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Stop the abuse, stop the fury

By Carolyn Davis
DEPUTY EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR

That's it. I've had it.

I'm fed up with seeing children around the world treated as though they were little more than empty cans to be kicked or crushed.

It was a photograph in yesterday's Inquirer, amplified by a series of photos on the New York Times front page, that pushed me beyond fury.

A 16-year-old Palestinian boy approaches an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank with something bulky underneath his sweater. It's a suicide bombers' vest.

Israeli soldiers help him to take it off via a robot, then make him strip to his skivvies to be sure he doesn't have another weapon. He doesn't look like a militant. He looks like a bewildered boy.

Afterward, his mother, Tamam Abdo, was quoted as saying, "Hussam left home this morning to school, and this was the first we heard of what happened . . . . To use a child like this is irresponsible, forbidden."

Thank you. But if such acts are so irresponsible and so forbidden, why do adults around the world so often and so purposely put children in dangerous circumstances?

Why did idiots from two gangs have a shoot-out near a North Philadelphia school when children were walking to class? Do gang members so lose their humanity, do their brains get so drunk with the feel of a finger on a trigger that they forget they once were innocents themselves?

What about the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services cases, in which youngsters died of neglect and abuse? What about all the children who die in the dark, or who continue to live quiet lives of suffering because the public learns only of the worst incidents?

Why, 7,100 miles away in northern Uganda, has a vicious crackpot named Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army been able to operate for 17 years, fighting the Ugandan government?

Kony is no brilliant military strategist, no charismatic figure. The man gets most of his "recruits" by snatching boys from nearby villages. He kidnaps girls to be domestic and sex slaves. He's said to have taken well more than 10,000 children during his futile, 17-year fight to run Uganda according to his twisted version of Christianity.

President Bush seems sincere when he talks about the plight of children in the United States and abroad who face the misfortunes of a lifetime before they get to their teens. Bush says he admires the Ugandan government for its anti-AIDS campaign. Uganda is an international darling now for its economic reforms. Uganda has some 50,000 soldiers and Kony is thought to have only 2,000 or fewer. So why hasn't he and his top aides been caught?

Let Bush lead the charge against Kony. It needn't cost great sums or take battalions of soldiers. Moral and financial pressure could be enough.

Two themes bind all these troubles:

1. No matter the locale, childhood as a stage of innocence is nearing extinction for far too many children. Adults should not accept that as a reality. Yet almost always, other causes grab the headlines, the money, the expertise, the attention span, until a child tragedy occurs.

2. Enormous problems surround endangered children - but that doesn't mean no progress can be made. It can. Break down the problems to manageable bits. Get active in a group. Tell state and federal legislators to make children's issues a high priority. Demand more of yourself, more of your government, as responsible custodians for those too young to care for themselves.

This will mean dropping cynicism. It will mean dropping the easy outs of saying, "Oh, it's only an inner-city problem," or "Let those foreigners take care of their own problems."

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