Securing womens’ rights is essential to protecting the rights of children, declared Deputy Minister of Health and Family Mariya Ali at a human rights function last night, moving the audience with her experience of handling a particularly insidious case of maternal child abuse.
“I first saw this case in 2000 when I started working in the childrens’ rights unit,” Maryia said. “At the time, the child was 11 years old. We had first accepted the case when he was six – he had bitten a classmate’s cheek and chewed off a piece of flesh, and his class teacher was despairing about what to do with him. He asked us to send him to the juvenile centre in Maafushi.”
The child had been diagnosed with attention-deficit-with-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), she said. “But his mother wasn’t told to avoid feeding him certain foods, or not to give him Coke or sugary things, or any information like that. So she gave him Coke. And then, when he stole a lump of sugar from a neighbour’s house when he was six, she poured scalding hot water on his hand.”
No assessments of the child’s family background had been made, and nobody “realised just how bad his life was,” Mariya said.
“Because he had ADHD he was difficult to control – so he was put in chains. When I went to the house, his foot was chained to a pole in the middle a dark room with nothing in it except a bed.
“He hadn’t been fed because he had misbehaved, so I asked him what he had done. He got scared and hid under the bed and started to cry, saying, ‘sister, please save me from this place.’ I touched his head and saw it was swollen all over – he said he was beaten by his brother.”
In later appointments, Mariya discovered that each of the other siblings in the family had some kind of psychiatric problem. It later emerged that the child had also been sexually abused.
“When I was evaluating the child, his mother told me ‘he only stays still when you show him horror films’ – she would show him five a day. She told me he couldn’t sleep without killing some kind of animal or living thing, and when the animals were buried, the next day he would dig them up and cut off pieces.”
Horrified, Mariya turned to child psychology experts in the UK for advice. She was told the damage could not be reversed even if the boy was given 11 years of therapy.
“A lot happened to this child,” she said. “It began with ADHD; that was something we could have managed. But [the situation] went beyond of our reach because we because we failed to assure his rights for him. When we consider the human rights conventions [that the Maldives has signed], here is a case where so many of those rights have been violated.”
The Ministry was now working to strengthen the mechanisms for child protection and fulfil its obligations under the convention, she said.
“Securing women’s rights is essential to protecting children rights: mothers have to be psychologically fit to take care of a child.”
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A serial killer in the making...
Damn.. even the whole family is psycho.. a genetic trait passed down.
My sympathies is with the child.
"mothers have to be psychologically fit to take care of a child"
are you friggin kidding me. mothers of this nation are as young as 17, 18 and 19 years or perhaps younger than that. they haven't got a slightest clue of the world around them. how do we expect them to take care of another child? even a normal one!
I feel sorry for the child mentioned here. i feel sorry for all the kids as matter of fact who do not have proper parents.
we all know how strong maternal love is.it is hard wired in to their brains! not just humans, but in most animals. so why would a mother treat a child like this? one reason could be dat she is mentally unfit...OR she did not want that child in the first place, and with typical dhivehi husband her life is hell. so this raises the important question of unwanted pregnancies and how lightly marriage and childbirth is taken in the society. there are ways to deal with unwanted pregnancies. there are reasons why people get married at such young ages. unfortunately these cannot be discussed any further in this comment, lest some g*cough*ay foundation may want to shut down minivannewsarchive.com
let me tell you It's all because of lack of knowledge.One other thing these kind of children should be involve in some sort of play. Thats one way they can release the tension and energy. I see this with a lot of students whom I taught and I always advised them about it.
Im tired of these politicians using the misery in our society to sensationalize on issues rather than making any concrete effort to solve them. I would like to ask what this Deputy Minister did for the kid and the family in the last nine years since she saw him.
By the way if the Attention Deficit children in Maldives had got even 10% of support from the government, there would be 50%less juvenile delinquency.
What's the current situation of the child and his family? Are they being treated or being taken care of etc? Is he still in Maafushi? What of the rest of his family?
I'm really curious as to what's being done to follow this up. It's depressing the way the article just ends suddenly with Mariya deeming him a lost cause.
This is very annoying, these kind of thing happen in our community for the reasons like that early marriage, lack of knowledge, lack of popper education etc. and these issues are never taken seriously in our community, tomorrow also another film director may find this story very interesting to make a supper movie for the public and happily make the fun out of this. this is so BAD..my sympathy and prayers goes to the innocent Child 🙁
Arn't we ignoring the real problem here? Whats this constant mentioning of early marriages?Weren't our forefathers married at an early age?Weren't our mothers married at an early age? Why is it that our generation find it so difficult to raise a child and when is it that we find western ideas so appealing? Obviously the Hollywood horror flicks had something to do with this.How many of our children watched gruesome films like saw, hostel etc.only god knows what kind of message these westerners want to give us and to think they invented 'human rights'. Its pathetic. What are we doing about the media who brainwash our children with such terrible violent thoughts.Nobody wants to talk about this i guess.