By Anthony Adongo Apubeo
Bolgatanga, June 12, GNA – Stakeholders in child protection in the Upper East Region have advocated the ratification of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, to protect children and promote their welfare.
They complained that issues affecting the growth and development of children continued to rise especially with the help of the advancement in technology and it was about time, the country ratified the Optional Protocol to address such issues as related to sale of children, child commercial sex business and child pornography.
The stakeholders include the Ghana Health Service, Ghana Education Service, the National Commission for Civic Education, Departments of Children, Gender and Social Welfare, National Youth Authority, the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice, traditional authorities and advocacy civil society organisations among others.
They made the call at the Upper East Regional Child Protection Committee meeting held in Bolgatanga, organised by the Regional Coordinating Council with funding support from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The Optional Protocol is supplementary to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and obliges all member states to take necessary measures to prohibit the sale of children, child prostitution and depiction of sexual abuse of children (child pornography).
About 180 countries have already ratified the Optional Protocol but Ghana, who signed onto the protocol in 2003, 20 years down the line, is yet to ratify it.
Dr Sylvester Kyei-Gyamfi, the Head of Research, Department of Children, said although statistics were difficult to come by reports indicated that the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography occurred in Ghana and continued to rise.
He said children’s access to the internet and technological gadgets exposed them to various materials that pushed them to such bad practices and underscored the urgent need for stringent measures to control children’s access to certain materials on the internet.
“As a country, we should re-examine ourselves and looking at all the circumstances around us, I think we should all rally behind this advocacy this time and get it ratified to protect children,” he said.
Mrs Georgina Aberese-Ako, the Acting Upper East Regional Director of the Department of Children, said most of the time children were deceived and promised jobs even by their relatives who sold or introduced them to commercial sex businesses and there was the need to clampdown on such perpetrators to safeguard the children and ratifying the Protocol was in the right direction.
The Acting Regional Director also called for policies to be rolled out to support children in emergencies especially during conflict, to ensure that they did not miss out on good education, quality healthcare and other social support services.
Ms Abigail Adomolga, the Gender and Child Protection Officer, Youth Harvest Foundation Ghana, an NGO, said the ratification of the Optional Protocol would be a major document that would inform the roll out of tailed interventions to addressing issues affecting young people.
Pognaab Atebalia Azantilow, the Paramount Queenmother of Builsa Traditional Area, said teenage pregnancy continued to be a major problem facing the region and noted that the influence of the internet was one of the major factors and needed to be controlled.
GNA