In many Ghanaian homes, a familiar situation still hangs in the air whenever a child is tempted to speak about what happens behind closed doors: “3fie asem, 3nkɔ abonten” what happens in the house should not go outside. For generations, this rule has protected families from shame. It has also allowed perpetrators to escape the law and denied justice for the victims. As Ghana gears up to mark National Children’s Day on August 31, 2026, the country is being asked to confront an uncomfortable question: how many children have suffered in silence because the walls of “fie asem” were built higher than their right to an environment free from abuse, exploitation and harm?
This year’s commemoration, organised by the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, through its Department of Children, is built around a Regional Forum for Children under the theme “Amplifying Children’s Voices on Abuse in Ghana: Promoting Child Protection, Participation, and Advocacy.” This is a theme that reads, at first glance, like a policy slogan. Spend a little time with the numbers behind it, however, and it becomes clear that this year’s celebration is less about ceremony and more about confronting a crisis that has been hiding in plain sight.
A crisis hidden in plain sight
The statistics tell a troubling story. Despite significant progress in child rights legislation and advocacy, violence against children remains alarmingly widespread in Ghana. According to UNICEF and national child protection studies, as many as 94 per cent of children aged 1 to 14 years have experienced physical punishment or psychological aggression at home, making violent discipline one of the most normalised forms of abuse in the country. Sexual violence presents an equally disturbing reality. More than one in ten Ghanaian girls aged 15 to 19 report having experienced at least one act of sexual violence, a statistic that points to both the prevalence of abuse and the barriers many survivors face in seeking justice.
The scale of abuse is not only a humanitarian concern but also an economic one. UNICEF estimates that approximately 3.4 million children in Ghana have experienced physical or emotional abuse, with the financial burden on the country exceeding US$200 million annually, equivalent to about one per cent of national GDP. These are resources that could otherwise be invested in education, healthcare, and social development.
Schools, which should provide safe spaces for learning and development, are not immune. Research conducted by UNICEF found that more than half of adolescents reported being beaten at home regularly, while 34 per cent indicated that they had been physically punished by a teacher within the previous month. Bullying and verbal abuse also remain common experiences for many learners, affecting both academic performance and mental well-being. The digital age has introduced new dangers. As internet access expands across Ghana, cases of online sexual exploitation and abuse are rising rapidly. UNICEF reports that 23,626 cyber tip-line reports linked to child sexual abuse material were recorded in Ghana in 2024, a dramatic increase from just 750 reports in 2016.
This sharp rise highlights the growing need for digital safety education and stronger online protection measures.
Why children stay silent
None of this happens because Ghana lacks laws to protect its children. The country has built a robust legal and policy architecture around child rights over the past two decades. The gap, however, lies elsewhere in the space between a child’s experience and a child’s willingness, or ability, to speak about it. Fear of punishment, the shame that culture and tradition attaches to making public or “airing family matters,” a deep-rooted acceptance of corporal discipline as normal parenting, and reporting systems that are simply too distant, too intimidating or too slow for a frightened child to navigate all of these, combine to keep abuse locked inside the home, exactly where “fie asem” has always insisted it should stay.
Behind every statistic is a child whose voice may never have been heard. Many cases remain unreported, concealed by fear, stigma, family pressure, and deeply rooted cultural norms that discourage children from speaking openly about abuse. The result is a crisis that is often hidden in plain sight, affecting millions while remaining largely invisible in everyday public discourse.
Children are not consulted enough when programmes and interventions are being designed to promote their rights and protect them. This, child protection advocates argue, results in a protection system that can miss the realities children live with, the specific fears that keep a girl from reporting a trusted relative, or the reasons a boy in a rural community might never mention what a teacher did to him after school.
Turning the theme into practice
This is precisely the gap that this year’s Regional Forum for Children is designed to close. Rather than a single ceremony in the capital, the commemoration has been structured as a rolling series of regional sessions moving across all sixteen regions of the country over roughly a week, giving children in Bolgatanga as much of a platform as those in Accra. In each region, children are expected to sit with facilitators trained in child-safety methods, share their experiences of abuse and neglect in their own words, and offer recommendations on what protection should look like from where they stand.
Alongside the regional sessions, the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection and its partners plan a coordinated media push: press briefings, radio interviews, television coverage and social media campaigns intended to carry children’s testimonies beyond the forum halls and into the national conversation, well past the day itself. A formal press release to media houses is meant to anchor that coverage, ensuring that what children say in these sessions does not simply evaporate once the event closes.
The ambition, according to the concept behind the commemoration, is to gather first-hand evidence and recommendations that can directly inform policy and programme design; to strengthen collaboration between children, schools, government agencies, traditional and religious leaders, and civil society; and most importantly, to promote reporting and response mechanisms that are actually built for children to use and not merely mechanisms that exist on paper for adults to reference.
What success would look like
If the forum works as intended, its success will not be measured by how many regions were visited or how many children sat in a room. It will be measured months later, in whether a girl in Chiana in the Kassena-Nankana West District of the Upper East region, feels she can tell a trusted teacher what is happening at home; whether a boy in the Western North region knows there is a helpline he can call without his family finding out; whether communities begin to see a child’s complaint not as a betrayal of “fie asem” but as an act of courage deserving protection, not punishment.
Breaking a saying as old as “3fie asem, 3nkɔ abonten” will not happen through one week of regional dialogues, however well organised. But every national conversation that treats children as witnesses to their own lives, rather than subjects to be discussed without them, chips away at the silence a little further. This year’s National Children’s Day theme is, at its core, a wager that if Ghana keeps handing children the microphone, more of them will eventually find the courage to use it and more adults will finally learn to listen.
For a country where nine in every ten children have known some form of abuse or violence at home, that wager may be one of the most important Ghana makes this decade.
The author Ernest Wemuye Adanyina, is a Public Relations Officer at the Department of Children, Ministry of Gender Children and Social Protection
