Tag: Child Rights

Tunisia: The migration trap | Migration News

Sub-Saharan African refugees and migrants fleeing northwards away from war, conflict and corrupt governments are ending up trapped in Tunisia, unable to move on to Europe or return home.

Across Tunisia, signs of growing hostility towards these arrivals are apparent.

The thousands living in makeshift camps are under pressure from a frustrated population and a government that analysts say is out of options.

On Friday, security forces raided two temporary camps and a protest site in the capital, Tunis, forcing more than 500 refugees onto buses to the Algerian border where they were abandoned. Some others may have been expelled to Libya.

The Refugees in Libya organisation described a wretched journey for the asylum seekers, many travelling with infants, who were refused help from hostile people in Tunisia and blocked from accessing transport back to Tunis.

Outside Sfax, 278km (172 miles) south of Tunis on the coast, thousands of sub-Saharan Africans, many of them registered refugees, shelter in open fields, attacked by security services and residents.

Refugees in Libya shared a video of 400 refugees and migrants they said had been seized from Sfax, as well as some from the Tunis camps, being expelled to Libya on May 2. The only indication the NGO has of what happened to them is a message it received on Tuesday originating from Libya’s al-Assa prison, 19km (12 miles) from the border.

On Monday, Tunisia’s President Kais Saied confirmed the expulsion to the National Security Council, blaming unnamed “others” for the migration crisis before lambasting “traitors” who had allowed them to enter Tunisia.

Competition for limited resources

Living standards in Tunisia are falling, with its own migration statistics testament to a lack of hope.

The high unemployment that caused its 2011 revolution remains, while an estimated 17 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

Some 17,000 irregular Tunisian arrivals landed in Italy in 2023, many from working-class areas where refugees stay, like the industrial areas around Sfax where finding casual labour can be the difference between eating or not.

There, Tunisians find themselves competing with refugees and migrants for diminishing resources.

There has also been a surge in suspicion of outsiders, echoed in Saied’s rhetoric and press attacks on “foreign” NGOs such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, telling the public to distrust them for their international links and blaming them for the “disruptive” refugee presence.

Public figures, including Member of Parliament Badreddine Gammoudi, are also calling for the establishment of citizen militias to fight the “conspiracy” of “suspicious entities” looking to “settle refugees and migrants in Tunisia”.

“Tensions are rising across Tunisia,” Hamza Meddeb, of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said. “We’re seeing the beginning of citizen militias and an angry public attacking the migrants. Something’s going to give … it’s inevitable. Tunisia has basically become a trap for migrants,” he said.

In Sfax, citizens have attacked refugees with fireworks and in the farming and fishing town of al-Amra, they protested against refugees sheltering on farmland, saying farmers needed it to feed their families.

Channelling public suspicions, Saied paints Tunisia as a victim of a conspiracy to overrun it with refugees.

At a Tunisian National Security Council meeting on Monday, he accused “traitors” of receiving millions to do that, claiming to have seen a document “proving” more than 20 million dinars ($6.4m) from an unnamed organisation were being funnelled unofficially for a migrant centre in Sfax.

(Al Jazeera)

Dangerous – but impossible to return home

A common refrain in Tunisia is for Black refugees and migrants to be deported to their countries of origin.

The IOM estimates some 15,000 people are camped in olive groves outside Sfax. The UNHCR said it registered 11,535 refugees between January 2023 and April of this year, bringing the total number in the country to 16,500.

Many are likely sleeping in the fields outside Sfax, or near Zarzis on the Libya border and various other points.

It is uncomfortable and dangerous, but for many, going home is simply not possible.

Salahadin, 26, a former nurse in Sudan, told Al Jazeera in March of leaving El Geneina in West Darfur in August. Returning to Sudan was not an option.

“They [the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group] killed my people, my family, all of them … killed,” he said flatly.

Abdul, 24, who had worked in the mines of Sierra Leone from the age of eight alongside his father, had a similarly tragic story.

“I saw a lot of the white people there,” he said, describing Lebanese, Israelis and Americans who went to Sierra Leone for its diamonds, gold and cobalt. “I worked with the slaves,” he said. “A lot of child slaves.”

“I saw them [the mine owners] kill people,” he said. “They have this tradition where they kill someone and bury them in the bank. It’s good luck.”

Waters calm as summer approaches

Meddeb of the Carnegie Center said public feeling would not allow Saied to settle migrants at the camp. “Public feeling wouldn’t allow for it. He can’t expel them, either … all he can do is push them around the country and make life difficult for them,” he said.

As the numbers of refugees and migrants increase in Tunisia, the waters between Africa and Europe are calming as summer approaches and passage north becomes easier. Irregular migration will return to the top of the European political agenda.

Italy and the European Union consistently try to externalise their migration concerns to Tunisia and Libya, urging each to halt the flow of desperate people from their shores.

“That migration is thought to be a destabilising force within Europe appears to have become a widely accepted truth, both within Europe and elsewhere,” Ahlam Chemlali, a researcher in migration and externalisation at the Danish Institute for International Studies, said.

