In an attempt to escape the risk of abduction from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and a general climate of insecurity, an estimated 30,000 children in northern Uganda commute to sleep in urban areas or into the middle of larger camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs). Most of the “night-commuter” children, as they are known, commute without the protection of adult family members and face the risk of harassment, physical abuse, sexual exploitation and gender-based violence, including rape. However, the “night commuter” phenomenon is symptomatic of the broader issues relating to the protection of civilians in northern Uganda and illustrates how these can impact on family and community life. A UNICEF assessment in Gulu indicates that “as many as 25 percent of child “night commuters” were leaving their homes nightly due to family issues, rather than the specific fear of LRA abduction. Working on this issue is a way of generating awareness of the broader human rights concerns in northern Uganda.
After almost two decades of conflict in northern Uganda, the human rights of children are violated on a daily basis. Children have suffered disproportionately in the conflict. As many as 25,000 children have been abducted by the LRA since the conflict began, for use as soldiers, sex slaves and porters. 7,500 are girls with 1,000 having conceived children during captivity. An unknown number have been killed, while over 15,000 have escaped or been rescued by government soldiers – the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Force (UPDF) – since the armed conflict began in 1986.
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2 comments:
I'd like to know where you read this. I have heard of this before, or I think there was a movie made recently based on these kids. I am disheartened at the thought of young kids trying to escape in the middle of the night to avoid fighting in the army or worse. I was just having this conversation with my mother this morning. She wants to know why we don't just build a fence around the u.s. so as to avoid having other countries problems brought into this country. I told her we should make sure to build that fence all the way to the top of the ozone layer so as to keep out their pollution too. We must work with everyone, not just regarding environment issues but civil rights and economic issues as sooner or later the united states will be affected by all this in one way or another. More importantly we should understand that we have the ability to help, maybe we can't change everything but these are not isolated problems and the united states is not an isolated country. I don't know if that is naive to think but we are all on this planet and we should try and work together instead of separate.
Yes, Farzenah, part of what's so interesting about your entries is that these dramatic events receive almost no airplay and little print coverage. One has to dig for them a bit, no?
Where do you dig?
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