Do Families Play a Role in Peace Building?

Children in Uganda have been most marginalized with child-friendly health services only limited to referral hospitals. Elsewhere in the country children share facilities and health care services with adults -an indiscriminate administration of health, yet special care for them was paramount. Direct, structural and institutionalized violence too claims the lives and right morals of children. Domestic violence does not only take the life of one of the parents, but also is psychological violence -moreover the worst a human being can experience that, now, becomes a children affair to deal with or shared experience upon observing parents fight.

Cultural environment -which is discriminative according to gender; never recognizes the rights of children -and the reproductive health rights of women have turned out to be a huge and overwhelming social cost -inclusive of HIV spread and under-development. It becomes a way of life that suffocates the rights of women and children as men behave the way they want as suggested by their cultures.

The economic environment disables parent’s ability to further children’s education, or not even at all affording it, yet it is through child education that the future a community is secured with a productive citizenry. The cycle continues from children dropping out of school and opting to marry or succumbing to wrong and untimely choice to conceive, then the burden becomes a product to be handed over from one generation to another -rendering the talk of children rights a dream.

Now, that way of life is one that begins to dictate the quality of life of a children, level of attachment -where insecurities and future behavioral problems begin, irresponsible parenthood, reckless and risky behaviors of a parents as children observe, low or no health seeking as there will be no money and, ultimately, no motivation to adopt a healthy lifestyle -even when health guidelines are issued -which in turn affects children health, leads to broken family situations, or broken marriage relationships -and which as the saying goes, “if elephants fight it is the grass that suffers,” the consequences accruing from broken-family situation hit children hardest as all the anger gets projected to them in form of abuse and neglect.

And in bid to come out of poverty traps using the much respected cultural or traditional remedy systems, children, still, are the soft target like commodities (without life) to offer to the gods. These are innocent children: why all that? What about the plight children in areas once ravaged by war in northern and north eastern Uganda? How about those affected by annual floods and, in recent years, the landslides? Is our scope of children health catering for that? It is from such grounds that families and communities face accountability for in the child’s teen or youthful years. No shall we have a moral fabric in society, violent free generations because society simply ignores the root causes of structural violence -whose origin is quality of care of children right from conception. And who should save the children of Uganda?