“However, there are other factors at work here. We have European [Commission and Parliament] elections coming up and … we’re seeing hardline parties challenging for power in France and Germany, as well as that already governing in Italy. All of them want to deflect from their own problems and be seen as being tough on migration,” she said.

In mid-April, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, with a large ministerial delegation, made a fourth visit in less than a year to Tunisia to conclude deals she later said were hallmarks of her Mattei Plan – partnerships with African states on energy transfers in return for them preventing irregular migration.

In March, the Financial Times reported that the EU was to make 165 million euros ($177m) available to Tunis over three years to help limit migration – far more than the figure the bloc had previously publicly admitted to.

On Thursday, Tunisia’s Interior Minister Kamal Feki met with his counterparts from Libya, Algeria and Italy in Rome to discuss migration. The outcome, while officially unknown, appears to be the destruction of the makeshift camps and border transfers to Libya.

The increased tension in Tunisia is the result of this politicking, Chemlali said. “These are the consequences of border externalisation policies, which de facto are trapping thousands of people within Tunisia, while reinforcing the president’s racialised attacks on migrants and encouraging his deepening authoritarianism.”

Tunisia’s financial difficulties are worsened by Saied refusing to negotiate with the International Monetary Fund, whose requirement of economic reforms he dismissed as “diktats”. Instead, he relies on loans and aid packages from the EU and Arab states to paper over the cracks in the subsidy-reliant economy.

Algeria, in particular, has emerged as a source of both financial support and energy for Tunisia.

“Tunisia has become a diplomatic minnow under Saied,” Meddeb continued. “He’s ideologically and financially subservient to Algeria and Europe. He relies entirely upon Algeria for gas and financial aid,” he said, referring to a $300m loan from Algeria in December.

“If Algeria cuts Tunisia’s gas, it could last on its own for around 24 hours. That’s it. If Algeria wants to push its irregular migrants out, as it appears to, it can direct them back to Niger or, increasingly, into Tunisia.”

Anecdotal reports suggest Algerian security patrols are driving intercepted refugees to the border and telling them to follow old mining tracks into Tunisia and to not return.

Protesters outside the EU Delegation in Tunis demonstrate against the bloc's externalisation policies
Protesters demonstrate outside the European Union delegation in Tunis over the bloc’s externalisation policies (Al Jazeera)

Dead end

Tunisia’s position at the northernmost tip of Africa means it was always likely to be a dead end for the hopes of those fleeing from across the continent.

Conflict in Sudan has displaced 7.5 million people. Coups, the devastating effects of global warming, and intense competition for remaining resources have displaced 13.6 million people this year across Central and West Africa.

What this means to the 30 or so expelled people that the Refugees in Libya NGO are still searching for is uncertain. They are lost in Tunisia’s north.

According to the organisation, trains have barred them from boarding and shopkeepers have refused to serve them, scared of rumours that helping Black refugees has been criminalised.

With no alternative, the men, women and children have resorted to sleeping in caves.

They continue to walk. There isn’t much else they can do.



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Children of the Darien Gap | Migration

A family flees violence in Ecuador for the United States, but first they must enter the Darien Gap, a perilous jungle.

Swanny Flores fled Ecuador with her two young daughters and 12-year-old brother after her boyfriend, a local gang leader, murdered her mother and threatened to kill the rest of her family.

She wants to apply for asylum in the United States, but the only way to get there is through the Darien Gap, a 106km (66-mile) stretch of remote and perilous jungle in Colombia and Panama that is the only land route for migrants heading north from South America.

Amid historic regional migration and new travel restrictions from countries in Central America for migrants, the Darien Gap has become one of the most travelled migration routes in the world and a burgeoning humanitarian crisis. Last year, more than half a million people went through the jungle. A quarter of them were children. This is the story of one family’s journey through the Darien Gap.

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Tunis police raid sees refugees abandoned near the border with Algeria | Refugees News

Tunis, Tunisia – Teams of refuse workers are busy in the deserted alleyway outside the International Organization for Migration (IOM) offices in Tunis. A nearby park stands empty.

In both, large piles of refuse are the only evidence of the hundreds of sub-Saharan African refugees and migrants who sheltered here until recently.

In the early hours of Friday morning, police swept into both camps, plus a protest site outside the offices of the UNHCR a few miles distant, clearing them of the shelters erected there and bundling the men, women and children onto municipal buses to the Algerian border.

The Refugees in Libya organisation claims they were taken off the buses near the border town of Jendouba – whose governorate borders Algeria – where they were left without food or water to fend for themselves.

The raids in Tunis are the latest example of an increasingly hostile environment taking hold in Tunisia. One where irregular sub-Saharan African arrivals, their numbers swelling by the day, find themselves attacked by both security services and politicians, forced to shelter in open fields while increasingly vulnerable to kidnapping and ransom.

Who they are

There are currently tens of thousands of irregular sub-Saharan African arrivals sheltering in Tunisia, nearly all hoping to continue their months-long journeys on to Europe.

Total numbers are impossible to confirm. However, the IOM estimates that about 15,000 may be living in the fields near the coastal city of Sfax after police ejected them from the centre in September.

