For Children with Special Needs

This first time I am writing about this and I wanted to write about mental disorders that are affecting the youths nowadays. Each and every child born is special, which includes children born with complications or disorder.

Everyone has a right to have a proper childhood, if you know what I mean. Children really need a lot and among the most basic provisions are to have proper nutrition, good education and effective healthcare systems.

 Apart from all the things I have mentioned above, children also greatly need love and care for them to grow up into adulthood and this is where parents come in. Being a parent is not an easy thing and it is more challenging to raise a child with a physical or mental disorder. This is because children in this group need special treatment or resources to help them so that they should have similar opportunities with other children.

Parents should shower their children with love and the parents also need to be very patient with their children. Parents should never look down on their children's potential and should never be ashamed with their children no matter what. The society should also be more open-minded and come forward with initiatives that are aimed at supporting children who have special needs.

It’s time to advocate for the Protection of Children with Special Need’s Rights…

Consider youth friendly health services…….

A youth accessing health services during YONECO YFHS outreach programme

As children grow up into adolescence, they face new sets of health challenges and dilemmas. Sometimes these challenges are more linked to behavior and negative influences from the environment they are growing up in.

Usually, the youths in this age group are faced with so many temptations to indulge in unhealthy behaviours and practices like smoking tobacco, substance abuse, alcoholism and experimenting with sex. The aftermath of all these seemingly joyful deeds are sexually transmitted infections, early pregnancies as well as physical and psychological imbalances.

Sadly, the direct costs of such loose behaviours contribute highly to deaths of young people within the age range of 15 to 24 year olds.

Despite the overwhelming magnitude of health related problems among the youths, most young people are not aware of the specific health and risk factors that are out there.

This situation calls for intensified efforts to increase awareness on health issues that affect the youths. Young people, especially those in rural areas, encounter in accessing health services.

 Many health facilities do not have confidential and accommodative health services where the youth can feel comfortable to seek the services. The services that are accommodative and responsive to the needs of the youths are called ‘youth friendly healthy services’. These are services whereby the youths are always sure that they will not be confronted with negative attitudes from health-care service providers.

In addition to this, many young people do not have strong financial muscles to enable them to seek health services from privately owned hospitals. Thus, they suffer in silence due to the prohibitive nature of our public health service centers’. Furthermore, the existing policies that are followed by health service personnel often require a parent or husband’s written permission for a person to access some particular services.

Thus, YONECO with funding from UNFPA conducted a number of outreach campaigns in an effort to increase awareness on youth friendly health services. The campaigns were conducted in 5 districts namely Chikwawa, Chiladzulu, Mangochi, Machinga and nkhatabay.

 In all these districts, the youth were able to access different health services like HTC as well as information concerning Sexual Reproductive Health and some youths were able to come to the open and talk about their sero status.

 Youth clubs were also established for married adolescents and for adolescents living with HIV.

A lot of young people revealed that they are always afraid to go to the hospitals to access health services because they feel shy to explain what they want because some health service personnel have negative attitudes towards young people who seek SRH or HTC.

Women: Perpetrators of gender based violence?

By Stella Makhuva

Coming from a long weekend, I opened my email account to keep myself updated on work matters and other businesses.

After reading all the important emails, I got attracted to one of the emails with a title: Men vs. Women. I quickly thought that it was one of those chains of emails people share with their friends and anyone in their contact list. 

I wanted to ignore the email but on a second thought, I opened it and read the contents quickly. The contents of this so called ‘humorous’ email were full of actions and expressions that portrayed men as clever, intelligent, organized, hardworking and fearless while women were portrayed as stupid, ignorant, disorganized, lazy, fearful and so on.

Soon after reading it, I questioned the ‘humour’ behind the contents and I felt anger burning in me. I got angrier at the realization that the email originated from a woman who circulated it to over 135 people including men before it reached me! 

I sent an email to the author to reason with her if she realised that the email was degrading women but she could not take it. This was the day I realised that much as women are trying their best to fight Gender Based Violence, some women are busy perpetrating it.

Since the 16 days of Activism was initiated, women and men have been working as partners to create awareness and promote response to GBV. The battle has not been easy, but slowly we have seen change of behaviour in men pertaining to GBV and many more successes achieved. 

As a woman, I would jealously guard the successes ensuring that, NO ONE takes us back to those days when people believed that some women ask for abuse.

My humble request to fellow women is that, we should not frustrate the efforts to stop all forms of violence against women. We should never smile at any humour that tends to degrade women. We should realise that, if we are in the forefront smiling at abuse against women in whatever form it takes, we are opening loopholes and defeating the very same cause we are fighting for. We can stop perpetrating violence against ourselves.

We Can Tactfully Arrest Rape

 A six year old girl was raped by a thirty four year old man as she was going to play with friends and a thirteen year old girl was raped by an uncle and the uncle threatened to bewitch her if she reveals this to a living soul. These incidents tread on children’s rights as well as human rights.
Rape dehumanizes and disgrace women in the society. This wildish act has ruined a lot of girls and women whose futures were very promising. Both the government and Non Governmental Organizations are advocating against such immoralities and the culprits really need to be punished severely by the law. There is need for stiff penalties so that no one should dare do this kind of beastly and barbaric act.
Apart from the law, we still need to make our societies better and stronger. We must secure our societies by reducing or eliminating the risks of such incidents. We must make women and girls stronger and knowledgeable enough to evade such circumstances. There are certain measures that could help us reinstate women’s and girl’s sense of dignity and secure in the society.
What I am trying to propose are some few measures that could be used to reduce the incidences of rape and they are as follows

•   Never let children to go to faraway places alone. Sometimes you may wonder to see a little girl alone and using paths or roads that are not frequently used and this practice puts the leaders of tomorrow at a higher risk of being attacked by rapists.
•  There should always be a male family member when ever girl children are playing outside just to keep an eye on them.
•   Young girls should not play outside the comfort of their homes when at sunset.  Such times are dangerous as the assailants may attack under the cover of darkness.
•   Children must avoid making unknown contacts with unknown people, children must be taught not to get close to strangers and that some people can use different items and ploys just to make them easily fall prey to their tricks.

These measures are applicable to every society and it is the duty of parents or guardians to ensure that they have set forth these rules and they should not lose their grip on them. We can save society and we can reinstate the dignity of women and girls on earth.
We can save time and resources that are spent on investigating and prosecuting rape cases if we could only apply the necessary measures to avoid the incidences. Once we are able to deal with the barbarism, our time and energies will then be focused on other important sectors like education, health and poverty alleviation activities.
However, the challenge is that people may not be willing to put the measures into practice. Thus, to avoid this foreseen circumstance, there is need for massive awareness meetings in order to make people ready to evade the scenarios. The measures are helpful if we could all agree to adopt them in order to tactfully arrest rape.
However, we could also look at some rape scenarios and examine how assailants managed to seize opportunities to rape someone. In this way, we could collectively come up with other measures of arresting the crime. Do you have any ideas or suggestions?