 per cent of working mothers say the stress of trying to juggle work and home frequently causes them to shout at their children.
The survey, commissioned by health magazine Top Sante, found that only four per cent of working women with a baby or young child would choose to work full-time.
Nearly a third of respondents (31 per cent ) would rather have a part-time career job share, 22 per cent would prefer to work from home or set up their own business and 43 per cent would like to be "a full-time mum".
Juliette Kellow, editor of Top Sante, said: "The Government wants to encourage as many women as possible into full-time work, but this definitive survey clearly shows this is blatantly not what most women want - especially those with families.
 

Ireland: Adoption option for children in care is accepted
Health boards should consider adoption for all children in long-term care, according to a report which has been accepted by the Government. It warns that some young people are in danger of getting trapped in the care system because their cases are not being reviewed by social workers.
Parents are giving up fostering because they believe they are not being supported by health boards while prospective new foster parents are put off by inordinate delays in processing their applications, it says.
The report, Foster Care - A Child-Centred Partnership, was produced by a working party of Irish Foster Care Association representatives, health boards, social workers and the Department of Health and Children. It was published yesterday by the Minister for Children, Ms Mary Hanafin. 
In all, there are about 3,300 children in foster care and 700 in residential care, the latter in specially staffed units. The report says: "Some children remain in long-term foster care when adoption may in fact be in their best interests".
 

 13 June 2001 

Damning child soldier report
More than 300,000 children — some as young as 7 — are fighting as soldiers in 41 countries, an international group said in a report released in Johannesburg on Tuesday.
Besides being pressed into service as front-line fighters, children are being used in conflicts as minesweepers, spies, porters and sex slaves, according to the report by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers.
Governments recruit children to fight because of ``their very qualities as children — they can be cheap, expendable and easier to condition into fearless killing and unthinking obedience,'' said the report, the first global survey of its kind.
The availability of modern lightweight weapons has aggravated the problem by ``enabling even the smallest child to become an efficient killer in combat,'' Rory Mungoven, the coalition's international coordinator, said in a release.
While the number of child soldiers worldwide has not changed much in recent years, the number of countries where they are used has increased to 41 from about 30 three years ago, coalition spokeswoman Judit Arenas said.
Africa's wars involve more than 120,000 children, the report said, while Myanmar, the southeast Asian country also known as Burma, has the world's highest number of child soldiers — 50,000.
 

Youth violence to be seen as public health problem?
Despite the recent decrease in homicide rates, the United States still ranks first among industrialized nations in its rate of violent deaths. Alarmingly, more children die from violence than from disease. Homicide and suicide account for more than one-third of our country's annual 145,000 traumatic deaths.
The school shootings that have shocked the nation during the past few years provide an unfortunate glimpse into the dark and mystifying world of troubled youth. These situations reveal that the greatest threat to the lives of our children is not disease, starvation or abandonment -- but violence.
So far, lawmakers have tried to fight youth violence by repealing laws designed to recognize that children who commit serious crimes need special attention; by passing laws trying juveniles as adults, and sentencing youth to serve time with hardened adult criminals.
The California Safe Children and Communities Act, co-authored by state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, and Assemblyman Rod Pacheco, R-Riverside, would become the first state program to treat youth violence as a public health problem.
Viewing youth violence as a public health rather than juvenile crime issue focuses on the need to prevent rather than punish.
 

Making promises to youth
Representatives of businesses and organizations from around the region yesterday took the first step toward creating Promise Makers, a new mentoring program in Allegheny County to help young people.
"Volunteerism is the best way to improve quality of life at a local level, both for those who volunteer as well as for those who benefit from the service given," said Allegheny County Chief Executive Jim Roddey, who kicked off a symposium designed to help organizations create their own mentoring programs.
Allegheny County's Promise Initiative is aimed at bringing together businesses, corporations, service agencies, schools, communities, families and individuals to commit time, services, goods and funds in order to directly support positive youth development in the region.
The campaign strives to build the character and competence of local youths by providing them with five fundamental resources: caring adults, safe places, healthy starts, marketable skills and service opportunities. 
 

Youth Violence Prevention Recommendations
The Little Hoover Commission on Wednesday will present its just released recommendations on how to fortify state-sponsored efforts to prevent youth crime and violence at a conference sponsored by the Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles.
In its examination, the Commission found that many communities are successfully reducing violence among young people. Researchers also are developing a better understanding about the origins of violence and how to prevent it.
The Commission asserts that the State should make prevention the primary response to youth crime and violence, and it identifies ways to make programs more responsive to the needs of California communities.
The recommendations are contained in a report titled: NEVER TOO EARLY, NEVER TOO LATE -- to Prevent Youth Crime & Violence.
 

UK: Bullies' victim calls for children's ombudsman
A victim of bullying is calling on the Government to appoint a children’s ombudsman to tackle the problems she and others face. Joanne Geldart, 14, has contemplated suicide after being taunted, kicked and punched since she started school. She said: “I know it’s hard to sort these things out, but if we had something like a children’s commissioner it would make lives a lot easier.”
Joanne wants to be a veterinary surgeon but is worried about missing school because of the bullying. Her head teacher at Ferryhill Comprehensive, Steve Gater, said: “We are supporting Joanne through this difficult time and have put in place a range of strategies to help her.”
 

Fears about contraception, Nigerian youths rely on abortion
Low levels of contraceptive use among Nigerian adolescents might be a result of perceived risks related to the use of birth control methods, according to findings reported in "Why Nigerian Adolescents Seek Abortion Rather than Contraception: Evidence from Focus-Group Discussions." See report here
Researchers Valentine O. Otoide, Frank Oronsaye and Friday E. Okonofua found that sexually active Nigerian youths are generally misinformed about the risks associated with modern methods of contraception, especially the possibility of infertility. As a result, many teenagers reject contraceptive use and rely on induced abortion instead. Many participants in focus groups conducted by the authors in a major Nigerian city perceive the adverse effects of modern contraception on fertility to be continuous and prolonged, while they view abortion as an immediate solution to an unplanned pregnancy-and, therefore, one that would have a limited negative impact on future fertility. Induced abortion in Nigeria is the largest contributor to maternal mortality, however, and accounts for 20,000 of the 50,000 maternal deaths that occur each year. Abortion is illegal in Nigeria unless a woman's life is threatened by the pregnancy. Most abortions are of poor quality and unsafe.
With Nigerians marrying later and increasingly having premarital sex, this study concludes that young people need education about contraceptives and their side effects in relation to unsafe abortion in order to prevent a dramatic rise in the prevalence of unsafe abortion.
 