Some have returned to the outskirts of the city, squatting in the working-class districts close to the rail tracks. More shelter in the fields near Zarzis, close to the Libyan border, clustering around the UNHCR office in hopes of securing refugee accreditation and a degree of protection in a country that offers none.

Some 550 were estimated to have been living rough in Tunis at the time of Friday’s police raid. Outside the offices of the IOM, many families had sheltered in structures of timber and tarpaulin. Among them were a large number of children and newborn babies, including Freedom, a four-month-old boy born in Tunisia to a Nigerian mother, Gift.

“I named him that because I need freedom,” she had told Al Jazeera, “I need to know freedom. There is no freedom for us,” she says.

Gift had entered the country last summer through Libya, where a militia patrolling the desert had taken her prisoner, holding her for seven months before her family in Nigeria could raise her ransom.

Gift and Freedom’s location is currently unknown.

Cleanup crews clearing the alleyway by the IOM office in Tunis on May 3, 2024 [Al Jazeera]

Unwanted

Conditions in the fields near Sfax are dire, 37-year-old Richard from Ghana said.

Violent police raids and surveillance have grown more frequent and disease has gradually taken hold in a community deprived of medical care. The fear of arrest and deportation to the desert borders with Libya and Algeria is ubiquitous.

“Conditions there are bad. Very, very bad,” Richard said.

He had returned from Sfax to the fragile security of the IOM camp in Tunis a week earlier.

“I am sick, you can see. My body hurts,” he said. “I have to go to hospital but they give you no assistance. In Sfax, it is very difficult.”

He gestured to his friend Solomon, 36, who was coughing: “My brother here is really sick. He’s been coughing for some time,” he said.

“I started to cough three days ago. All my body hurts. Lots of people at the camp had the same symptoms,” Solomon said.

On top of the spread of disease is the ongoing threat from the police. Camps around Sfax where the undocumented shelter offer no protection from police surveillance, which has taken to the skies recently.

“I saw the drones,” Solomon says. “I was at Kilometre 31. They were going up and down,” he says, waving his hand above his head.

Tear gas canisters from Al Amrah, near Sfax, Tunisia 23-25 April 2024 [Courtesy of Richard]

Richard joins in, he had been at Kilometre 34, names given to the informal camps based on their distance from Sfax centre. He describes a raid last month where the refugees were able to film the police burning tents and firing tear gas.

“The police came and burned the tents,” Richard explains, showing the video of the raid on his phone.  “I don’t know why they did it,” he says.

But this is just one of what have become commonplace raids for those living in the fields around Sfax, shut off from the world by a police force that seeks to block access from NGOs and prying journalists.

Both Richard and Solomon subsequently told Al Jazeera that they were away from the Tunis camps at the time of the police raid.

Kidnapped

With much of the sub-Saharan African refugee community existing in an official vacuum, a trade in kidnapping has been growing since at least the end of last year.

In Tunis, huddled on a broken sofa that, like the shelters surrounding it, was subsequently swept up in the raid, three Sierra Leoneans spoke of having been held and tortured on arriving in Sfax from Algeria.

They were held prisoner by an unknown number of Francophones, their guess was Cameroonians, after being “sold” to them by the Tunisian smugglers they had already paid 600 euros ($644) to.

“They beat us with plastic pipes. One, he gets a bottle and burns it, so the plastic falls on us,” 29-year-old Hassan said.

His friend, 34-year-old Izzi from Freetown, took up the story: “They make us call our families. I phone my wife in Sierra Leone. I am supposed to be earning money for her and our three children. We all phone.

“We transfer the money. They leave us with nothing. They take our phones, everything.”

Accounts of kidnapping, torture and trafficking are rife among the sub-Saharan African refugee community. In March, the practice was called out, by a group of 27 international and national NGOs, including the regional office of Lawyers Without Borders, who said the prevalence of kidnapping was the outcome of official attitudes towards migration.

Determining how prevalent the trade is – like trying to count overall arrivals – when both victim and trafficker rely upon secrecy, is like trying to place one’s finger on liquid mercury.

“There have been escalating reports of such practices since the end of last year, primarily in Sfax, where migrants are kidnapped by other migrants, or in conjunction with Tunisian smugglers,” Romdhane Ben Amor, communications officer for the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, said.

“They are then held against their will in apartments or houses.”

Translation: What is currently happening in Sfax is shameful. The worst part is that the state and so-called politicians are all complicit. Remember that #Tunisia has more than 12,000 refugees, mainly in Italy, where they are treated with dignity.

The situation deteriorated since authorities expelled undocumented sub-Saharan refugees to the fields outside Sfax, Ben Amor continued.

In April, journalists for French newspaper Liberation reported on a police raid on a three-storey building in a working-class district of Sfax, where sub-Saharan African refugees and migrants were ordered onto the roof by their Black kidnappers and instructed to threaten to jump should the police approach.

Vilified

Encouraged by a government that analysts typically characterise as authoritarian operating in tandem with a largely pliant media, many within Tunisia are venting their frustrations over tanking living standards, shrinking freedoms and endemic unemployment in the Black refugee and migrant community.

