Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Impacts on Early Emotional Development
After exploring the UNICEF website I chose to focus on Latin America. The reason I wanted to explore this area is because of the amount of children I have worked with who have come to America from that area. Many of these families we had in Head Start have conveyed how much better life has been since they moved their family here. I have traveled all around Mexico and I often wondered how the quality of life is different in other Spanish speaking areas.
Children are dealing with a wide range of obstacles. The first one I noticed was The Break the Silence Initiative is a multi-pronged approach to protect children against sexual abuse and the risk of HIV. This is a problem in the region and action is being taken to try to educate. Some of the other topics which struck me were campaigns to fight for girl’s right to education and to eliminate child labor. Many of the other headlines were aimed against violence in regard to children. The information was shocking on commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking. There are no specific data on victims of commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean, but have made global estimates say 1.2 million of children are trafficked each year and two million are sexually exploited through prostitution and pornography. Approximately 80% of women in prostitution were sexually abused in their homes when they were children.
When I explored the website I quickly found out millions of children every day are still living situations of violence, exploitation and discrimination in their closest environment (family, school and community or state institutions), severely jeopardizing their growth and development.
Personally, reading the information it made me extremely sad. I was unaware of how bad the living conditions still are in Latin America for children. I also wonder about the families I have worked with in the past and the living conditions they came from. Many of these issues are things we do not have to deal with living in the United States. I can only hope safety and justice will be the right of every child living in this region.
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Hi Alissa,
ReplyDeletethank you for sharing about the children's life in the area of Latin America.
Sometimes life in the different countries and area can have different challenges to encounter. I notice that woman and children ( especially girl) are the ones who affected most when it comes to the terms of sexual exploitation and trafficking.
Hopefully, the knowledge about the different challenges that early childhood professional have to encounter in the different region of the world would give us some wider and deeper perspectives in out practice in this field.
Thank you.
Evita Kartikasari
I too have a lot of students from the Latin America region. When they come to our school it we take the time to learn what their life was like before coming to America. Many worked in Latin America putting their education on hold or missing many days of school to work farming jobs.
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