UN: Best of Times, Worst of Times For World's Children 
Polio has been nearly eradicated, fewer toddlers die before the age of 5 and more youngsters are in school than ever before since the United Nations' first World Summit for Children in 1990.
But a children's report card for the 21st century, timed for release when week-long sessions on children opened Monday, showed that more than 10 million children die each year from preventable causes, 150 million are malnourished and 100 million are out of school, 60% of them girls.
"There is good news and there is bad news," said Carol Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF, the UN Children's Fund. "In the past decade, the world has not met its own standards for children. In fact, it has fallen short on its goals," she said. But Bellamy stressed that "there has been real progress for children over the last 10 years" in education and other areas, with children higher up on many nations' political agendas.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic has reached catastrophic proportions, particularly in Africa, unraveling decades of gains in children's survival and development. But the biggest obstacle to a solution is a lack of will to invest in children, the report said.
Bellamy said the world has not realized that investment in children would bring incalculable dividends in a more productive population. "Until we invest in children, we are not going to really deal with poverty and as long as poverty is out there it's going to fall the hardest on children," she said.
 

 12 June 2001 

Australia: Why boys think school is a dead loss
Boys believe secondary school is an unpleasant waste of time and their experiences of education are overwhelmingly negative, a study of declining male student achievement and retention rates has found.
"Most boys value school largely, if not solely for the social life," said the study, which sought the views of 1800 male secondary students. "They can't see the importance of much of what it is reported to offer them, they don't like the form in which it is offered, and they believe they could learn more doing other things with their time."
The savage criticisms of schooling were similar among high and low achievers and across the 60 private, state and Catholic schools surveyed by researchers at Flinders University.
Boys said schoolwork in years 8, 9 and 10 was boring and repetitive. They said teacher expectations were low, there were no goals and no rewards.
 

Canada: Getting off the street
He came north to avoid the draft into the Vietnam war 31 years ago. He's been living on Montreal streets on and off since then, full time for the last two years. A few days ago, he stood at the corner of Ste. Catherine St. and St. Laurent Blvd. holding a dirty baseball cap out for money.
A few blocks away, at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, 260 researchers, theorists and field workers from across Quebec and parts of Ontario discussed strategies for helping people just like him at a conference on homelessness.
"They need to get down to the gut level of who's on the street and why," the panhandler said when told of the conference, "if they want to help such a prolonged chronic problem. "Some are pinned and have no choice, some have low intelligence and can't cope, and others have just been really screwed around," he said, adding that he probably belongs in the last group.
 

The IQ factor in defining gifted children
In the old days, "it was 129 you're out, 130 you're in," declares Joseph Renzulli, one of the nation's leading experts on gifted education. He isn't talking about the junior lightweight boxing division, but the breakoff point he refers to was just as unforgiving.
Until the late 1960s, the magic number of 130 was the IQ marker used by school psychologists to draw the boundary between gifted and "nongifted" children, and whether they would get special educational services. And even though school districts now use other criteria as well, many still rely partly on the 130 IQ cutoff.
The term "gifted child" was coined in the early part of the 20th century by Stanford University's Lewis Terman, who developed one of the first tests to measure intelligence.
 

US: Centers Aim to Make Reporting Abuse Easier 
The Ventura County district attorney's office is prepared to spend at least $350,000 to create two interview centers where alleged victims of physical and sexual abuse can report those crimes in a less stressful atmosphere. 
The facilities--officially known as multidisciplinary interview centers--will be designed so that children will have to tell their story only once, in a private, friendly environment, away from the chaos of a police station or a hospital emergency room. 
"How many times would you like to tell your story if you've been sexually molested?" asked Paul Russell, director of children's medical services for the Ventura County Department of Public Health. "Some kids who are telling it once are in tears. Then they have to go through it again, then again. "Once you have obtained the information that is needed from a prosecutorial perspective, there is no good in having the child tell it over and over again." 
 

Nova Scotia questions on mainstreaming
In 1996, the Liberal government in Nova Scotia unveiled what was seen, at the time, as a cutting-edge policy on special needs education and moved to integrate special needs children -- about 17% of the student population -- into ordinary classrooms.
Five years later, special needs education in Nova Scotia is such a mess the Conservative government of John Hamm has launched an overhaul of the policy. Budget cuts have meant that special needs children, now dispersed in regular classrooms, do not have the equipment they require, nor suitably trained support staff. "The money is just not there for the services necessary to make an inclusive classroom work," says Wendy Lill, a Halifax parent with a 15-year-old special needs child. "It's a horrible time for parents."
Ms. Lill has a unique perspective: She is the federal MP for Dartmouth and serves as the NDP's disabilities critic. She cites a statistic that circulates widely among Nova Scotia parents: "Nova Scotia's per capita spending on special needs education is lower than anywhere else in Canada." Ontario's spending in this area is twice as high as Nova Scotia's, according to a recent report.
 

Obesity Said Worse than Smoking, Drinking
A new study found that obese people have more chronic health problems than smokers or heavy drinkers, the Associated Press reported June 6. According to the study by the RAND Institute in Santa Monica, Calif., overweight or obese people are nearly twice as likely to have chronic health problems than those who smoke, drink heavily, or live below the federal poverty line.
The study also showed that female smokers are more at risk for health problems than men. Furthermore, female smokers have nearly 40 percent more chronic health problems than nonsmokers.
As a result of the study's findings, Roland Sturm, a RAND economist and lead author, said public-health officials should increase their efforts against obesity to levels that at least match the campaign against smoking.
 

Nebraska look at youth figures
The average cost of incarceration of a juvenile for one day is $165; the average cost of treatment programs is less than $50. There are 1,217 juveniles who have broken the law and are wards of the Office of Juvenile Services; 63 voluntary placements; 62 on police hold awaiting court placement; four relinquished by parents; and 5,733 placed with the state because of neglect, abuse or chemical dependency. Twenty-four juveniles are housed outside of the state for treatment not available here, including those who need residential psychiatric treatment and sexual perpetrators.
Nebraska does not have a "Level 5" security facility for juveniles who are extremely dangerous to themselves or others. There will be a study this summer to determine the need for and construction cost of such a facility.
Some juveniles are tried as adults. They may face different treatment than juveniles of the same age for the same crime, depending on the judge. The "gatekeeper" system is supposed to give consistency to those sentences and placement.
Placement by the Office of Juvenile Services can include the juvenile's home, a group home or the youth treatment centers in Kearney or Geneva.
The Office of Probation, under the Nebraska Supreme Court, will evaluate and recommend placement for more than 4,500 juveniles this year. Those offenders may be assigned to home, group home, or to specific programs determined by the counties.
Of the more than 22,000 juvenile arrests in 1998, more than 50 percent could have been handled in placement in a program prior to a court decision and incarceration.
 