In Sfax, local MP Fatma Mseddi has channelled much of that anger, petitioning to have irregular arrivals deported and pushing a law intended to hobble the international NGOs she blames for supporting them.

A suggestion from a Tunisian NGO to shelter some of the refugees and migrants in a hotel has already been attacked within the press with the organisation’s national credentials questioned.

On the ground, community Facebook groups focus that anger while ignoring from their own contribution to the overall migration numbers. 17,322 Tunisian nationals made the journey to Italy without paperwork last year.

However, with no long-term solution in sight, Tunisia continues to punish refugees and migrants for their presence.

How four-month-old Freedom and the other children of the Tunis encampments may be responsible for their homelessness and destitution is unknown.



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Child marriage is a problem in the US that needs urgent action | Child Rights

On April 4, the state legislature in Virginia voted to amend state law, raising the marriage age to 18. A couple of days later, Governor Glenn Youngkin signed this measure into law.

Coming amid Sexual Assault Awareness Month in the US, this vote was an important victory for child rights. Protecting vulnerable minors from sexual assault ought to include banning child marriage across the United States. But Virginia is only the 12th US state to ban child marriage. The other 11 enacted their bans between 2017 and 2024. This means that until the year 2017, child marriage was legal across the US under certain conditions: if the parents or a judge consented, or if the minor was pregnant or had a child. These loopholes effectively kept the practice widespread.

Just 12 states out of 50 having a ban on child marriage is a shamefully low number. Much more needs to be done. We need to ban child marriage nationwide.

Though Americans often view it as a “foreign” problem, child marriage is surprisingly widespread throughout the US, cutting across different regions, religions, and cultures, according to a new Population Institute study titled Behind Closed Doors: Exposing and Addressing Harmful Gender-Based Practices in the United States. Between 2000 and 2018, an estimated 300,000 minors under age 18 were legally married in the US. California, for example, does not specify any minimum age for marriage, and more than 8,000 children are married there each year.

Eighty-six percent of child marriages reported in the US took place between adults and minors, most often girls ages 16 to 17, but sometimes as young as 12. Marrying them to adult men sets up a dangerously imbalanced power dynamic that raises the risk of domestic and sexual violence.

To be clear, child marriage is a form of gender-based violence and a human rights violation. In addition to physical and emotional abuse, it puts minors at higher risk for poverty and exploitation and denies them educational and economic opportunities. It is the leading cause of adolescent girls dropping out of school worldwide. In the US, women who marry before age 19 are 50 percent more likely to drop out of high school, four times less likely to graduate from college, and 31 percent more likely to live in poverty. The consequences reverberate throughout their lives, perpetuating cycles of intergenerational poverty.

But since there is no comprehensive federal law setting a minimum age of marriage, and the patchwork of state child marriage laws is inconsistent and riddled with loopholes, the practice persists. The myth of American exceptionalism, the contrary-to-fact belief that child marriage is someone else’s problem and that it can’t happen here, blocks constructive public discussions and effective legislation.

This misguided belief fuels a cycle of neglect and inaction that keeps states from passing effective measures.

Resistance to enacting child marriage bans also comes from both conservative and progressive groups. Conservatives argue it would interfere with religious freedom. Progressives worry it could take sexual and reproductive choice away from minors.

But child marriage threatens the bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom of a child more than any ban ever could. Ending it is more important to the health and dignity of American children than preserving antiquated traditions. They need protection from entering legal contracts that they do not have the power to escape, and empowerment to make their own choices about their lives.

While the US has vocally opposed child and forced marriage in other countries, laws against it inside the US are patchy, weak, and fail to protect those at risk. In fact, most US states are overwhelmingly noncompliant with international child rights standards.

Ending child marriage in the US will first require recognising it as an urgent, ongoing, domestic problem. Further stigmatising the practice or ostracising affected communities will not help. US policymakers should focus on learning from survivors to understand child marriage’s root causes and real impacts, and work with them to build support for child marriage bans in each state.

Survivor-led advocacy goals include raising awareness, passing effective, implementable legislation, investing in comprehensive sexuality education, and expanding reproductive health support services and resources. State authorities should support such efforts.

All states should work to pass and implement a strong legislative framework setting the minimum age of marriage at 18, with no exceptions. That is the only way to ensure full and free consent. It is incumbent upon policymakers, advocates, and community members to stand up against child marriage and other harmful gender-based practices, and to uphold everyone’s fundamental right to bodily autonomy and dignity.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance. 

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Aslan, a little Syrian boy’s journey to hear again | Child Rights

Idlib, Syria and Reyhanli, Turkey – When Khalid Abdel Razek Abu al-Zumar heard that his five-year-old son had been accepted into a programme that would restore his hearing, he rushed to prostrate himself in prayer to thank God.

Aslan, a nattily dressed, smiley little boy, had been hearing impaired his whole life, and now he had a chance to hear his family’s voices and play with other children his age in a whole new way.

