Child Rights Glossary : D

DISABILITY
The needs and rights of disabled children are frequently overlooked, since they experience a double invisibility: of being a child and of being a disabled person. Lack of awareness means that unless disabled children are specifically mentioned, they become marginalised within the general children’s agenda.

Girls with impairments suffer still further discrimination: they are more likely not to survive, to be abandoned, to be discriminated against, to be excluded from education, to be deemed unmarriageable and to be excluded from motherhood and general participation in their society.

Disabled people are the poorest of the poor in every country in the world. Some 97 per cent of disabled children in developing countries are without any form of rehabilitation and 98 per cent without any education; they suffer more violence and abuse than other children and are often shut away in institutions, cupboards and sheds, and even starved to death.

Until recently, disability and child policies have been paternalistic, based on charitable interventions as opposed to rights. Neither disabled children nor children in general are used to being listened to, and society has strong negative expectations and assumptions concerning their perceived competence in expressing their views and participating in policy and planning.

Source: http://www.crin.org

Similar forms of discrimination is at the base of many of the violations of child rights, when specific groups of children face discrimination on account of their sex, colour, race, religion, political or other opinion, national, ethnic and social origin, property, disability, birth or other status.

Disabled children, for example, are often excluded from mainstream education. Children of minority, indigenous or migrant background face in a number of ways. They are disproportionately represented among juveniles who are imprisoned, less likely to access quality and relevant education, more likely to be recruited as child soldiers, trafficked, exposed to hazardous work and sexual exploitation. Creating an environment where girls and boys are respected and cared for equally in early childhood is the first step towards breaking cycles of discrimination and disadvantage.

The World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, from 31 August 2001 to 7 September 2001 in Durban, South Africa has special significance for children and youth.

According to Human Rights Watch Follow-up Report, Many children around the world experienced violence and discrimination as a regular part of their school experience. In some cases, school officials participated in acts of intolerance, ostracization, and violence directed at particular youth because of their gender, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, social group, or other status. In others, authorities failed to intervene to protect students from harassment and attacks by their classmates.

In many parts of the world, minority children did not have access to an education on equal terms with their peers from majority families. In some cases, minority children were placed in separate, inferior schools, or restricted to vocational curricula; in other instances, they were denied access to schools altogether.

In one case brought in July, a Jerusalem city counsellor submitted a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court on behalf of 117 school children who were refused enrolment in Jerusalem public schools, in violation of Israeli law. The petitioner alleged that up to 2,000 children had been turned away in 1999 and thousands more had never applied because they did not know they had a right to public education.

Human Rights Watch also received reports of discrimination against Greek children in Turkey, Turkish children in Greece, Roma children in Bulgaria, Albanian children in Macedonia, Rohingya children in Malaysia, Bidun children in Kuwait, the children of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere.

Girls in many countries endured sexual harassment and abuse in educational settings at the hands of teachers and other students. In South Africa, for example, a 1998 study by CIETafrica, an NGO researching sexual violence, found that one in every three Johannesburg girls experienced sexual violence at school; two thirds of those subjected to sexual violence did not report the abuse to anyone. Human Rights Watch interviews in March and April confirmed that sexual abuse and harassment of girls by teachers and other students is widespread.

Source: http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1/children/child6.html
http://www.crin.org

What are Drugs?
Understanding what drugs are is fundamental to understanding their potential abuse.
A psychoactive substance is something that people take to change the way they feel, think or behave. Some of these substances are called drugs, and others, like alcohol and tobacco, are considered dangerous but are not called drugs. The term drugs also covers a number of substances that must be used under medical supervision to treat illnesses.

For our purposes then, we will talk about drugs as those man-made or naturally occurring substances used without medical supervision basically to change the way a person feels, thinks or behaves so that they "can have fun."

In the past, most drugs were made from plants. That is, plants were grown and then converted into drugs such as coca paste, opium and marijuana. Over the years, these crude products were further processed to yield drugs like cocaine and heroin, and finally, in the 20th century, people found out how to make drugs from chemicals. These are called man-made, or synthetic, drugs and include speed, ecstasy, LSD, etc. These were initially manufactured for largely experimental reasons and only later were used for recreational purposes. Now, however, with the increased size and scope of the drug trade, people set out to invent drugs especially for recreational human consumption.

Designer drug cocktails appear and disappear with astonishing regularity. For the first time in human history, a whole industrial complex creates and produces drugs that are meant to be used outside and in defiance of social conventions for the sole purpose of “having fun.”

What's Wrong with Drug Abuse?
Substance abuse has many negative physiological health effects, ranging from minor issues like digestion problems or respiratory infections, to potentially fatal diseases, like AIDS and hepatitis C. Of course, the effects depend on the drug and on the amount, method and frequency of use. Some drugs are very addictive, like heroin, while others are less so. But the upshot is that regular drug abuse or sustained exposure to a drug - even for a short period of time - can cause physiological dependence, which means that when the person stops taking drugs, he/she experiences physical withdrawal symptoms and a craving for the drug.

Drug abuse also causes brain damage. Again, depending on the drug, the strength and character of this damage varies. But one thing is clear, drug abuse affects the way the brain functions and alters its responses to the world. That is what psychoactive means, after all, something that acts on your brain. How drug abuse will affect your behaviour, actions, feelings and motivations is unpredictable. By meddling in the natural ways the brain functions, abusers exposes themselves to risks they may not even have imagined.

Finally, drug abuse damages the ability of people to act as free and conscious beings, capable of taking action to fulfil their needs. How free drug abusers are when they have no control over their actions or reactions is debatable. What is unarguable is that by giving in to bio-chemical processes that are deviant, a drug abuser looses what makes humans admirable and unique.

Source: http://www.unodc.org/youthnet/youthnet_youth_drugs.html