Irish inspectors criticise practices at child centres
Practices at a number of children's residential centres in the North Eastern Health Board area have been criticised by inspectors.
One of the centres had taken on temporary staff without getting written Garda clearance, another kept its front door and fire escape locked, which the inspectors said was unacceptable and could impede exit in an emergency, and care plans, if drawn up, did not always meet an acceptable standard.
The inspections on the centres - Westcourt, Valhalla, 104 and Tí na nÓg, all located in Drogheda - were carried out by the Irish Social Services Inspectorate in January. Their findings have been released under the Freedom of Information Act.
 

Ireland: Child abuse compensation Bill imminent
The Government will publish a Bill within the next few weeks setting up a compensation scheme for the victims of institutional child abuse.
The Bill is expected to include a provision for the religious orders involved in the institutions to contribute to the compensation fund, in return for a waiver from civil litigation. However, those who do not agree to contribute would have no such waiver.
It is understood that legal representatives will meet the Attorney General this week to discuss details of the proposed legislation.
The Bill will be published a year after the need for such a scheme was raised with the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse by solicitors acting for victims. The commission was established following the screening of the States of Fear programme about child abuse in industrial schools.
The commission adjourned its sittings last June to allow the Government to consider this proposal. In September it criticised the Cabinet for its delay in coming to a decision. The following month the Government announced there would be a scheme. However, it was many more months before the details were worked out, which are now to be outlined in the Bill.
 

 11 June 2001 

SA girl to address UN on child labour
Children from all over the world will gather in New York next week to put their collective foot down against child labour.
Ntombizakhona Khoza, 11, from Boksburg, will be South Africa's representative in the Global March Against Child Labour and will deliver a speech before the UN General Assembly during her week-long trip.
A confident and excited Ntombizakhona said she had been preparing her speech for the past week.
She said children suffered from many other forms of abuse: "Most children are not aware of their rights. Children from farms are not attending school, are abused and travel long distances just to reach school."
She and the other children will participate in a workshop to discuss the plight of children, as well as solutions to eliminate child labour and other forms of abuse.
Ntombizakhona said she was concerned about children being removed from their homes for domestic work.
Thabisile Msezane, director of the Sithabile Child and Youth Care Centre, a home for abused children in Boksburg, said most children at the home were successfully rehabilitated and returned to the mainstream education system.
 

EU Approves Plan to Address Underage Drinking
European Union (EU) health ministers approved a proposal that would address the growing problem of underage drinking, the Associated Press reported June 5. The 15 EU nations supported a plan that would tighten enforcement of laws on alcohol sales and educate young people about the dangers of drinking.
In addition, the EU agreed to work with the alcohol industry on codes of conduct to ensure that alcoholic beverages are not designed or promoted to appeal to children.
The proposal also would allocate $238 million to a public-health plan that would gather and evaluate EU-wide data on such health issues as alcohol and tobacco use.
EU Health Commissioner David Byrne called the action "an excellent basis to better protect our young people, especially children and adolescents, from alcohol-related harm."
The proposal moves on to the European Parliament for consideration. 
 

South African Journal Reports on AIDS Crisis in Hospitals
Hospitals in South Africa's most AIDS-ravaged province, KwaZulu-Natal, are being overwhelmed by a growing number of AIDS patients, the country's leading medical journal reported in its latest issue.
The South African Medical Journal (SAMJ) found urban and rural clinics in the province stretched to breaking point, with HIV-positive patients filling 80% of beds in some rural clinics.
South Africa has more HIV-infected individuals than does any other country. The government estimates 4.7 million or one in nine people are HIV-positive.
The number may rise to 7 million by the end of the decade, placing a catastrophic burden on South Africa's already under-funded health system, according to some health experts.
 

Holes found in foster care files 
The vast majority of foster care cases have no documentation that workers are conducting required checks of foster children in Milwaukee County, state records show, raising questions about the foster care system's ability to protect children in its care.
The records also show that workers falsely documented visits with at-risk children in a program meant to keep them at home with their parents under strict monitoring. In one example, a caseworker completed a weekly safety assessment a week or more in advance.
The situation represents a "complete breakdown in accountability," says Eric Thompson, the Children's Rights Inc. attorney spearheading a federal class action lawsuit that alleges foster care officials routinely put children in harm's way.
"If foster children are not being seen, it means the bureau is failing to monitor, protect and provide services for them, and it calls into question every case decision made on their behalf," Thompson said. "If these workers were supervised, the supervisors would know there's no documentation of visits."
 

Sweden's commitment to children and families
When the Swedish say they value children, they mean it. All those moms pushing prams on the streets of this beautiful city have not traded career for baby. They are taking advantage of the year of parental leave that is national policy in this country.
The leave - usually with 80 percent pay and return-to-work guarantee - is only the first part of the child-and-family-centered policy in Sweden. In the 1970s, the country established day care and preschool for all children as part of its welfare state.
For the Seattle delegation visiting Stockholm last week, "welfare state" is a very high hurdle. The very words tend to close minds and shut down conversation.
Don't expect these business and civic leaders to return with a blueprint for public subsidies for day care and parental leave. But to dismiss child-centered policies and programs as do-able only in Sweden and impossible in America and Seattle is to miss the point.
Story

Canada: Lawyers blast crime registry
Two Calgary lawyers say Alberta's plan to include youths in its proposed public registry of high-risk offenders is too drastic, and another legal expert warns that it could face constitutional problems.
"There is no redeeming value to a registry like this. It is only used to harass people," said Stephen Jenuth, a Calgary criminal lawyer who is also president of the Alberta Civil Liberties Association.
"It destroys any chance for rehabilitation . . . it makes people lose their jobs, it forces them out of their city and eventually leads them back into crime."
And Jenuth suspects that may even be the intent of police and provincial government with such a registry.
"It makes police look good, like they're doing something. In fact, it gets these people back into crime, back into the hands of police, and so police look good again."
Sources told the Herald this week that Alberta's high-risk offender registry could include the names of criminals under age 18 who commit serious crimes or who are deemed dangerous offenders in adult court.
 

