Tunisian children at risk of vagrancy, sexual abuse

Governmental data issued by 'Child Protection Officer in Tunisia' Foundation, which specialises in child protection, has announced that the number of children at risk was about 6968 during 2010. The governmental also affirmed that the total cases that it investigated reached 4957 cases or 71.6 per cent of the cases. These threats represent the inability of the parents for raising the child (20.4 per cent), birth outside of marriage (15.6 per cent), the child neglect and homelessness (28.2 per cent), the obvious and continuing failure in education and care (17.8 per cent), habitual child abuse (18.7 per cent), the sexual abuse of males or females (2 per cent), using child to beg or to make profits (0.9 per cent), child suicide attempts (0.4 per cent), child's loss to his parents and being without family support (3.2 per cent), and the rest of the percentage distributed in other different reasons. In order to review the cases of delinquents, the CPOF accepted the requests of mediation for peace in all the complaints it receives, and carries out more than 670 mediations, through communicating with the parties concerned and trying to convince them of the usefulness of peace and its importance to protect the delinquents from committing crimes and from punitive sanctions. The peace process could be carried out with an amount of money provided that it should not be a large sum of money, but to help in fixing the physical damage affected the victims, like returning stolen things or paying for his treatment or the costs of repairing what was damaged by the child. Following this, the child protection officer submit the peace agreement to the Judicial Magistrate concerned, and helps the child and his family to complete the applying the agreement. Child protection is considered a national priority in Tunisia, where many governmental sectors are involved directly in the development of programmes and mechanisms according to ambitious national goals that balance between the needs of the targeted groups and the available resources, in line with the requirements of international legislation at the UN, and based on that the concept of protecting the child means the essential right to enjoy various preventive social, health, and educational measures, and other provisions and procedures designed to protect them from all forms of violence, physical or psychological abuse, or neglect. The programmes of protecting children increased and varied to include groups with special needs. These programmes depend on volunteers from different sectors and fields. At the level of legislation, which is one of the most important mechanisms of protection, it have witnessed over the last decade a fundamental shift in basic principles and concepts adopted, represented particularly in giving the child's interest the first priority, according to the general principle stated in the third article of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This was put by legislature in the journal of the Child Protection to ensure the need of considering the child's interest first in all actions, whether by courts or administrative authorities or social public or private welfare institutions. Many international reports have highlighted the important national gains achieved during the last decade by Tunisia, in the field of child protection, where the most important achievement was the ratification by Tunisia of the United Nations Convention on the Right of the Child since 1991. It also took over the issuance of the Child Protection Journal in 1995, which distinguishes Tunisia from its Arab, Islamic and African neighbors, enabling it to be among the first countries to have enacted developed legislation for the benefit of childhood.