With International Children's Righ-ts Day scheduled for Nov. 20, children's rights advocates released a report yesterday which, they say, shows that the public's neglect of child welfare issues is a threat to the rights of children in Taiwan.
According the report, entitled The 2001 Review and Evaluation of News Concerning Children's Rights, the Child Welfare League Foundation (兒童福利聯盟文教基金會) said that, of all the news related to children's rights covered in the period from January to October this year, 42.7 percent was negative news that only reported on violations of children's rights.
"Negative news are reports on violations of children's rights according to four main categories," Feng Yen (
Feng added that there is a flip side to the coin: "Positive news is news that has to do with the promotion and implementation of these four areas of children's rights."
"Out of a total of 749 children's rights-related news reports from January to October this year, 320 cases [or 42.7percent] had to do with violations of children's safety rights."
"This high percentage shows the public's disrespect for children's right to live a safe life," added Feng.
Feng explained that the violations of the child's safety rights included cases where children's lives were endangered, child abuse, sexual assault on children, child abandonment and cases where children commit suicide because of their parents.
"When we further evaluate these 320 cases, the statistics show that cases where children were intentionally harmed were far more prevalent than cases of unintentional harm."
"The figures accumulated over just these 10 months are worrisome enough," said Feng. "What about all those cases that have not been reported?"
"In view of these statistics we must again emphasize that it is everyone's responsibility to protect the youngsters in our society."
Feng said that in comparison with the large amount of negative reports regarding safety rights, "there were more positive reports regarding the other three rights."
Lee Ching-an (李慶安), a PFP legislator, argued that the positive news often received little media coverage.
The foundation therefore also called on the mass media yesterday to try to report more of the positive news regarding children's welfare.
"Maybe the negative news makes more juicy stories and therefore has more sensational appeal to the public than the positive news," added Lee. "The media tends to devote more time and space reporting negative news than positive news."
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