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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs |
IRAQ: School attendance falling due to fear of abduction
BAGHDAD, 7 October 2003 (IRIN) - At a time when the aid community is scaling down in the country due to deteriorating security, reports of children being kidnapped for ransom in and around the capital, Baghdad, are having a detrimental effect on education, according to a British based NGO.
"Approximately 50 percent of children are not going to school because their parents are too scared to send them, having heard these stories about children being kidnapped and held for ransom," a spokesman for Save the Children UK, Paul Hetherington, told IRIN from London on Tuesday.
In mid-May, an assessment by the NGO of three Baghdad schools found attendance to be less than 50 percent. The survey attributed non-attendance by girls mainly to insecurity and fear of kidnapping.
School attendance had increased by the first week of June to approximately 75 percent as families arranged for their daughters to travel to and from school in groups, and as more male relatives began escorting them to school. However, there remained widespread fear among parents who were refusing to take chances as stories of abductions continued to spread panic around the city.
Last week, Christian Aid issued a statement saying child kidnaps were increasing. "We have been told that this is happening more often now and we are very concerned about it, even though this is second-hand information," Christian Aid's emergency programme officer for Iraq, Oliver Birch, told IRIN from London.
He had just returned from a meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, where he was informed of several incidents of children being kidnapped. "I was told about an incident in Baghdad where 20 children were recently found in a house," he said. The lack of job opportunities could be one reason for the rise in kidnaps. "I was told by the patriarch of the Assyrian Eastern Church, His Holiness Maredde II, that unemployment is the biggest problem and that the economic situation was pushing people into crime," he said.
Staff in Iraq working for Norwegian Church Aid, which also works on child protection, have also expressed concern over the kidnaps. "We heard recently that a teenage boy was taken from a house near our office by four armed men and has not yet returned home," the country representative for Norwegian Church Aid in Iraq, Tore Winsvold, told IRIN.
"In most cases parents are forced to sell possessions so they can pay the ransom," he said, adding that security must be improved in order to prevent such incidents from happening. "The police and occupying forces need to act on this to prevent such incidents," he stressed.
In July this year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report, following research on this issue particularly as it related to females. The report stated that the abduction of women and girls from the streets was a new phenomenon, according to Iraqis. "This never happened before the war," was an often repeated refrain, the report said.
"Throughout the city, Iraqis talk of women and girls being seized from public locations, particularly while walking down the street, even in broad daylight. Out of the 30 or so women and girls HRW interviewed in Baghdad, virtually every one cited fear of abduction and sexual violence as justification for not returning to or looking for work, holding children back from school and, in many cases, preventing young women and girls from leaving the house," HRW said.
The report documented that in May, women and girls were rarely seen outside in Baghdad, even during daylight hours when male shoppers and workers crowded the streets and other public places. Although they were more visible by the end of June, women continued to tell HRW that they limited their movements and remained afraid.
HRW obtained credible information on 25 cases of sexual violence and abduction, and interviewed four victims of rape and abduction in Baghdad between May and June 2003. Two of the cases involved girls under 16 years of age. At one police station HRW visited, Iraqi police officers said that before the war they typically received one rape complaint every three months, but had seen several cases during the few weeks since the station had been reopened after the war.
In one account, 49-year-old Salma M. told HRW that armed men had abducted her from her home in early May. They gang-raped her at an unknown location before dropping her in an unfamiliar district of Baghdad the following morning. The attack seems to have been meted out by individuals seeking reprisal against persons associated with Saddam Hussein’s government, according to HRW.
In addition to this case and others, HRW received several reports of other women abducted and taken out of Baghdad. For example, US military police reported that on 17 June 2003, two women came to New Baghdad Police Station and reported that their companion had just been abducted while they were walking down the street.
Although military police went to the scene, they failed to find the perpetrators. "Iraqi police in the station failed to take a report from the women, and only referred them to a police station in the district where they said the kidnapping had taken place (although the location was closer to the police station to which the girls appealed)," the report said.
Themes: (IRIN) Conflict
[ENDS]
This material comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this item, please retain this credit and disclaimer. Quotations or extracts should include attribution to the original sources. All materials copyright © UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2003
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