Protecting Children in Conflict

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

The whole House will be grateful to the hon. Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) for initiating this debate on protecting children in conflict. She was right to deal with the Palestinian situation, but I will not follow her example in any detail as I do not want to get involved in the debate about the rights and wrongs of the Palestinian issue, except for noting the suffering of both the Palestinian people and the Israeli people in a very difficult conflict.

I want to make some general remarks about how the British Government could try to improve the protection of children in conflict areas, particularly when it comes to education. Education is the subject on which I want to focus and I would be grateful if the Minister could deal with that problem when he replies.

I should perhaps declare a family interest. I am speaking today because both my elder daughters work for charities in Africa and have worked in Kenya, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic. They keep me informed of their work and what is going on and, a few years ago, I visited the Congo with War Child to look at the appalling privations that children faced, particularly because of the conflict and the use of child soldiers. My visit had a deep impact on me and I am sure that, even despite all the excellent work of my hon. Friend the Minister and other Ministers in the FCO and DFID, there is still more that we can do.

As I say, I want to concentrate on education, but why are children particularly vulnerable? It is an obvious point, but they are vulnerable because they are young. When a three-year-old loses their parents in a bomb attack, it is virtually impossible for them to survive alone. If a 25-year-old loses a parent, it is a tragedy, but they can survive. It is right that the House should focus particularly on the appalling impact of conflict on children, which is much greater than its impact on mature people.

Of course, children suffer appalling and severe trauma from witnessing events. They do not have the life experience or emotional maturity to integrate a particular scene into the rest of their life. We have been brought up in a very comfortable environment, but we all know how even quite small events from our childhood can have a traumatic effect later on. Imagine a child in a conflict situation witnessing their mother being raped or their brother being dragged off as a child soldier or witnessing murders or the appalling scenes that have happened in Syria. That trauma will live with those children for ever.

Children are targeted in conflict situations for sexual attacks. Girls and boys make up more than half the rape cases in such conflicts and that is an appalling statistic. Imagine the appalling emotional trauma of that. Children are also targeted by military groups that are keen to expand their ranks quickly and we have seen that in particular over the years in Congo. As I know from my visit to the Congo and as we all know, it is appalling to talk to former child soldiers who have been dragged into these events. They have committed terrible things and terrible things have happened to them, sometimes when they are just 13 or 14-years-old.

War destroys livelihoods, and children are often seen as a way for distressed families to get income. Girls can be married early for a price or used as sex workers and boys can be sent out to work in fields and factories or to collect rubbish from the streets. I occasionally visit the middle east, and we see the desperate struggle for survival, particularly for Syrian refugees in Lebanon or Jordan when there is no social security available to any significant extent. In conflict situations, families are desperate to survive, and we all know that children have to be used as part of that.

The point I want to stress and focus on for the rest of my speech is that it is children and not adults who lose their opportunity for education. Once that opportunity is lost, it is lost for ever and can never be repeated. Education is essential for children and particularly for children in conflict areas. It is a life chance that comes only once and a reasonable level of education is even more important for children who will be expected to build a peaceful recovery from conflict. Education keeps children safe. Obviously, if a child is in a school or in an educational environment, it is less likely that they will be married early, raped, abducted or recruited by armed groups. All that is much more unlikely when schools are open.

Actually, education is prioritised by families in conflict areas. We have seen on television, such as during the Iraq conflicts, and from our own experience how families that are often desperate and have nothing—owning nothing, surviving on nothing—still make the effort to dress their children in immaculate uniforms to walk through bombed-out streets to get school. Education is extraordinarily important for them.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes a compelling case based on his experiences in Africa. It is deeply humbling when we go to developing countries in parts of Africa and elsewhere and see children who have walked miles and miles and miles to attend a classroom where they have no seats, but may have rocks to sit on, if they are lucky, and which have corrugated iron roofs. Their parents have made a contribution out of what limited resources they have, because they absolutely value education as the way out of poverty and conflict. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is deeply humbling for those of us here who take education for granted?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

My hon. Friend has made that point very movingly. We live in such a comfortable environment here where education is, frankly, of a fantastically high standard and is free—paid for by the taxpayer—that we simply do not appreciate the appalling sacrifices made in places where education is not free by parents who have nothing. They make that huge effort to try to educate their children, because they know, as we know, that education is everything.