“My heart would break whenever kids avoided playing with my kids because they can’t communicate with them in the usual way,” said Khalid, who is 31 years old and a father of five.

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Qatar pledges $3m to Ukrainian human rights body | Russia-Ukraine war News

Funds aim to provide support for children, others affected by armed conflict in Ukraine, Qatari foreign ministry says.

Qatar has announced that it will provide $3m to the office of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, as part of a push to support “welfare and safety” in the war-torn country.

Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Friday that the funds aim to support initiatives designed to improve the lives of children, citizens affected by armed conflicts and the overall population in Ukraine.

“Furthermore, the fund will contribute to increasing legal support and improving the necessary infrastructure required to provide the support needed for families affected by conflict in Ukraine,” the ministry said in a statement.

The ministry and the commissioner’s office also reiterated “their dedication to a world where human dignity is respected, and where each individual’s rights are protected”.

Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that 16 Ukrainian children who “had previously been forcibly deported” to Russia after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine were recovering in Qatar following their release.

Zelenskyy said on Wednesday that the group was freed and reunited with their families thanks to Qatari mediation efforts that have helped bring back dozens of children taken during the 27-month war.

“I am deeply grateful to Qatar and personally to the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, for assisting Ukraine in this vital effort,” the Ukrainian president said in a post on X.

“We look forward to continued fruitful cooperation on this matter, as well as the return of more of our children.”

The president’s comments came days after Qatar said 20 Ukrainian and Russian families had arrived in the Qatari capital, Doha, to be provided healthcare and support as part of the ongoing mediation efforts to reunite families.

Ukraine believes Russia has illegally taken more than 19,000 Ukrainian children since Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbour in 2022. Of that, fewer than 400 children have been returned.



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Israeli attack kills 10, mostly children, in Gaza’s Rafah | Israel War on Gaza News

An Israeli air strike on a house in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah killed at least 10 people, including six children, hospital authorities said, as Israel pursues its nearly seven-month offensive in the besieged Palestinian territory.

Funerals were held on Saturday for those killed in the deadly strike on Rafah’s western Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood the night before, according to Gaza’s civil defence.

At al-Najjar Hospital, the site of the area’s main morgue, relatives sobbed and hugged white-shrouded children’s bodies. “Hamza my beloved. Your hair looks so pretty,” a mourning grandmother said.

The fatalities included Abdel-Fattah Sobhi Radwan, his wife Najlaa Ahmed Aweidah and their three children, according to his brother-in-law Ahmed Barhoum. Barhoum lost his wife, Rawan Radwan, and their five-year-old daughter, Alaa.

“This is a world devoid of all human values and morals,” Barhoum told The Associated Press, crying as he gently rocked Alaa’s body.

“They bombed a house full of displaced people, women and children. The only martyrs were women and children.”

A young Palestinian mourns over the bodies of children killed in Israeli bombing in Rafah [AFP]

The scene of bodies being transferred from al-Najjar Hospital to their final burial was heartbreaking, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said, reporting from Rafah.

“The majority were children, wrapped in white sheets soaked in blood … We spoke to a doctor from the hospital [where the children were brought] who described them as having devastating wounds, soaked in blood,” he said.

“Their burns were so bad that even if they made it to the hospital alive, they would have quickly lost their lives because there’s no way such injuries could be treated right away given the current situation.”

Al Jazeera’s reporters said the Israeli military continued its assault on the city on Saturday. “There has been no let-up in the fighting,” said correspondent Tareq Abu Azzoum.

‘No plans for food, water, civil services’

Israel has been promising a major invasion into Rafah, which hosts more than half of Gaza’s population of about 2.3 million and is the only area in the territory to have been spared Israel’s ground forces so far.

According to two Gaza war monitors, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Critical Threats Project (CTP), United States and Israeli officials held a high-level “virtual meeting” on Thursday to discuss a Rafah incursion.

Palestinians, including children, examine the rubble of destroyed buildings as a result of an Israeli attack east of Rafah, in Gaza [Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu Agency]

The US-based think-tanks said Israel shared with the US its plan to move some 1.4 million Palestinian civilians out of Rafah ahead of its promised ground invasion; however, the plan did not include “concepts for access to food, water and other civil services” according to reports.

Al Jazeera’s Abu Azzoum said Rafah has been witnessing a surge of Israeli military strikes in the past couple of weeks and these attacks could be seen as a sign that further military incursion could be carried out, specifically in light of Israel’s mobilisation of its troops near the border with Rafah.

“Right now, we are in central Rafah, and we can clearly see in the sky above the Kuwaiti Hospital, at least four Israeli military surveillance drones, hovering at a very low altitude,” he said.

“Different areas have been attacked in Rafah … One of the latest strikes targeted an empty house on the western side of that very densely populated area.”

Additionally, there were Israeli strikes on other areas of the Gaza Strip on Saturday, including the Jabalia, Nuseirat, Maghazi and Bureij refugee camps, our correspondent said.

More than 34,000 people have been killed and over 76,900 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza since October 7.

