Child Abduction Must Worry Every Upright Person
- Category: Children
- Date 28-05-2006
- 296 views
Child abduction incidents have been making rounds in the media of late and raising concern among parents as regards the safety of this country’s children. Take an example of the paedophile suspect Mohammed Hassan of Kiteto in Manyara Region who was arrested as he attempted to abduct five-year Leila Abdi.
He was later discovered to have taken hostage another girl, six-year Samiyu Ali from Tandika, keeping her in a guest house in Dodoma. Fortunately, the two girls are back at home, reunited with their loving parents. The total disappearance of the girls was imminent at the time of their rescue and this sends a powerful message to the parents, government and nation as a whole.
Rescuing the girls is not enough; it calls for rehabilitative measures to salvage the girls’ childhood normalcy and bliss as a foundation for refined adult life. They might be too young to describe their inner feelings after that gruelling encounter with the abductors, but we cannot assume that all they needed was merely to return home!
Scholars suggest that abducted children suffer emotionally and physically; having been subjected to strange conditions and personalities who demand their immediate adjustment to suit their motives. Abductors often use the stolen children both as objects and weapons, which leads to psychological brutalisation of the children, and hence destruction of their sense of trust in the world around them.
Rescued children will suffer significant damage; therefore, they desire psychosocial support. Think of Humud Abubakar who was kidnapped from Magomeni on April 27th and later used by his captors as a bargaining tool for a 5m/= ransom.
While under the abductor’s concealment, the child’s sense of attachment with his family is tampered with. Yet it is this attachment that influences a child’s physical, cognitive, and psychological development; dictating how the child will relate to the world, learn and form relationships throughout life.
Being taken hostage automatically stresses a child and arouses displacement whereby impulses of anger are redirected from the offender to a safer person, because the threat is too dangerous to confront. An abducted child may redirect his anger against his parents for not protecting him from a dangerous situation and may remain mutely unforgiving even after the rescue.
Alternatively, abduction might bind a child to the abuser. Many children are kidnapped for sexual exploitation, and often tend to identify strongly with the offenders, to the point of feeling intimate towards them. That is why most victims could grow up to behave like their abusers and commit similar offences.
Is your child safe?
Child trafficking is a reality and respects no status or place. Well-to-do and poor families are equally vulnerable, so all children are potential abductees, therefore government and communities share the duty to uphold firm child protection mechanisms and watch any suspicious persons that might endanger children.
Moreover, the world is a global village, so what happens across the ocean could also happen here. The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children indicates that strangers kidnap about 300 children a year in the United States of America.
If American evangelists are successfully exporting their religious brand to Africa; politicians dictating economic policies in our countries; American gays influencing us to respect homosexuality; then child abduction trends cannot be further from us. Perhaps we simply do not have the means to detect the vice; therefore, media reports are a mere tip of the iceberg.
It has been suggested that child abductions have been fuelled by intentions for miners and other businesspeople to sacrifice human life to reap impressive dividends. This could be one probability, but sex tourism has been cited as major cause of child abduction.
Some tourists travel abroad with less innocent intentions. Recent research suggests that a large number of children in many different holiday destinations worldwide are being sexually exploited for commercial gain. It is thus believed that most prostitutes do not engage in the trade out of choice but are involved as victims.
Anyhow, all children need protection whereby everyone should be watchful to make communities secure for children.
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen