In August 2018, a 15-year-old Stockholm schoolgirl began a protest in front of the Swedish parliament building, vowing to continue until her government met the carbon emissions target agreed by world leaders in Paris, in 2015. At first Greta Thunberg was a loner, with her sign which read ‘school strike for climate’, but before long she was joined by others and then more students began to protest in their own communities in Sweden and around the world, using the hashtag #FridaysforFuture.
Last year Ms Thunberg and thousands of other youth environmental activists were successful in making the world stop to listen to them and in some instances, changes were effected because of the climate strikes. In her now famous ‘how dare you?’ speech at the UN Climate Conference last September, Ms Thunberg, who had taken a year off from school so deep was her concern over the lack of movement on climate targets, accused world leaders of stealing children’s dreams and childhoods with their empty promises. “… I shouldn’t be up here,” she had admonished, standing at the podium. “I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean, yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?” Many countries that had signed the Paris agreement were not making any moves to reduce emissions.
But climate change was far from the only thing stealing children’s dreams. In fact, too many children were and are living under conditions which make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to even have dreams.
At the end of last year, there had been only minimal progress made towards ensuring better lives for children overall on a global scale. The world’s most vulnerable humans, children are severely affected by wars; poverty; climate change; lack of access to food, water, sanitation, and education; violence; sexual, physical, mental, and emotional abuse and denial of their rights among other societal ills. According to a UNICEF brochure published last year using data from 2018, almost 1 billion children were living in countries where the Sustainable Development Goals remained not just out of reach, but off track for at least ⅔ of the child-related targets. It is universally recognised that every goal affects children’s lives. And attaining them would ensure a better future for all of the world’s children.
But this year introduced a further setback in the form of the novel coronavirus, which quickly became a pandemic. As of Monday this week, 18,440,689 people in the world had been diagnosed with Covid-19 and 697,100 had died. While so far, the majority of those affected or dead are adults, this does not mean that children are safe. On the contrary, early information that the virus did not affect children was found to be incorrect as it has been discovered that they can contract and spread Covid-19 as well as die from it.
Global initiatives taken to stop the spread of the virus included the closure of borders, all but essential businesses, and schools; in some countries this has been in place for 4 months or more. The result has been bittersweet. While the hiatus on global travel meant a reduction in the use of fossil fuels and the earth was able to breathe in some places, it was not enough to cause any contraction in the climate change scenario.
For children, though, it meant their lives were interrupted. Suddenly, they could no longer go to school, play with their friends, or even go outdoors. In some cases, children could no longer physically interact with aunts and uncles and grandparents. In others, children have had to be quarantined, never having dealt any sort of isolation. Children whose parents are frontline medical professionals were suddenly seeing them less and, in some instances, not at all. For younger children, and even older ones, the abrupt end to socialising was traumatic, more so because adults were unable to tell them definitively when life would return to what they saw as normal. The newness of being homeschooled, too, resulted in many not being able to settle down and get work done. They were also contending with the transference of stress and anxiety besetting their parents, even if the parents tried to mask it. Psychologists believe that the trauma from any and all of these scenarios could have long-lasting effects on children.
However, there are at least three categories of children far worse off. There are those for whom the closures mean they are trapped at home with sexual predators, or abusive parents; those facing real hunger or homelessness because their parent/s have lost their jobs; and those whose parents and/or guardians are among the Covid-19 death statistics. It goes without saying that these children would be doubly affected.
In Guyana, some of these realities, thankfully, have been anticipated and are being addressed by the Child Care and Protection Agency and its partners, including UNICEF. Unfortunately, they will be unable to save every child, and this is understandable. It is laudable though, that they took the initiative to make long-term projections and, based on an interview with this newspaper in May, appear to be going above and beyond in this difficult period.
However, by contrast, the Ministry of Public Health’s Mental Health Unit’s claim last Sunday that it was managing mental illness in its early stages is far from reassuring. Guyana has long had problems with dealing with mental health, the diagnosis and management of which goes way beyond doctors and nurses screening patients who appear before them. Practitioners are aware, or they should be, that besides them not being forthcoming, young people and children’s traumas manifest very differently and could sometimes be hard to spot. This is not to say that work has not been done, but neither is this the time to plaster platitudes over what will likely be very real problems for some time to come.
