According to a recent report, 45 million Bangladeshi children under the age of 15 are regularly subjected to violence at home, which makes up 89% of the total target demographic.
As such, the government’s recent move to recruit 6,000 new social workers in order to enhance the efficient delivery of child protection services has, perhaps, been long overdue. However, the additional workers stands to give our child protection efforts a boost of 200%, bringing up the workforce to a total number of 9,000. These numbers are certainly laudable.
Children in Bangladesh are less safe than children in other nations, both inside and outside their homes. Over three million children are trapped in child labour, to start off, while child marriage is rampant throughout our rural communities. Both physical and mental abuse are normalized in schools -- so much so that there are clusters of parents that think that the more corporal punishment a school doles out, the better it is for the child.
This has been an untenable situation from the get-go.
Aside from increasing the number of child protection service providers, meaningful changes to our child protection framework, at a policy level, is imperative. Corporal punishment has no place in our society, and it needs to be made an illegal offense of the highest order. Regular inspection of industrial and commercial sites has to allow the mandatory provision of checking for child labour, while parental abuse of any kind cannot be tolerated.
The children of today are the architects of our tomorrow. To fail them would be to fail our future.
