Do not shirk responsibility - Parents urged
The Greater Accra Regional Director of the Department of Gender, Mrs Comfort Ablomuti, has urged parents and guardians to take responsibility for their children and wards and provide them with their needs.
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According to her, some parents take advantage of the government’s social interventions to provide free incentives to children to shirk their responsibilities.
For instance, she said due to the free feeding programme, some parents did not give their children or wards food when they go to school.
Parents must take responsibility
Mrs Ablomuti was speaking in Accra at a forum organised by the Coalition on the Rights of the Child, a non-governmental organisation, to discuss commercial sexual exploitation of children.
The forum, was intended to deliberate on ways to find solutions to eradicate the commercial sexual exploitation of children.
According to Mrs Ablomuti, most parents also blamed their irresponsible behaviour on poverty which she said was no excuse for them to abandon their children on the streets to engage in all kinds of activities including commercial sex.
“Parents must be up and doing. They must be responsible and not hide behind the government’s interventions. They must know where the ‘free’ ends and where their responsibility begins,’’ she stated.
Way forward
For her part, the Executive Director of Jil Foundation, Mrs Josephine Konadu Koduah, explained that children were mostly the victims of commercial sexual exploitation because their services were cheaper and they were likely to be free from all kinds of sexually transmitted diseases.
Most children, she said, were scared of reporting cases of sexual exploitation or expose the people behind the exploitation because they (perpetrators) were their sources of livelihood and therefore dreaded the consequences.
She mentioned that institutions that were in place to deal with issues related to child exploitation were inadequately resourced making it difficult for them to act.
Moreover, she said, there were no defined child legal systems in place while relevant institutions did not also have a legal framework to operate.
She also raised the issue of lack of shelters as one of the constraints to protect children who were rescued from all forms of abuses and sexual exploitation.
Mrs Koduah, therefore, said there was the need for children to be empowered and educated on what they should look out for in suspected cases of sexual exploitation.
She further suggested that policy makers should help make legal procedures friendly to enable parents to go through court procedures when their children fall victim to sexual exploitations.
Institutions such as the Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit (DOVVSU) must be well resourced to enable them to work effectively and efficiently, she said, adding that the laws must be implemented and enforced.