UN: Violating children’s rights: harmful practices based on tradition, culture, religion or superstition – International NGO Council on Violence against Children

Each year, thousands of children die worldwide and the childhoods and development of millions more are scarred by harmful practices perpetrated by parents, relatives, religious and community leaders and other adults.

The report illustrates a devastating failure of international and regional human rights mechanisms to provoke the necessary challenge to these practices and their effective prohibition and elimination in all regions. It marks a failure of political and community leadership to move parents, families and societies on from harmful practices
to cultures fully respectful of children’s rights. It marks a failure of religious leaders to insist that no form of violence against children can be justified in the name of religion and to highlight, as the Convention on the Rights of the Child does, children’s own right to freedom of religion.
This report builds on the key recommendations of the UN Secretary General’s Study. It identifies a range
of international, regional and national bodies that need to work urgently and more visibly to end adults’ inexcusable justification of inhumanity to children.

Please click here to see report