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U.S. IS NOT EXACTLY KID-FRIENDLY
Salim Muwakkil December 13, 1999
Were his native country anywhere but Cuba, most Americans would support sending Elian Gonzales, the 6-year-old "little rafter," back home to his biological father.
But our national hate affair with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, coupled with a widespread assumption that Elian would be better off here than there, has scrambled the poles on our ethical compasses.
Many people may want to deny custody to Elian's father and keep his son in this country. And even those who concede the boy should be returned to his father harbor the misguided notion that this nation offers Elian the best possible future.
In fact, the United States is one of the least child-friendly countries.
According to an October report by the Children's Defense Fund, nearly 80,000 children and teens were killed by gunfire in America between 1979 and 1997. That figure, the report noted, "is more than the total number of American soldiers killed in battle in Vietnam."
A toxic environment saturated with violent images, aggressive role models and firearms has produced a nation in which homicide is the third leading cause of death among children 5 to 14 years old and the second leading cause among those 15 to 24. Suicides rates among youth also are rising, according to the Children's Defense Fund, and firearms account for more than 90 percent of the rise.
Because of our peculiar history and a wealthy lobbying group that shamelessly purchases political influence, guns are more prevalent in this country than anywhere else on the planet. And despite the domestic carnage firearms cause in this country, they are championed by the same "Guns `R' Us" Americans who cite Cuba's unarmed citizenry as the primary reason Castro's tyranny has triumphed.
If the Castro-haters get their way, Elian will grow up in a land that is one of only two nations in the world that has failed to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The other nation is Somalia.
Among its many protections, the convention provides: "the child by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection." But that restriction is a stern rebuke to the hot, new American trend of trying kids as adults.
In recent years, 46 states have changed their laws to allow juveniles to be tried as adults. One particularly prominent case is that of 13-year-old Nathaniel Abraham, who recently was convicted of second-degree murder for shooting a stranger when he was 11.
Abraham's photograph adorned an Amnesty International report that blasted the U.S. for this primitive practice.
"As America exhorts other nations to uphold basic human-rights principles, we should begin with the ABCs of human rights and treat our own young offenders as children--not as adults," said Curt Goering, an official of Amnesty International USA.
So while self-righteous Americans snipe at Castro's Cuba for its affront to U.S.-style democracy, international monitors vigorously condemned this country for violating the human rights of children, its most vulnerable citizens.
But the U.S. is not content just with judging children by adult standards; our perverse juvenile phobia has pushed us to the point of executing children.
And the U.S. is riding solo in that practice.
Victor Streib, a professor of law at Ohio Northern University, has been tracking the number of juveniles sentenced to death over the past 25 years and told The Boston Globe that every other country has abandoned killing juvenile offenders.
"We're the only ones left," he said.
Of the six nations cited for charging children with murder in the 1990s--Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the U.S.--the U.S. is the only one that has yet to ratify the 1997 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits that practice.
The U.S. has become so mistrustful of its own children, legislators are passing zero-tolerance laws that deliberately exclude mercy, one of the most hallowed features of Judeo-Christian ethics.
The U.S. piously touts its reverence for youth at every opportunity, while enacting policies that place more children in harm's way than most other nations. It's an odd paradox. But perhaps it's not odd at all.
A nation's youth reflect its soul and our children may be telling us more than we want to hear.
So we drown them out with the diverting clamor of make-believe solutions that attack only symptoms. And we tell ourselves tall tales that this is the best of all worlds for kids--even if we have to kidnap to prove it.