 8 June 2001 

Children's Parliament Coming, Says Uganda Minister
Uganda will soon start a parliament for children similar to the national parliament, the Minister of state for Youth and Child Affairs, Mary Nsangi Kakembo, has said. She was speaking during the Children and Young People's Consultative Meeting on the Global Movement for Children at the International Conference Centre in Kampala. She was reacting to an appeal by the children to be represented on decision-making bodies, especially the parliament, to have their views and proposals on good governance. In a brief statement made by one of the children, they said even though they were not yet legitimate voters, they needed an MP in the House to fight for their rights.
The children will during the two-day meeting opened June 6 by Prime Minister Apolo Nsibambi, discuss a child friendly outcome document to be presented at their special session in New York. Nsibambi and Kakembo voted for what they felt were the most urgent issues to be discussed in the September summit in USA. They voted for fighting HIV/AIDS, educating every child, fighting poverty and protecting the environment for children among the ten issues on the ballot paper. 
The Say Yes ballot campaign aims to collect one million votes from Ugandan children and adults on how best to promote children's welfare. Nsibambi, who launched the meeting ahead of the program, told participants from several Kampala schools that he too was a child at heart. According to a UNICEF report on the impromptu opening, Nsibambi said, "you should not be surprised if I start a kindergarten when I retire." 
 

Canada: National Playground Program
As Canadians from coast to coast get set to celebrate National Kids Day this Saturday, Saturn Canada is launching the 2001 national playground initiative. For the fifth consecutive year, Saturn and its retailers are working together to build and refurbish playgrounds in cities and towns across Canada. 
So far the program has resulted in 130 playgrounds being built or refurbished, as a result of funds provided by Saturn retailers and efforts from their customers. The program is the cornerstone of the widely known Saturn Annual Event. In 2001 the Saturn Retailers have committed to 35 new playground initiatives in Canada - nine in the West, 16 in Ontario, five in Quebec and five in Atlantic Canada. 
According to Safe Kids Canada, children spend an average of 14 hours a week in playgrounds during the warm weather. To ensure that children have the benefit of playing outdoors, Saturn Canada carefully chooses its playground locations and targets those inner-city areas that are in need of more and better-equipped playground facilities. 
 

30,000 facing summer school 
Student failures push city to costly remedial program; 'A very bold step'. More than 30,000 children - nearly one-third of Baltimore's public school population - have failed to meet tough new promotion standards and are being directed to summer school.
Roughly half of eighth-graders, 40 percent of sixth- and seventh-graders and one-third of children in grades one through five are failing, officials say. They're not meeting promotion standards that were introduced last year by the school board for grades two through four and are being expanded now to all elementary and middle-school children.
The $12.8 million, five-week summer school program will be the largest the city has ever held, school officials said at a news conference yesterday. It will give failing students an opportunity to catch up and advance to the next grade on schedule. The program will employ 2,100 teachers and require most of the city's 180 schools to remain open, although the majority lack air conditioning.
"This is a very bold step that our school system is taking, but I believe it will benefit children," chief academic officer Betty Morgan said in an interview. She said the move was part of an effort to raise standards and help students who just needed more time in school.
 

S.C. Program Keeps Juvenile Addicts Out of Prison 
A program in South Carolina is successfully keeping youth who are coming out of the juvenile-justice system or addiction-treatment centers from returning to the system, Youth Crime Alert reported in its May issue. The South Carolina Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services Department's "Bridge" program ensures that youth coming out of the juvenile-justice system or addiction treatment receive the support services they need. Bridge case managers determine what services are needed for each youth and establish close bonds with the juveniles by meeting with them there to four times a week.
As Katherine Yandle Thonton, director of the Bridge program, explains, the three-phase program prevents recidivism by helping juveniles slowly transition to employment and school in their community. 
 

Media Reports on Youth Crime Called Imbalanced 
A newly released study found that news reports on youth crime are not indicative of the actual nature of crime, Youth Crime Alert reported May 20. According to a study prepared by the Berkeley Media Studies group and the Justice Policy Institute, media reports also fail to accurately reflect the true proportion of crimes committed by minorities.
The study, commissioned by Building Blocks for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that focuses on disproportionate minority confinement in the juvenile-justice system, included more than 70 content analyses of newspaper and television crime coverage.
The study found that youth are rarely reported in the news, but when they are, it is generally connected with violence and crime. The study further showed that minorities are overrepresented in crime stories.
Based on the study's findings, researchers concluded that exaggerated portrayals of America's youth as criminals has led to public policies that condemn young people to life sentences without parole.
 

 7 June 2001 

Australia: Call to cut rights of abusive parents
Some abusive parents are beyond help and should be stripped of their parental rights, a visiting child abuse expert says.
Richard Gelles, of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work, said children who had spent years in foster care because of worldwide opposition to adoption were the "real lost generation".
A trenchant critic of "family preservation policies", Professor Gelles said it was wrong to think that nearly all abused children could be reunited with their natural parents if enough help was given.
"A parent who abandons a newborn in a dumpster should not be helped to keep the child," he said. "If you kill one child you should not get a chance to keep a second. And if you can't keep your boyfriend's hands off your kid's genitals, you should be disqualified from parenthood, not helped."
Professor Gelles was the architect of former US president Bill Clinton's "Safe Families" law, which has led to a doubling in the number of adoptions in the US each year since 1997. He said the law aimed to move welfare agencies from a focus on family preservation to a focus on the safety and welfare of children.
 

`Cadillac' plan new foster kid approach: Program aims at drug treatment 
A panel of doctors, social workers and advocates is developing what they call the Cadillac or Mercedes of mental health programs for foster children, with hopes the new plan will largely eliminate the need for psychotropic drugs.
The Department of Children & Families' Advisory Panel on the use of psychotropic medications met for the first time Thursday and began to flesh out a new system for treating foster kids whose mental illness or unruly behavior require treatments such as the use of powerful mind-altering drugs.
The centerpiece of the model is the creation of teams of psychiatrists, case managers, behavior analysts, teachers and parents who would design treatment plans for hard-to-manage children in state care. Ideally, the teams would meet regularly to discuss a child's stability and progress while in treatment.
``What we're talking about is a Cadillac/Mercedes model of care,'' said Daniel Armstrong, a member of the panel and director of the Mailman Center for Child Development in Miami.
The new model may alleviate some concerns about the possible misuse of psychotropic medications because it will build in monitoring systems, Armstrong said.
``One reason we used [the drugs] was because we had no alternative,'' he said.
 