We can establish a case that education is absolutely vital, therefore, in terms of taking children out of conflict situations and giving them life chances. So, having made that case, we would expect it to be prioritised by humanitarian agencies and Governments, but analysis of the 2013 United Nations appeal tracking data shows that only 1.9% of UN humanitarian appeal funds went to education. That seems to me to be very low, and I was surprised when I saw that. I cannot believe that the figure is so low, but that is what I have been told. Donors simply did not prioritise that part of the UN appeals.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I am delighted to follow the very thoughtful contributions made to the debate so far. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) for making it possible, and I apologise for missing the very first part of her speech. I was talking about conflict and children in another context elsewhere. I had not anticipated taking part in this debate, but such is its importance that I want to pick up on some of the points made by previous speakers and draw on my own experiences of visiting conflict zones.

This is, of course, a timely debate, for the most tragic of reasons. The images we saw from Palestine earlier this week of the three Israeli children who became victims of war starkly brought home to us the ghastly things and tragedies that are occurring daily in other parts of the world. Another image that brought that home was that of the Nigerian girls, who were the subject of last night’s excellent debate—of which I read, but, alas, was not part—led by the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown). For hundreds of girls to be taken by terrorists from their schools, where they expected to be educated and to do all the things our children take for granted, and for their lives now to be in the balance—they have perhaps already been sold into the sex trade or whatever, because such threats have been made under the nose of that country’s Government—is absolutely alarming.

So alarming is that situation that we now have to talk about “safe schools”. Schools should be places of safety. When we send our children off to school, we expect them to be looked after and safeguarded. The fact that terrorists can make them pawns in some misguided holy war—that is how they try to portray their terrorism—is quite inconceivable to us today.

A third image that sends a chill down all our spines was one I saw on a news report from the conflict involving the so-called ISIS forces in Iraq: on the back of a pick-up were two boys, who could not have been more than 10 years old, with two AK47s and belts of ammunition to go with them. Those 10-year-olds are combatants of war, who have been expected to join, and coaxed and promoted into, the front line of the ghastly and misguided conflict in that country. We recently debated an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill—I supported the amendment, which was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois)—to make sentencing mandatory for 16 to 18-year-olds caught in unlawful possession of a knife as a second offence. That is something pretty ghastly in this country, but to have children routinely taking AK47s into places of conflict perhaps puts it into context.

Those three images starkly portray the tragedy that we are debating today, but they are of course the tip of the iceberg, as are the 250,000 children—surely an underestimate—who are child soldiers, including the notorious ones in places such as Uganda. I repeat the tributes paid by all hon. Members to the staff of the NGOs, whom many of us have visited and worked with in places of conflict. They absolutely put their lives on the line to try to protect and to give some safety and security to children who, through no fault of their own, find themselves victims of conflict. I particularly want to repeat the tribute paid by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) to Rob Williams and the excellent charity, War Child. He does such a good job with that charity, as he previously did with UK-based charities involved with families. Such images haunt all hon. Members and, I am sure, all our constituents.

There are, however, things in which we should take great pride, and I am sure that we will hear more about them when the Minister sums up. As in so many cases, the UK is setting the example—putting its money where its mouth is and leading the world—in trying to turn around the juggernaut of children’s involvement in conflict zones.

The international protocol on the documentation and investigation of sexual violence in conflict, which was launched by the UK, is working to establish international standards to help to strengthen prosecutions for rape in conflict, and it is increasing the prospects for successful convictions. We have got to bring people to book to show that such sexual violence is unacceptable. In whatever part of the world, developed or undeveloped, it must not happen and the perpetrators must not get away with it. We must all work together against the forces of evil who allow it to happen.

[Fiona O’Donnell]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech. In looking at our record on international prosecutions for acts of sexual violence so far, would the suggestion made by one of his colleagues about having a local form of justice, rather the western developed world being seen to impose its standards on other countries, be a better way forward?

[Tim Loughton]

I absolutely agree. If there can be a home-grown solution—so that people have ownership of it, and it can be adapted to their cultures and to the baggage of tribal conflicts, histories and cultural identities that have been asserted through violence—that has to be better. Otherwise, there is a risk that the former colonial power is seen as trying to reassert its ways.

There are some common basic moral standards that we should not resile from asserting in the international context, including that children are children, not young adults to be sent into war zones or to become victims of war in all its ghastly forms. They are children, and we treat children differently—they need our protection and respect—whether they are in Khartoum, Boston, Worthing, East Lothian or anywhere else in the world. We should not resile from the expression of such international values, in which we should take pride.

