Barbara Litzlbeck
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 14 2005 (IPS) – Each year, more than 50 million children go unregistered at birth, depriving them of basic services like health care and education, and making them more vulnerable to exploitation later in life.
In its annual report, The State of the World s Children 2006: Excluded and Invisible , released Wednesday, the U.N. children s agency UNICEF estimates that 55 percent of all births in the developing world, excluding China, are not formally registered.
Lack of access is among the most common reasons for parents not to register their child.
Birth registration needs to be simple, inexpensive and close to home. When this is not the case, the family may have to travel long distances to reach government offices which handle birth registration, said Alexandra Yuster, a senior adviser with UNICEF.
This travel may be unaffordable as well as impractical for parents given their work and child care obligations, she said.
Besides illiteracy and practical obstacles, a simple lack of information also contributes to the high level of unregistered births.
Related IPS Articles
Registration is often considered to be no more than a legal formality, unrelated to child development, health, education or protection, the report says.
But the consequences of non-registration can be disastrous for children, since they are often denied health care and other social assistance. Not having one s birth registered can follow a child throughout life, Yuster told IPS.
The most severe consequences occurring in childhood include exclusion from school or, heartbreakingly, from final exams which allow children who have attended school to get their qualifications recognised.
And if they come into conflict with the law, children without birth certificates run the risk of being prosecuted as adults. Plan International, which works in 45 developing countries to alleviate poverty and help children, cites the example of two teenagers in the Philippines who were sentenced to death because they were unable to prove that they were under 18.
Beyond childhood, living without a birth certificate prevents adults from enjoying the rights of citizenship and protection of the state.
This affects their ability to apply for a formal job or a passport, get a marriage license or vote, Yuster told IPS.
In Bangladesh, only seven percent of all children are registered at birth. The rate of documentation in Afghanistan, Uganda and Tanzania is even worse, at four to six percent.
In addition to exclusion from essential services, unregistered and undocumented children are extremely vulnerable to exploitation, violence and abuse. The UNICEF report, which cites discrimination, poverty and HIV/AIDS as root causes for the exclusion of children, says that undocumented children become easy victims for trafficking, child labour, prostitution and criminal gangs.
An estimated 171 million children are working in hazardous conditions and with dangerous machinery, making gravel in Latin America and bricks in South Asia, or quarrying stone in sub-Saharan Africa.
The report says that 8.4 million children toil in the worst forms of child labour, including prostitution and debt bondage, where children are exploited in slave-like conditions to pay off a debt.
Among children in forced labour, those in domestic service are some of the most invisible, always at risk of sexual and physical exploitation. Hidden from sight, these children are completely at the mercy of their employers. All too often, they are paid little or nothing and even the food provided is often nutritionally inadequate, vastly inferior to the meals eaten by the employing family .
The report says that domestic service often becomes a 24-hour job, with the child perpetually on call and subject to the whims of all family members .
In El Salvador, researchers found that 66 percent of girls in domestic service had been psychologically and physically abused, many of them sexually.
In plain sight, but still largely excluded from society, are the tens of millions of homeless children around the world. In Mexico City alone, there are over 11,000 children living and working on the streets.
Poverty and lack of access to education are the main contributors to child labour, including on the street, said Yuster. These children live in an environment polluted not only by smog, heavy traffic and extreme poverty, but also by violence and drugs.
The report notes that more than one million children also live in detention, the vast majority awaiting trial for minor offences. Many of these children suffer gross neglect, violence, and trauma.
When societies allow children to be so excluded that they grow up on the street, no one wins. Children who could have had a future as productive citizens have little future at all: early exposure to violence, to the criminal justice system and to society s scorn will have precisely the opposite effect, she told IPS.
The report calls on governments to create systems to monitor the nature and extent of abuses against children, and to pass legislation that matches international commitments to child welfare. Legislation that fosters discrimination must be changed or abolished, it says, and laws to prosecute those who harm children must be consistently enforced.
UNICEF also recommends more child-focused budgets and the strengthening of institutions that serve children for example, eliminating the requirement of a birth certificate to attend school.
Meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) depends on reaching vulnerable children throughout the developing world, said UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman at the report s launch in London. There cannot be lasting progress if we continue to overlook the children most in need the poorest and most vulnerable, the exploited and the abused.
The eight MDGs include a 50 percent reduction in poverty and hunger; universal primary education; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; the promotion of gender equality; environmental sustainability; reversal of the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; and a global partnership for development between the rich and poor.