Middle East: Juvenile delinquency declines steadily in Sharjah
The number of juvenile delinquents has decreased in the past few years, thanks to awareness lectures and summer employment programmes.
Fawziya Taresh, Director of the Sharjah Comprehensive Social Care Unit, told Gulf News that the unit had received only 111 juvenile delinquents last year, 58 from Sharjah, 39 from Ajman and seven from Kalba.
"Most of them were involved in theft, violence and other crimes," she said. Taresh attributed the decline mainly to the increased social awareness programmes conducted in schools, colleges and youth clubs.
"We launched our own nationwide awareness project around two years ago in cooperation with the Ministry of Education and Youth. We held lectures at schools and universities that tackled crime and the need to avoid peer pressure, engage in useful activities and, above all, adhere to religious and social values.
"We organise similar lectures at women's associations and clubs across the country," she said, and the lectures have sparked a good response.
Programmes to employ youngsters during the summer holidays have helped keep young people out of trouble which often results from too much leisure. Youth clubs also involved adolescents in a variety of activities year-round. 
 

Ireland: Child sex cases to get early trial dates
The Central Criminal Court will try to give early trial dates when possible to serious sexual abuse cases involving children, Mr Justice Carney has said.
His comment before the monthly listing session for new cases came in response to a letter he received from the Minister for State for Children, Ms Mary Hanafin.
The Minister referred to research in the Mid-Western Health Board area and concerns expressed at the Children at Risk Ireland Conference which indicated the period between the alleged incident(s) and the trial date is particularly difficult for children.
This resulted from "a reluctance on the part of social and care workers to engage fully with the children lest there be a suggestion of influencing the child's evidence".
This led to a risk that the child received "less than optimum therapy whilst the trial is pending".
Mr Justice Carney said the Minister's concern was a legitimate one. "The court is anxious to do anything it can to take account of it and accommodate the Minister."
 

Guard was demoted before escape
Ryan Johnson, the guard accused of giving a key to an inmate who used it to free himself and two others from Cypress Creek Correctional Facility last month, had been demoted just two months before the escape, according to an official at the facility.
Johnson, who had worked at Cypress Creek for about a year, was bumped from supervisor to guard in March for failing to do his job properly, said Eric Gallon, the facility's administrator.
Gallon spoke at a public forum Monday night designed to quell residents' fears about Cypress Creek, a detention center for the worst juvenile offenders in Florida. He outlined some of the security changes that have been implemented and spoke of other issues at the center.
He said Johnson's case was an example of staffing troubles at the facility, which he said he has struggled with since taking over in October 2000.
"This is definitely a problem I inherited," he said, estimating that he has fired more than 30 people during his tenure. Most of the firings involve guards who don't take their jobs seriously enough, Gallon said. Although he declined to give specific reasons for Johnson's demotion, Gallon said he thinks Johnson had grown too close to the inmates.
"Some get to the point where they feel comfortable and you want to look at these kids as just kids," he said. "He may have let his guard down."

 6 June 2001 

Canada Inches Towards Decriminalizing Marijuana
The Canadian government has proposed several initiatives that would expand medicinal use of marijuana and minimize punishment for marijuana possession and use, the Associated Press reported May 29. Justice Minister Anne McLellan has urged a study on marijuana policy, while a new Parliament committee on drug matters will review decriminalization. In addition, Conservative Party leader Joe Clark is calling for the elimination of criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of marijuana.
"It's unjust to see someone, because of one decision one night in their youth, carry the stigma -- to be barred from studying medicine, law, architecture, or other fields where a criminal record could present an obstacle," Clark said.
Also, the government has proposed expanding medicinal use of marijuana, while the Canadian Medical Association Journal recently came out in support of full decriminalization. Furthermore, Canada's Supreme Court will decide this year whether criminal charges for the personal use of marijuana violate constitutional rights.
 

Failing grades
Things seem to be going from bad to worse in Quebec's education system. Over the past four years, barely 60 per cent of Quebec's secondary-school students obtained their diplomas within the regulation five-year time frame. This represents a significant step backward from 1993, when 71.9 per cent of the province's students finished their high-school program on time.
The situation in Montreal is even worse, according to the results of last year's high-school leaving exams, which were made public on Friday. Fewer than 55 per cent of Montreal secondary-school students finished their studies within five years.
Francois Legault, the current education minister and a man from the private sector, is bringing both his strengths and weaknesses to school reform. He has the good sense to quantify the results he wants to see. It is about time someone said that a dropout rate of 27 per cent at the high-school level is unacceptable in a modern society such as Quebec.
The risk, of course, is that after demanding that schools lower the drop-out rate, the schools may be tempted to grade their students more leniently. Simply stating that the repeat rate at the elementary-school level must drop from 22 per cent to 11 per cent by 2002-03, without providing the means to achieve that in a meaningful way, may lead to worse problems than exist now.
 

State eyes techniques for student discipline
The state is looking for ways to keep troublesome students in school instead of forcing them off the grounds through suspensions and expulsions.
Up to $75,000 in federal money will be available for two or more school systems in Maine that are picked to develop alternatives to disciplining students. The money would be distributed by the Juvenile Justice Advisory Group in the Department of Corrections.
Paul Vestal, the board's chairman, said he is against throwing students out of school for any length of time.
"I'm not opposed to disciplinary action. But what I am opposed to is putting a student from one space to another, in the community," he added. Sending a student home or onto the streets is detrimental to society and often results in little or no supervision for the displaced child or teen-ager, Vestal said.
Schools use three types of disciplinary action in dealing with students who violate rules: detention, suspension and expulsion.
Detention involves keeping a student after school, a suspension usually sends a student home for a specified length of time (up to 10 days), and an expulsion — the most severe form of punishment — removes the student from the school system indefinitely.
 

 5 June 2001 

South Auckland school opposes secure youth centre nearby
School trustees are blocking plans for a secure youth residential centre at Clendon, in Manukau City, saying the community was misled by the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services.
Clendon Park School is challenging on health and safety grounds a notice of requirement on the site for the 46-bed centre by Social Services Minister Steve Maharey.
Residents are heartened that the minister has bowed to pressure from residents of Mandeville, in North Canterbury. A week ago, he scrapped plans to build a 40-bed secure youth justice centre there.
In the Clendon case, the residents' appeal to the Environment Court is prompted by the department's plans to move its youth justice operations from the Northern Youth Residential Centre in Weymouth to 243 Roscommon Rd in Clendon.
Weymouth has 35 beds, 25 of which are for young offenders. The rest are for youngsters placed there for care and protection.
The 46-bed Clendon facility would take 25 young offenders from Weymouth, allowing the latter to be used only for care and protection work. 
 