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Cass Review: A victory for women, children and common sense | Women’s Rights

In England, a landmark independent review into gender care services for young people has exposed one of the biggest medical negligence scandals of recent times and vindicated those who have been accused of engaging in malicious “culture wars” and branded as unkind bigots for opposing unnecessary medicalisation of children.

The review, conducted by respected paediatrician Hilary Cass, found that some of the most vulnerable members of society – children presenting with “gender dysphoria” which, in many cases, masks autism, sexual abuse, trauma and confusion over same-sex attraction, among other conditions – have been let down by a lack of research and “remarkably weak” evidence on medical interventions in England’s gender care clinics.

The National Health Service (NHS England) said it commissioned the review, published on April 10, to ensure that “children and young people who are questioning their gender identity or experiencing gender dysphoria receive a high standard of care, that meets their needs, is safe, holistic and effective.”

The review’s intentions, and thus its conclusions, are of course disputed by those who insist that anyone claiming to be transgender must be instantly affirmed – and in the case of a child, given access to puberty blockers.

Puberty blockers –  hormones that stop the progress of puberty –  have long been at the centre of the dispute over whether medical interventions offered to gender-questioning children are safe and fit for purpose.

In short, Cass has found that puberty blockers do indeed have side effects and negative health implications. Her inquiry concluded that there is, at best, weak evidence that these drugs are safe and beneficial to gender-questioning children, especially in the long term.

Cass told the BBC that the use of puberty blockers to “arrest puberty” started out as a clinical trial, but has been expanded to a wider group of young people before the results of that trial were available.

“It is unusual for us to give a potentially life-changing treatment to young people and not know what happens to them in adulthood, and that’s been a particular problem that we have not had the follow-up into adulthood to know what the results of this are,” she said.

To make sense of this scandal, and understand how the NHS came to offer this experimental treatment to vulnerable children without obtaining meaningful evidence for its safety and efficacy, we must examine how British institutions have been captured by “gender ideology” – the belief that an individual’s internal sense of gender, or “gender identity”, should supersede their sex in all aspects of life and under law.

In 2016, Women and Equalities Minister Maria Miller led an inquiry into transgender equality that strongly recommended that the United Kingdom legally adopt principles of gender self-declaration, which would allow any individual to decide whether they would be considered male or female according to their own “gender identity”.

Miller signed off a report advising a change to the Equality Act which would replace the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” with “gender identity”. In so doing, she suggested that the inner feeling of “gender” should take precedence over legal sex.

Feminists complained – for us, this was a matter of protecting our hard-won sex-based rights. But Miller dismissed women’s fury about the erosion of single-sex provisions in domestic violence refuges and prisons among other aspects of life as “extraordinary” bigotry.

The feminist resistance to gender ideology and objection to harm it inflicts on women and children, however, did not start with Miller’s misguided inquiry, which ramped up institutional capture.

The first article I ever wrote on the trans issue was published in the Telegraph Magazine in November 2003. It was about those who had undergone “sex change” surgery (the popular parlance of the time).

Researching that article, I discovered that Mermaids (a charity supporting children and teenagers with “gender identity disorder”) had seen a dramatic increase in inquiries since its founding in 1995. “Sex-change” treatment, including puberty blockers, was available to children as young as 14, despite evidence (even then) from the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust that one in four teenagers seeking “gender reassignment” would later change their minds.

Soon after, I wrote about Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR), in Canada. In August 1995, two VRR employees had asked Kimberly Nixon (a trans-identified male) to leave its counsellor training, which prepared attendees to offer face-to-face support to women traumatised as a result of male violence. The following day, Nixon filed a human rights complaint, initiating a lengthy legal battle.

The publication of this article in Guardian Weekend on January 30, 2004, headed “Gender Benders, Beware”, led directly to me being cast out by trans activists.

Invitations to prestigious events were withdrawn. I was shortlisted for awards, only to be un-shortlisted when the organisers found themselves under pressure.

Refusing to bow down to these efforts, I and a small number of other feminists continued to speak out – as did some valiant whistle-blowers. These were people working within gender clinics, horrified by the creeping normalisation of transitioning “gender-distressed” children.

In September 2017, Woman’s Place UK (WPUK) was founded by a group of feminists in response to planned new legislation by Miller, and everything changed as groups of women began to organise. Resistance to gender ideology was now driving feminist activism.

These efforts, however, did not immediately put a stop to institutional capture. There was a spike in the number of children, overwhelmingly girls, presenting with gender dysphoria and being referred to gender clinics, but this did not concern trans activists and their supporters in positions of power. More than 5,000 referrals were made to the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in London in 2021-22, compared to just 500 hundred a decade earlier. Almost two-thirds of referrals in recent years were teenage girls. Still, people continued to dismiss our concerns over gender ideology and its medicalisation of children as hyperbole and bigotry.

By July 2023, the situation in schools in some parts of the country had become so urgent that concerned parents started to take matters into their own hands.

In the Brighton and Hove area, where a number of children were being allowed to “socially transition” at school, for example, concerned parents set up  PSHE Brighton to assess the delivery of Personal, Social, Health, and Economic Education (PSHE) and Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in local schools.