The Government have already committed to providing more than £140 million to the survivors of sexual violence and their supporters. In the context of the many victims of historical cases of horrendous sexual abuse that have recently hit the headlines in the United Kingdom, a key factor is making sure that victims who have had the bravery to come forward get the support they need in order to come to terms with the trauma that befell them, often as children. In this debate, we are talking about victims who have perhaps seen their parents gruesomely killed in front of them, their homes burned, their sisters raped, or their brothers, sisters and school friends kidnapped and taken off into slavery or the sex trade. These children need our support, and they need rehabilitation to get over traumas caused by what happened in front of their eyes, which is why that project is so important. The Government have also called for all soldiers and peacekeepers to be trained not only to understand the gravity of sexual violence in conflict, but to help to prevent it and to protect people. Those are all practical measures that we can sometimes overlook.

The Government, particularly the Foreign Secretary, should be given great credit for the great initiative of the global summit to end sexual violence in conflict—quite rightly, it hit the media, including our television screens—which he co-hosted with the special envoy Angelina Jolie last month in the east end of London. It brought together more than 140 countries and more than 900 experts, making it the biggest global meeting ever convened on the issue. Let us hope that it was not just a talking shop, but that delegates from nations where such violence happens daily could take comfort, ideas and support, could make contacts and could engage with projects that will help them in the future.

The preventing sexual violence initiative—again, the Government are spearheading it—aims to strengthen and support international efforts to respond to sexual violence in conflict, including by enhancing the capacity of countries, institutions and communities to support survivors and to end impunity for perpetrators. A team of UK experts has been deployed to conflict-affected countries at the heart of the problem, such as Libya, Syria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Mali, to name but a few. The initiative provides good practical experience, and we should be proud that DFID, our Foreign Office and this Government are pioneering, leading and setting such an example on the global stage.

Education is absolutely vital in all this, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) mentioned. That is why I welcome DFID’s pledge that by 2015 it will spend half of its direct educational aid on unstable or war-torn countries where more than two fifths of the world’s out-of-school children are found and where a lack of education can contribute directly to conflict. In such a revolving doors scenario, kids are indoctrinated to hate other kids and families from other tribes and religions in other parts of the country. If they are brought up to accept that as normal, it is little surprise that they are susceptible to taking up arms when a conflict happens. We have to start at the beginning, by educating against conflict and the mentality of vehement retaliation right at the outset. Education is so important. The United Kingdom’s commitment of up to £300 million for the Global Partnership for Education over the next four years is therefore particularly welcome.

Many children out of school are marginalised and hard to reach, and nearly half of them live in fragile and conflict-affected areas. Marginalisation affects children right through the education system, from early education to university level. In post-conflict environments and fragile states, getting children back into school and addressing out-of-school youth, some of whom may have been child soldiers or refugees themselves, helps to bring back a sense of equity, justice and cohesion to what can be a fractured society. That has to be the start.

Girls’ education is a big issue. The girls’ education challenge will give up to 1 million of the world’s poorest girls the opportunity to improve their lives through education. The point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford was important: if more women were doing the educating—and, indeed, the negotiating before or after a conflict, as well—there might be a better chance of avoiding the worst excesses of conflict in the first place.

We will perhaps think of places such as Afghanistan, where under the Taliban regime girls were excluded from education. Despite all the horrors that have taken place in that country, one great success that we should never cease to emphasise is that so many young women and girls in Afghanistan now have the opportunity to get an education in school and to go on to university. We should never underestimate the importance of that. However, there are other countries, which are not in such familiar conflict zones, where young women do not get access to education. There is so much more to do, particularly in parts of Africa. That is why DFID’s priority of concentrating aid on getting more girls into education across the world is a good one that many of us can support.

I have seen projects in places such as Ghana. In my constituency, I run the EYE project—it stands for Eco, Young and Engaged—and every year we have an eco-summit; recently we had our seventh. A very enthusiastic local man called Jib Hagan runs a charity called CARE—Collecting and Recycling Ecologically. He collects old computers that are being thrown out by local schools and businesses, takes them to Ghana and puts them in schools, pre-loaded with lots of information about how to be more environmentally friendly, how girls can get better education, engagement in the democratic process and so on. In return, he brings back lots of wonderful shopping bags made from old plastic carrier bags by some of the kids and the families out there.