EU Criticizes Romania on Orphans
A European Union official recommended suspending membership talks with Romania if the country fails to resolve the plight of its thousands of abandoned children, a draft report said Friday.
Baroness Emma Nicholson, the European Parliament's special envoy for Romania, originally denied advocating the suspension of membership talks. But the full report released Friday by her office stresses that ``unless the existing situation is duly addressed, accession negotiations should be suspended.''
The draft mentions ``persistent abandonment of children, child abuse and neglect, international adoption and child trafficking.''
The EU has insisted that Romania improve its handling of orphans before it can join the trade bloc, something Bucharest hopes to do by 2007. 
 

Foster kid-care policy studied 
Advocates claim potent drugs used to handle children
A panel of doctors, social workers and advocates will study the medication of foster children with potent mind-altering drugs and recommend new policies for the use of such drugs, which some advocates say are being used as ``chemical restraints.''
Florida Department of Children & Families Secretary Kathleen Kearney has asked the panel to look at how many foster children are being administered psychotropic medications, and to recommend new policies to her agency, said Cecka Green, an agency spokeswoman in Tallahassee. Meanwhile, a group of mental health service providers in Miami-Dade County held an emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss the recent outcry among advocates over the medication of foster children.
Many of the participants expressed enormous frustration over state laws and department procedures they see as hamstringing their efforts to help children. The rules include the longstanding use in Miami-Dade of a sworn statement by the child's psychiatrist to secure permission for the use of drugs and the requirement that doctors obtain informed consent from a parent, guardian or judge. 
 

Nigeria: Orji Kalu Tasks OAU On Children's Rights
Governor. Orji Kalu of Abia state has urged the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) to sanction member-nations with records of abuse of children's rights, as enshrined in the organisation's charter.
The call was contained in his address at a children's party organised on Saturday by his wife, Mrs. Ifeoma Kalu, as part of activities to mark 2001 children's day and second anniversary of democratic governance. The governor, who was represented by the commissioner of education, Prof. Chibuzor Ogbuagu, advised Nigerian governments at the federal and state levels to ensure that children's rights were adequately protected. "The federal government of Nigeria and the OAU should religiously implement the provisions of the charter of the organisation on children's rights, and punish violators accordingly," he said.
Kalu also called on well-meaning Nigerians, government and non-governmental bodies, as well as corporate organisations "to remember motherless children, others in orphanages and children used for cheap labour during the children's day celebration". He further enjoined African leaders to preserve and properly impart African cultural values to children and to show adequate care for them, noting that "the world can never have peace, if we do not take good care of our children".
 

Mugged boys may become criminals
Today's schoolboy mugging victims could become tomorrow’s vicious young Rolex raiders, a senior Scotland Yard commander said yesterday. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Tim Godwin, who heads Scotland Yard’s drive against street crime, said that the effects of a robbery on a child could be more profound than is seen in adults.
“As a result the only circumstances the child can see to survive is to become the hardest character on the block. Some of these graduate to be come very hard-core criminals,” he said.
Drawing on police research on youth crime in the wake of the murder last year of Damilola Taylor, 10, he said: “There are some children aged between seven and ten who become serial victims and are robbed and bullied.”
Mr Godwin admitted that police may not have been taking the problems of street crime among children as seriously as they should have done.
Last year Scotland Yard recorded its highest level of street crime at 50,000 offences but the true figure could even higher, Mr Godwin said. 
 

Brits Consider Alcoholism More Serious than Illicit Drug Addiction
A new report shows that Britons consider alcoholism a bigger problem than illicit drug misuse, UPI reported May 24. "We're hoping that issuing our report during the election campaign -- at a time when it can be circulated to candidates of all political persuasions -- will help to throw the spotlight on alcohol problems and encourage much-needed action," said Eric Appleby, director of Alcohol Concern, the charity which published the report.
According to the survey, 79 percent of Britons said the government should do more to address alcohol dependency. In addition, 70 percent believed the United Kingdom would be a "healthier and better place to live" if alcohol drinking was lowered.
"Alcohol abuse needs to be presented, and repositioned, as an irresponsible and dangerous thing -- in much the same way that the tobacco industry has been targeted," the report stated.
The report also found that twice as many people are dependent on alcohol than all other drugs, including prescription drugs.
 

 4 June 2001 

Violence Plagues Youth Sports
Excitement suddenly turned to fear for the 49ers youth football team as players ran off the field holding their stomachs and began vomiting violently on the sideline.
Parents and coaches helped the eight boys, ages 12 to 14, into cars and headed to the hospital, ending the practice for a championship game a few days later.
No one knew it at the time, but the sick 49ers had been poisoned, casualties in an epidemic of parental rage sweeping through youth sports.
Coaches are being threatened, referees assaulted and kids hurt more than ever by the parents of some of the estimated 30 million young players in organized sports.
From parents brawling at a T-ball game in Florida while 4- and 5-year-old children watched to a father being beaten to death at a hockey game in Massachusetts, anger is growing.
Leagues are responding by banning rowdy parents from the stands, holding silent games and trying to teach coaches and parents how to behave.
When that fails, authorities are putting the worst offenders in jail.
``From road rage to airplane rage to cell phone rage, children in sports aren't immune to all of this. Now we have sideline rage,'' said Fred Engh, head of the National Alliance for Youth Sports.
 

Rise in Single American Indian Moms 
Amid the exodus of youth from the Plains are four Dakota counties with sobering similarities: They are among the nation's youngest, they have startlingly high numbers of single mothers and all are on American Indian reservations.
Shannon County, on the Pine Ridge reservation, had the highest percentage of children under 18 living with single mothers in the United States last year - 21.4 percent, more than double the statewide average.
Nearby Todd County was second and Buffalo County was fifth. North Dakota's Sioux County was ranked fourth, with 19 percent of its households headed by single moms.
"Seems low to me," said Jeff Sheets, who lives on the Standing Rock reservation and serves as Sioux County's prosecutor.
He said there are many reasons for the situation, including "almost zero" employment opportunities on the reservation and religious prohibitions against birth control.
 