So far, more than 20 local families contacted them and voiced their worry that their children may be being transitioned “from the classroom to the clinic”.

One such family was 16-year-old Catherine’s.

Catherine is autistic and, in less than two years, has gone from being a feminist and a proud lesbian to identifying as a boy. Now fixated on medical and surgical transition, she appears to have experienced rapid onset gender dysphoria after accessing material from trans-affirming charities like Mermaids online.

Her parents say she forced her school into making a social work referral by self-harming and reporting false information about her family. They explain that they had secured agreement from both Catherine’s headteacher and a private counselling service that social transition would be inappropriate for her before a full assessment of her needs had been carried out.  Nevertheless, her parents say that “an unholy alliance of well-meaning teachers and social workers, misguided by potentially unlawful policies, practices, procedures, and training, have led to Catherine transitioning – first socially and then medically”.

Today, Catherine is estranged from both of her parents.

There are many, many more families going through this hell, and many children like Catherine who are exposed to experimental treatments with permanent side effects, as a result of an almost blind acceptance by individuals and institutions of gender ideology.

For years, those of us who tried to put a stop to this have been accused of being bigoted, unkind, and motivated by a dislike of trans people. For years, it has been claimed that it was not feminists and concerned parents, but ideological charities like Mermaids who were doing what is best for “trans children”. Women lost their jobs, reputations and, often, sanity for speaking up against gender ideology, and its medicalisation of vulnerable children. Thankfully, Hilary Cass has finally exposed the truth, proved that it was not us who were being “unkind” but those unnecessarily medicalising children, and brought us one step closer to throwing the harmful delusion that is gender ideology into the dustbin of history.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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Why mass kidnappings still plague Nigeria a decade after Chibok abductions | Armed Groups News

Lagos, Nigeria – In the decade since the armed group Boko Haram kidnapped nearly 300 students at an all-girls school in the town of Chibok, abductions have become a recurrent fixture in Nigeria, especially in the restive northern regions.

Just last month, on March 7, a criminal gang kidnapped 287 pupils at the government secondary school in Kuriga, a town in Kaduna state. Two days later, another armed group broke into the dorm of a boarding school in Gidan Bakuso, Sokoto state, kidnapping 17 students.

The Sokoto victims and more than 130 of the victims from Kaduna have since been released, but there is no word yet about the remaining abductees.

Meanwhile, out of the hundreds taken in Chibok in April 2014, more than 90 are still missing, according to the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF.

“I cannot believe that it is 10 years and we have not really done anything about [stopping] it,” said Aisha Yesufu, the co-convener of the #BringBackOurGirls movement pressing for the release of the kidnapped Chibok students.

Nigeria is plagued by insecurity. In the northeast, Boko Haram has waged a violent insurgency since 2009; in the north-central region clashes between farmers and herders have escalated in recent years; and acts of banditry by gunmen in the northwest are terrorising citizens.

Across the country, the targeting of vulnerable populations has been widespread, including kidnappings for ransom or to pressure the government to meet the aggressors’ demands. Experts also say that worsening economic conditions have led to an increase in abductions for ransom over the last four years.

But as Africa’s largest economy and a country with one of the strongest military forces on the continent, many have questioned why Nigeria has been unable to nip the spiralling insecurity crisis in the bud.

“At the end of the day, it comes down to the fact that there is no political will,” Yesufu said.

Bring back our girls campaigners chant slogans during a protest calling on the government to rescue the remaining kidnapped Chibok girls who were abducted in 2014 [File: Sunday Alamba/AP]

A booming industry

Last year, charity Save The Children reported that more than 1,680 students have been abducted in Nigeria since 2014. This has significantly contributed to deteriorating absentee statistics, with one in three Nigerian children not in school according to UNICEF.

But students are not the only ones bearing the burden of the crisis as travellers, businesspeople, priests, and those perceived as being well-off are also often targets. Kidnappings have become a sub-economy of sorts, as abductors rake in millions of naira in ransom payments. Social media is also littered with public requests from people soliciting funds to buy the freedom of their abducted relatives and friends.

Since 2019, there have been 735 mass abductions in Nigeria, according to socio-political risk consultancy firm, SBM Intelligence. It said between July 2022 and June 2023, 3,620 people were abducted in 582 kidnapping cases with about 5 billion naira ($3,878,390) paid in ransoms.

This year alone SBM Intelligence said there have already been 68 mass abductions.

The abductions are not confined to the north, where banditry and armed religious groups are prevalent, but have also been seen in the south and the southeast. Even Abuja, Nigeria’s capital territory, has not been spared, and in Emure Ekiti in the relatively peaceful southwest region, five students, three teachers and a driver were kidnapped on January 29.

The roots of hostage-taking in Nigeria can be traced back to the 1990s in the Niger Delta, where the country gets most of its oil; at the time, armed groups started abducting foreign oil executives as a way to pressure the government to address their concerns about oil pollution in their communities.

But in recent times, hostage-taking has become a booming industry, said Olajumoke (Jumo) Ayandele, Nigeria’s senior adviser at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). Perpetrators now mostly target socially classified vulnerable groups such as children and women, she said, to elicit public anger and press their demands for ransom payments or the release of their arrested gang members.