A few years ago, we did a satellite link-up with the British Council between one school in a very impoverished area whose pupils were using those computers and the 250 local kids at my eco-summit. Incredibly, the technology worked. British kids and Ghanaian kids in completely contrasting environments spoke to each other, and understood and empathised with one another. It was a wonderful moment. To see the advantage that a bit of old technology that we were throwing out had brought to those kids—it was going to transform their educational opportunities and, I hope, keep that country out of conflict—was deeply humbling, and a very proud moment for those of us who had helped to make it happen.

Girls’ education is a particularly important part of preventing conflict in the future. I will draw on a couple of examples. I do not need to go over all the statistics about what is happening in Syria at the moment, but there are now 2.3 million children in Syria who are out of school or at risk of dropping out of school. Many hundreds of thousands are refugees outside Syria, as well. I am due to visit some Syrian refugee camps in Jordan later this month—they are vast camps—just as some years ago in Syria I visited what was then the largest refugee camp run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in the world. It was for Iraqis fleeing conflict who had gone to Damascus. I saw the great efforts of the UNHCR and other charities, which were trying to make sure that there was some normality in the lives of those kids. Getting some ongoing education for them was absolutely key. We must make sure that children who are displaced because of the horrible war dragging on in Syria can at least have some semblance of a normal childhood by continuing some form of education. The crisis in Syria has placed many women and girls at risk of violence, exploitation and insecurity. We often forget that.

Drawing on some of my previous trips, the very first parliamentary delegation that I went on, some 15 or so years ago, was to Ethiopia. That country had been riven by civil war under a particularly nasty Marxist regime. People had been driven out of their properties and sexual violence was part of the conflict. I remember visiting the Fistula hospital in Addis Ababa. It is a charity set up by some wonderful medics, where visiting clinicians go to help out. Daily I saw 12-year-old, 13-year-old and 14-year-old women—in some cases they had walked hundreds of miles—who had had bad experiences of giving birth because they had been too young. They were victims either of conflict, of misguided forced marriage or of being raped, effectively under the noses of their families in their villages, and had then been cast out. The only sanctuary and help they could get was by walking literally hundreds of miles to that wonderful hospital in Addis Ababa. The war in Ethiopia did huge damage but the country is, I hope, on a better path now.

I visited schools in the drought-affected areas, and, as I said earlier, kids were walking 10 miles or more each day to and from their homes to attend school, because it was such a big deal. They loved it. Nobody was playing hooky there; no truancy officer was needed. They went to school because their parents wanted them to go, as they could see it was a good thing. The kids themselves wanted to go to school and get an education, because that was their ladder out of poverty. It would stop them getting sucked into the conflict that so often happens in these impoverished zones, where people will fight over a little dustbowl of land.

I remember going to Mozambique—again, a country riven by vicious civil war over many, many years. There were many displaced kids who had fled parts of Mozambique and had gone to what they thought was the relative safety of South Africa, but had ended up in the sex trade. I worked with some hugely dedicated charities in Mozambique that were trying to rescue those kids.

A few years ago I went to Tajikistan, where I was taken to a school in Duschanbe, because I wanted to see some of the refugees from Afghanistan—there were a lot of them there. They asked me to give a class to kids of all different ages. They spoke wonderful English and were really enthusiastic about being there. They were there because they had been driven out of Afghanistan. There had been a big spate of kidnappings: brothers and sisters had been kidnapped; indeed, the teacher’s own children had been kidnapped and she had never seen them again. Tajikistan was giving them sanctuary, and had given them a school and some teaching resources, because the way forward is education.

There are many other subjects that we could mention in this debate. Forced marriages are another form of conflict, frankly. Female genital mutilation, of which we have been hearing so much recently, is another form of violence inflicted on children. It is not acceptable in the modern world, and we should not be afraid of saying so, whatever cultural differences might separate us from those people who say it is all right. It is not all right. It is not acceptable in this day and age. It is violence against girls and women.

There is no excuse for children being caught up in war and conflict. Children are different and special, and as adults we have a duty to do whatever we can to protect them, in this country or in any far-flung corner of the globe in which they are involved in conflict. In many of the countries that we are talking about, almost half the population is under the age of 18, so we are talking about huge numbers of people who are the future of those countries. If we do not get it right for those war-torn countries now, we will not get it right in the future. If they get back on the road to peace and prosperity, their kids might at last get an education and a chance to prosper.