Youths surrender after uprising at Nevada detention center
Teen-age inmates were locked down Friday after a disturbance at a maximum security youth correctional facility outside Las Vegas.
"We've got them secured," said Jason MacIntyre, who became administrator of the Summit View Youth Correctional Center less than a month ago.
Some inmates climbed to a rooftop and could be seen brandishing metal pieces of air conditioning equipment and waving T-shirts before the standoff ended without further incident about 1:30 p.m., police said.
No serious injuries were reported. Administrators and police said one teen reinjured an ankle, others complained of eye, nose and throat irritation from pepper spray and some received scrapes when they dismantled air conditioning units.
None required medical treatment, said Willie Smith, deputy Nevada Department of Youth Services administrator. 
 

South African AIDS Activist Dies
The AIDS death of a 12-year-old South African boy has evoked sympathy at home and abroad.
Nkosi Johnson's adoptive mother, Gail Johnson, says he died in his sleep early Friday. He had been confined to his bed since December when he suffered brain damage from seizures.
The chief of the United Nations AIDS program, Peter Piot, described the lad as a hero in the fight against AIDS for his efforts to remove the stigma associated with the disease.
Gail Johnson Former South African President Nelson Mandela said Nkosi had provided an example to all about how to endure such a disease.
The youth gained international attention last year when he addressed an international AIDS conference in Durban. He defended HIV positive people, especially children, and appealed for humanity in treating disease sufferers. He also urged the South African government to give anti-AIDS drugs to pregnant women, he was infected with the disease at birth and his mother later succumbed to AIDS.
 

 2 June 2001 

Canadian courts fail youth, human rights conference told
Canadian courts are failing the country's youth, particularly young aboriginals, a territorial court judge told an international conference on human rights Tuesday. Judge Heino Lilles said very little attention has been given to the rights of children, "the most vulnerable minority in society.
"Canada may not be a great place for young people and it's certainly not a great place for aboriginal youth," Lilles, who has been a judge for more than 13 years, told about 25 people. According to a 1991 study, for every youth placed in custody in England, Canada sent four into care. The same study found Canada sent more youths into custody than the United States.
"We generally pride ourselves for being different than Americans," Lilles said. "But as you can see here, Canada's rate is much higher." Lilles said it's been proved that punishing youth and placing them in custody doesn't reduce crime or make communities safer.
He called for a diversionary stream alongside the traditional court system where youth are funnelled out of court and into community service or another type of program. Currently, Canada only diverts 16 per cent of its youth cases. The rest are placed in government care or incarcerated. "RCMP don't like to divert charges. It's a lot easier to lay a charge and go to court," he said. "I'm not suggesting all police do that, but there definitely is a propensity across Canada."
In New Zealand, a country at the forefront of youth diversionary programs Lilles said, more than 88 per cent of youth are enrolled in a therapeutic aid program.
 

DSHS Unveils Plan to Improve Foster Care
An ambitious plan with the goal of achieving major reform of the Washington foster care system was released today by the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS). The Building a Future for Washington's Children: Foster Care Improvement Plan is a key component to the DSHS Kids Come First Action Agenda (www.dshs.wa.gov).
The improvement plan is being led by DSHS and will be made possible with support from Casey Family Programs (CFP) and assistance of key foster care and child welfare workers from throughout Washington State.
"Foster care is one of the most important elements of the child welfare system," said Rosie Oreskovich, assistant secretary for the DSHS Children's Administration. "It provides foster children with family connections essential to child and adolescent development. We want to create a support system where foster parents are mentored, trained and provided with the most recent information on child behavior and development. We want a system in which foster parents are supported during crises and have a voice in decisions made about children in their care.
"Without this, it will become even more difficult to retain and recruit foster parents and relatives, who are caregivers," she said.

Since start of programs, 25 percent fewer juvenile offenders
Two years ago, before an array of new juvenile justice programs had kicked in, 1,326 youths entered the four juvenile correctional facilities in Kansas.
Last year, with those programs in full swing, the number of youths admitted to the correctional facilities fell by more than 25 percent.
That is the earliest measure of how the state has fared with its new system of dealing with juvenile offenders. The initiative, entrusted to the Juvenile Justice Authority, placed the focus on crime prevention and early intervention.
 

Boot camps for unruly kids have pros, cons
Laura Martinez had tried everything from punishment to counseling in an attempt to straighten out her misbehaving 14-year-old son, Ariel, who was skipping school, disobeying and talking back to her. Nothing worked.
Then Martinez saw a daytime TV talk show featuring a boot camp for teens. On the show, rebellious teens were transformed, seemingly overnight, by tough-talking, fatigue-clad drill instructors who shouted in the kids' faces, made them march like soldiers and taught them to respect their elders.
Last December, Martinez, a Chicago saleswoman and married mother of three, sent Ariel to the About Face Boot Camp in rural North Carolina, at a cost of about $1,000 for two weeks' care. The camp, run by former Marine Raymond Moses, has been featured on the Jenny Jones talk show.
"I was scared at first," said Ariel, who had to have his hair cut and was made to clean bathrooms, sweep floors, jog and march in military drills. "They would yell at you if you got them mad, if you didn't do what you're supposed to do."
If you did what you were told, though, the instructors would be nice and tell jokes, said Ariel, who learned "not to take things for granted," especially TV, a luxury he especially missed while at the rustic camp.
When Ariel came home, said Laura Martinez, "he was good for about two weeks." Then his old behaviors came back, leaving Martinez feeling that two weeks at boot camp was not enough time to change her son's ways.
"It was a waste of money," she said, sighing, adding that she wishes instead that there were a boot camp or similar program closer to Chicago, where she could place Ariel for a longer period.

Demand by parents for private boot camps for teens has soared in recent years, driven by daytime TV reality shows hosted by Maury Povich, Jenny Jones and others. Frustrated parents are encouraged to look upon such camps as a solution to problems with their teens--despite the fact that research has shown boot camps to be ineffective at best when it comes to changing teen behavior, critics say.
Larry Brendtro, a professor emeritus of special education at Augustana College in South Dakota, has written several books about youth at risk and heads Reclaiming Youth, a training institute for professionals who work with delinquent children. Brendtro said that though some children "have received at least short-term benefits from the discipline and high expectations of boot camp," many other youths have had much less positive experiences.
"The public popularity of a drill instructor in a Smokey the Bear hat compelling a smart-aleck teen to do push-ups obscures the system by which these programs run," Brendtro said. "A boot camp only functions as a bullying adult instills fear and then riles up the cadets to harass resistant peers. If these behaviors were used in any other normal community setting, they would be seen as assault and abuse."
Brendtro, too, said that research has shown "no enduring crime-prevention benefits of boot camps."
 

