If Children’s
Lives Are Precious, Which Children?
By Derek Summerfield
January 06, 2015 "ICH"
- "Lancet"
- Homeless street children are
regularly murdered and tortured in
Brazil, Guatemala, Columbia, and
elsewhere. In one notorious case in
July, 1993, off-duty policemen
opened fire on 50 children huddled
together near Candelaria church in
central Rio de Janeiro; six died
immediately and two others were
taken to a beach and executed. When
these events were reported on the
radio, most listeners voiced their
approval, as did 15% of respondents
in a community survey a week later.
Many ordinary decent people in
Brazil, who love their own children,
do not refer to street children as
“children”, and when they die they
are not called “angels” like other
children, but presunto (ham).1
Such events and
attitudes symbolise much wider
issues. In 1991, about 1000 street
children were murdered in Brazil,
150 000 died before their first
birthday through poverty, poor
sanitation, and lack of health care,
and a further 2 million were
malnourished. Income disparities
between rich and poor in Brazil are
now greater even than in Bangladesh.
On other continents too, Western-led
economic orthodoxies put pressure on
the ways of life of the least
protected, and health and education
standards continue to deteriorate.2
WHO says that by 2000, a third of
the world’s children will be
undernourished.3
Since 1989, 2
million children have died in
conflicts, the underlying causes of
which were frequently linked to the
geopolitical and business alliances
made by the West with elites
entrenched in unstable and
inequitable societies.4
The moral tone is set by the UN
Security Council, whose members are
the world’s major arms manufacturers
and who must know that these weapons
are mostly for internal oppression.
Leaders come and go, some with Nobel
Peace Prizes, but the underlying
thrust of Western policy has been
consistent for centuries: what
evidence is there that the lives of
non-Western children weigh any more
than they did in the eras of slavery
and Empire? 30 years of corruption
and vicious misrule at home and in
East Timor did not dent Western
perceptions of Indonesia’s Suharto
as a reliable ally and good
capitalist, as was Mobutu in Zaire.
Western governments started to talk
about human rights and democracy
only in the last weeks of his rule,
probably when they saw that his fall
was inevitable. With a successor in
place, this talk subsided as quickly
as it arose. The same calculations
shape relations with Netanyahu in
Israel or Zeroual in Algeria. Why
does the link between rising infant
mortality rates and World Bank
prescriptions not haunt the
reputation of Western economics and
of the officials who carry it out?
Who is shamed by the deaths of
thousands of Iraqi children since
1991 as a result of the Western
embargo?
Yet those
responsible are unremarkable
individuals who come home to the
embraces of their children
uncontaminated by thoughts of
what their day’s work might do
to children in Turkey, Algeria,
or El Salvador; children whom
they perceive as “other”. Health
professionals too practise moral
relativism. An Israeli
psychologist, a child-trauma
expert, told me that she could
not bring herself to treat a
Palestinian child because “I
would always be thinking that
his or her father was a
terrorist”. Polarised attitudes
may be inevitable in societies
with endemic conflict, but the
result is a kind of blindness
with consequences of its own.
Language, for example, is used
to distance and debase those to
whom we do not extend our
notions of humanity and
fraternity. To call street
children in Brazil or Guatemala
“vermin” is to prepare the way
for atrocity, but is it so very
different to use “collateral
damage” for the shredding of
Iraqi children and their mothers
by Allied bombing during the
Gulf War?
It is an
aphoristic truth that both
individuals and whole societies run
the moral economy they can afford,
or want to afford. The evils of
slavery, and of children working
15-hour shifts in coal mines, were
only “discovered” when evolving
patterns of industrialisation
rendered these forms of labour
unprofitable. The question is
whether we are willing to pay the
price of extending to all the
world’s children the sensibilities
we apply to our own. For if not, and
if those who are not “our” children
are expendable, let us dispense with
false sentimentality and say so.
Over the body of one street child in
Brazil was daubed, the more
grotesque for its kernel of truth:
“I killed you because you had no
future”.
