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Shirin AUMEERUDDY-CZIFFRA
<B>Ombudsperson for children</B>
You have published your annual report on child abuse. Why is such a report important? Will there be any action taken afterwards?</B>
My team and I have relied on the 790 cases we have dealt with all year long (751 of which are included in the second part of the report) to make recommendations to the government and see how the situation of children could change for the better. The decision is now in the hands of the different ministries concerned, especially the ministry of Women and Child welfare, to take action…
In your report, you are asking for a social audit. What does this mean and what would it aim at?</B>
A social audit would gather a group of specialised people to appraise the different services, see who is doing what and what difficulties and loopholes they are facing. This should help to find ways of improving the situation. By doing this, the national budget would not suffer. It may show that, by rationalising existing resources, there will be no need to increase our budget. Investing money, time and energy in prevention should avoid wasting money with police, lawyers and protection officers after violence has already been perpetrated. Hopefully, this will cost even less to the national budget.
How would you describe the situation concerning child abuse in Mauritius? </B>
The problem in Mauritius is that we have so far been treating the symptoms rather than the problems. All over the world, specialists have been studying a new approach to violence. In Mauritius, the situation is not so different: people who have been victims of violence have more chance of becoming perpetrators of violence. With this in mind, we should break the cycle by investing more in prevention to make sure violence is not being passed on to the next generation. For the moment in Mauritius, a child who is a victim of violence is removed from his/her family and placed in a shelter without thinking of any rehabilitation for either victims or perpetrators. There is no long-term policy to lift them out of their problems.
What could we do to change this situation?</B>
In fact, there is a lack of real collaboration and interaction between ministries and institutions concerned and this has led to a lack of a global strategy. And this comes back to the need for a national audit. The lack of skilled workers in shelters, schools and other institutions is also a major problem. When children are sent to rehabilitation centres, they are in fact not rehabilitated at all. The ‘mutiny’ of the girls at the rehabilitation centre was nothing more than a signal that children are not able to cope with their problems, as they are not rehabilitated. If they were properly treated they would know that they should not behave like this. There has to be professional therapy in such centres… What I would recommend is a complete change of mindset and a new approach by the authorities concerned. The ‘law and order’ approach at the moment is totally inadequate and should be replaced by a ‘human approach’ that would allow the reintegration of both victims and perpetrators of violence into society.
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