 1 June 2001 

Africa Child Labor Numbers on Rise
Eighty million children in Africa are forced to work - some as prostitutes or miners - creating one of the world's most serious child labor problems, delegates at a forum on child labor said Wednesday.
And the number of these child laborers - children 5 to 14 years old - could rise to 100 million by 2015, said Tim De Meyer of the International Labor Organization, a Geneva-based U.N. agency.
De Meyer and others spoke at the Pan-African Forum on the Future of Children. The gathering, attended by 53 African nations, is seeking to adopt an ``common African position'' to represent the continent in a special U.N. General Assembly session on children in September.
The delegates said that child trafficking is the most insidious form of child labor because it often leads to slavery. However, the scope of child trafficking is difficult to determine because countries involved don't keep records and frequently deny there is a problem.
But UNICEF said 200,000 children are trafficked across West and Central African borders alone every year by smuggling rings preying on poor rural families hoping for a better life for their kids.
In this trade, Meera Sethi of the International Migration Organization said, children are used for prostitution, begging, work on construction sites, plantations or in mines.
``Many of these children end up as victims of modern day slavery or forced labor,'' Sethi said. ``They are deprived of food, denied basic medical care, denied their wages, abused, beaten, raped, suffer from medical and physical trauma and many pay the ultimate price: death.''
``There is not a single country on the continent that is spared,'' she said, with most nations serving as suppliers, receivers or transit points. Trafficking of children to Gulf and European Union countries is also on the rise, she said.

UK: Children of violent parents must be expelled, say heads
'Something has gone wrong in society over the years' School fights payout order over sacked head Internet for Schools
HEAD teachers demanded the right yesterday to expel pupils whose parents attack teachers after the number of assaults on senior staff doubled in the past year. Increasing social problems and poor parenting, often by people with bad memories of school themselves, were some of the explanations given for the surge of anger towards head teachers. Attacks were not always by poor families in inner cities but also happened in rural and more prosperous areas.
One primary head spoke of her sense of failure after being hit eight times in the face by the mother of an eight-year-old who had been temporarily excluded for holding a knife to the throat of a classmate. Last week the parents of an 11-year-old sent home for wearing a nose ring were jailed for nine months for causing whiplash injuries to the head teacher in her study.
Physical attacks on heads or deputies are running at more than two a week during term time against members of National Association of Head Teachers, its general secretary, David Hart, said yesterday. There had been 88 physical assaults on members in the past year and a further 52 serious threats of violence, of which 70 per cent had been carried out by parents.
Assaults had doubled in 12 months, he said. But these figures were only the "tip of the iceberg" as many violent incidents were not recorded but accepted as "part of the scene". Since January l999, the union has recovered £350,000 in criminal injury compensation and is about to claim a further £500,000 for injured heads and deputies.
 

N. Ireland: Education of young people in care 'needs to improve'
HALF the young people in care in Northern Ireland leave school with no qualifications, it was revealed today. This disturbing statistic is contained in a new report by the children's charity Barnardo's based on the experiences of young people across the UK.
The researchers also found that fewer than 20% of young people in public care in Ulster go on to further education, compared with 68% of the general population, and between 50% and 80% are unemployed between the ages of 16 and 25.
The report stated that a culture of low expectations is to blame for the gulf between their educational attainment and that of their peers.
Barnardo's has called for the educational attainment of young people in care to be a higher priority for all the agencies involved.
Better Education, Better Futures is due to be officially launched at a seminar in Belfast Castle tomorrow.
It puts forward some practical measures designed to improve the quality of education for all children in public care.
 

US Experts Say Many Anti-Bullying Programs Don't Work
Experts say many school anti-bullying programs are ineffective in preventing violence, but there are some that have been proven through scientific research, Youth Crime Alert reported in its May issue. Santana High School in California, site of a recent school shooting, had an anti-bullying program in place that was funded through a $137,000 grant from the U.S. Justice Department. Experts are not surprised that the program didn't stop the violence. As Joanne McDaniel, interim director for the Center for the Prevention of School Violence (CPSV) explains, many schools implement anti-bullying programs that confront the bully, rather than take a school-wide approach.
Some programs, though, have been successful in reducing harassment and improving students' perceptions of school safety. McDaniel said these programs involve teachers, principals and everyone associated with the school, including janitors, cafeteria workers, and crossing guards.
One such program that works is the Bullying Prevention Program, designed by the CPSV. The program has shown to reduce cases of bullying or harassment by 50 percent.
Experts also are concerned that schools are concentrating anti-bullying efforts on the high-school level, where they see the biggest problems. But they recommend focusing efforts on elementary and middle-school students, where positive changes in behavior are most likely to occur.
 

Abuse Of Gay Students Rampant — Report
Gay teenagers are often subject to so much bullying at school that they are not receiving an adequate education, according to a report released Wednesday in Los Angeles by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
"The U.S. school system gets a failing grade when it comes to providing a safe place for gay students to get an education," according to Michael Bochenek, co-author of the "Hatred in the Hallways" report.
"Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender kids face a greater risk of bullying than any other students in American high schools. That has to stop."
The report is the result of interviews conducted with several hundred youth, parents, teachers, counselors and administrators in seven states, including California.
Students told interviewers that they spend an enormous amount of energy attempting to become invisible -- by avoiding crowded hallways, cutting gym classes and otherwise be in what one student described as "survival mode."
California lesbian student Nikki L. said "everyone thinks I have a problem."
"They blame me, they blame my mom," she said. "They want me to be quiet. But I'm a lesbian. I feel like I've always known it. But I didn't get into trouble 'til the seventh grade. I told a friend. Next thing I know, everyone seems to know."
Human Rights Watch urged school districts and state and federal legislators to crack down on harassment based on sexual orientation by passing laws and providing adequate monitoring.
Superintendent Roy Romer and board member Caprice Young of the Los Angeles Unified School District were among those on hand for release of the report at Fairfax High School, one of the participating campuses.
"Every member of the school community has to work toward making all of our schools a welcoming place for learning," Young said. "This is not just about gay kids, but about all kids and the way we live together in mutual respect."