The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Kasese, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Kasese District is grappling with a surge in children abuse cases.
The cases include defilement, rape, neglect, torture among others. According to records, the district registered an increase of child abuse cases from 2,082 in 2018 to 20,653 in 2019.
Last year, the cases rose to 25,439 cases and this year alone Kasese has so far recorded over 22 child abuse cases.
Zainabu Asiimwe the District Probation and Social Welfare officer says the situation is disturbing. She says that the cases might be much higher with some going unrecorded or concealed by the parents and leaders.
She blames the cases on poor parenting, high poverty levels and school drop-outs which has exposed the children to their tormentors. Asiimwe is also cognizant of the fact that some leaders have supported child marriages under the guise of culture.
Asiimwe wants the Obusinga Bwa Rwenzururu and all leaders in the district to speak out publicly and take action against the vices.
Bigemera Abdu Latif the LCI Muhokya Cell, Muhokya Sub County attributes violence against children on parents who have abandoned their parenting roles. He says a number of young children have taken on casual work on Lake George shores where they are either sexually or physical abused without getting justice.
Earnest Masereka, a Para-Social Worker from Muhokya Sub County and working with Muhokya HCIII attributes the increase in child abuse cases to domestic violence that has separated parents.
Some of the children end up staying with a single parent while others run away from their homes.
But Leonard Masereka from Acholi quarter blames children for engaging in bad groups at tender ages. He says many street children ran away from their parent’s homes after being persuaded by their friends. These would later fall victims to abuse without any defence.
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Child abuse and resultant trauma, in all its chronic forms, causes the child’s brain to improperly develop. If allowed to continue for a prolonged period, it acts as the helpless child’s starting point into an adolescence and (in particular) an adulthood in which its brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammation-promoting stress hormones and chemicals, even in non-stressful daily routines.
Society generally treats human procreative rights as though we’ll somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture our children’s naturally developing minds and needs. I find that mentality — however widely practiced — wrong and needing re-evaluation, however unlikely that will ever happen.
I often wonder: how many instances have there been wherein immense long-term suffering by children of dysfunctional rearing might have been prevented had the parent(s) received, as high school students, some crucial parenting or child development education by way of mandatory curriculum? After all, dysfunctional and/or abusive parents, for example, may not have had the chance to be anything else due to their lack of such education and their own dysfunctional/abusive rearing as children.
For decades, I have strongly felt that a psychologically sound as well as a physically healthy future should be all children’s foremost right—especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter—and therefore basic child development science and rearing should be learned long before the average person has their first child.