When a ransom is demanded, the payment is expected to be made by the victims’ relatives, or in some cases the government – and delays or non-payment can sometimes be deadly. One of five sisters kidnapped in Abuja in January was brutally killed after a ransom deadline passed, sparking a national outcry.

“The groups that have used this strategy are able to gain local and international attention to really show their strength and amplify what they want to state authorities,” Ayandele told Al Jazeera.

Although the Nigerian government has said it does not negotiate with terrorists in dealing with the spiralling security crisis, experts say this may not be true.

“We have heard and we have seen some state governments negotiating with some of these groups and some of these bandits,” said Ayandele. In many cases, this has only emboldened the criminals.

A member of the security forces holds a weapon as people wait for the arrival of rescued schoolgirls who were kidnapped in Jangebe, Zamfara [File: Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters]

Why can’t Nigeria stop the abduction of pupils?

Experts say that complex, multilayered issues are at the heart of the worsening insecurity crisis. These include socioeconomic factors, corruption and a lack of cohesiveness in the security structure – where there is no rapid response to attacks and ineffective collaboration between the police and the military.

Over the last decade, Nigeria’s economic situation has all but nosedived as the country grapples with high inflation, rising youth unemployment, and the loss of currency valuation. The fortunes of citizens have hardly improved, and 63 percent of people are in multidimensional poverty. Experts say this has pushed many into criminality.

“The economic hardship during this period has only increased and different policies drive different dimensions. As a result, this has led to kidnapping being seen as a viable and profitable endeavour,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, a research analyst at the Abuja-based Centre for Democracy and Development.

The security architecture in Nigeria is also centralised, with authority concentrated in the hands of the federal government and no real state or regional policing independent of that. Experts say this has hindered the ease with which security agents can operate. It has also led to calls for state policing, especially amid criticisms that security agencies do not collaborate effectively.

At an army level, soldiers have complained about low remuneration and substandard weapons. The Nigerian military has been dogged with accusations of corruption, sabotage, connivance and brutality in the past, and this has fractured relationships with communities and potential sources of intelligence.

“This inability is not down to the military alone – there is a cross-government failing in security response,” Adekaiyaoja told Al Jazeera.

“There needs to be a stronger synergy in communal buy-in in securing facilities and also escalating necessary intelligence … There should be a renewed focus on necessary and frankly overdue police reform and a stronger synergy between intelligence and security agencies.”

Nigeria’s insecurity plagues all six of the country’s geopolitical zones, with each facing one or more of the following: armed fighters, farmer-herder clashes, bandits or unknown gunmen, Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) separatists, oil bunkering and piracy. This has kept the armed forces busy.

“Our security forces are spread thin. We have six geopolitical zones in Nigeria and there is something that is always happening,” said ACLED’s Ayandele.

Nigerian students and staff who were kidnapped in March arrive in Kaduna after they were freed [File: Abdullahi Alhassan/Reuters]

What is the toll of the crisis?

Abduction victims who have been released have reported harrowing conditions while in captivity. They are often threatened with death and barely fed as they endure unhygienic, unsavoury living conditions, including sleeping out in the open and trekking long distances into forests where they are kept.

The girls especially are vulnerable to rape and even forced marriages. Adults’ testimonies claim they are routinely beaten and tortured until the captors’ demands have been met.

Experts say the experiences leave victims with serious psychological wounds and trauma.

The fear of their children being abducted has led many parents in hot zones in the northeast and northwest to pull their children out of school entirely to avoid the risk. This is despite the government’s introduction of free and compulsory basic education in schools.

According to UNICEF, 66 percent of all out-of-school children in Nigeria are from the northeast and northwest, which also represent the poorest regions in the country.

“No parent should be put in a situation where they have to make a choice between the lives of their children and getting their children educated,” said #BringBackOurGirls movement’s Yesufu, adding that education is under attack in Nigeria.

As a result, she said illiteracy is then weaponised by the political class, who use people’s lack of information and knowledge to manipulate voters during elections.

But for some girls, the consequences may be even more dire than just losing an education, Yesufu said, as some parents decide to marry their daughters off early to avoid them getting kidnapped or worse. More than half of the girls in Nigeria are currently not attending school at a basic level, and 48 percent of that figure are from the northeast and northwest.

Education is crucial to national growth and development. But Nigeria’s continuing abduction crisis is posing serious challenges to schooling in the worst-affected regions of the northeast and northwest – and experts worry it may have broader implications for the country in the near future.

“This is just a ticking time bomb because when you don’t have a populace that is educated, they can be easily radicalised or recruited into these non-state armed groups,” Ayandele said.

“We don’t know what can happen in the next 20 years if we don’t address this education problem as soon as possible.”

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Nigerian army rescues 17 students abducted from Sokoto state | Government

NewsFeed

Children who were kidnapped in two separate abductions in northern Nigeria have been freed. On Friday the army rescued one group taken from Sokoto, while more than 130 students from Kaduna were released early on Sunday.

Published On 24 Mar 2024

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