Children Seem to Be Less Vulnerable to the Coronavirus. Here's How the Pandemic May Still Put Them at Risk

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Published on Friday, 10 April 2020 16:00

Written by Angelina Jolie

Of the many ways that the pandemic is making us rethink our humanity, none is more important, or urgent, than the overall protection of children. They may not be as susceptible to the virus as other groups, but they are especially vulnerable to so many of the secondary impacts of the pandemic on society.

The economic fallout of COVID-19 has been swift and brutal. Lockdowns and stay at home orders have resulted in job losses and economic insecurity, increasing pressure and uncertainty for many families. We know that stress at home increases the risk of domestic violence, whether in a developed economy or a refugee camp.

In America, an estimated 1 in 15 children is exposed to intimate partner violence each year — 90% of them as eyewitnesses to the violence. An average of 137 women across the world are killed by a partner or family member every day. We will never know in how many of these cases there is a child in the next room — or in the room itself.

Isolating a victim from family and friends is a well-known tactic of control by abusers. This means necessary social distancing could inadvertently fuel a direct rise in trauma and suffering for vulnerable children. There are already reports of a surge in domestic violence around the world, including violent killings.

It comes at a time when children are deprived of the very support networks that help them cope: from their friends and trusted teachers to after-school activities and visits to a beloved relative’s house that provide an escape from their abusive environment.

COVID-19 has cut children off from their friends, their regular schooling and their freedom of movement. With well over a billion people living under lockdown worldwide, there has been a lot of focus on how to prevent children missing out on their education, as well as how to lift their spirits and keep them joyful in isolation.

For many students, schools are a lifeline of opportunity as well as a shield, offering protection — or at least a temporary reprieve — from violence, exploitation and other difficult circumstances, including sexual exploitation, forced marriage and child labor.

It’s not just that children have lost support networks. Lockdown also means fewer adult eyes on their situation. In child abuse cases, child protective services are most often called by third parties such as teachers, guidance counselors, after school program coordinators and coaches.

All this poses the question: What are we doing now to step up to protect vulnerable children from suffering harm during the shutdown that will affect them for the rest of their lives?

We were underprepared for this moment because we have yet to take the protection of children seriously enough as a society. The profound, lasting health impacts of trauma on children are poorly understood and often minimized. Women who find the strength to tell somebody about their abuse are often shocked by the many people who choose not to believe them, make excuses for abusive behavior, or blame them. They are often not prepared for the risk of being failed by an under-resourced child welfare system, or encountering judges and other legal professionals who are not trained in trauma and controlling abuse and don’t take its effects on children seriously.

There are signs of hope. In my home state of California, Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris has argued that domestic violence and other Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are major components of the most destructive and costly health problems in the United States. She’s leading a drive for routine screening of children for ACEs by health care providers to enable early intervention.

Even though we are physically separated from each other under lockdown, we can make a point of calling family or friends, particularly where we might have concerns that someone is vulnerable. We can educate ourselves to the signs of stress and domestic violence and know what to look out for and how seriously to take it. We can support our local domestic violence shelters.

The Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children offers a number of resources to help protect kids during the pandemic, including guides to keeping them safe online and talking to children about difficult issues. The Child Helpline Network can direct parents or anyone with concerns to a number to call for advice and information. And there are sites that can help you if you have concerns about your own relationship.

It is often said that it takes a village to raise a child. It will take an effort by the whole of our country to give children the protection and care they deserve.

source : Time

Angelina Jolie: A Mother’s Strength

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Published on Monday, 11 May 2020 05:00

Written by Angelina Jolie

This year, I’m remembering my mom’s spirit, and the power of so many women I’ve met around the world.

Mother’s Day is hard for anyone who has lost their mom, but this year must be particularly so because of coronavirus. So many people have lost a parent suddenly, without being by their side, able to care for them and return their love in the way they’d always imagined.

I lost my mother in my thirties. When I look back to that time, I can see how much her death changed me. It was not sudden, but so much shifted inside. Losing a mother’s love and warm, soft embrace is like having someone rip away a protective blanket.

I got a small tattoo on my right hand after my mother died, knowing that hand tattoos fade. It looks to others like a letter “m.” But it wasn’t an “m” for Marcheline, her name. It was a “w” for “Winter” — the Rolling Stones song she sang to me as a baby, and that I remember loving as a little girl. “It sure been a cold, cold winter,” she would sing to me. And at the line, “I wanna wrap my coat around you,” she would wrap me up in my blankets and snuggle me.

I loved my mom. She was raised Catholic on the South Side of Chicago. My grandfather, who fought in World War II, loved bowling, M*A*S*H, Benny Hill and my grandmother, Lois. My grandmother died before I was born, when my mother was in her twenties. “Diamond Lois,” my mother’s boyfriend called her. Not because she was a socialite but because she scrubbed the floor in her diamonds. Before my grandparents moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, they ran a bowling alley. Their parents before them ran a bar.

She loved to feel alive. She loved to laugh. When I was down, she would break out those rock songs and remind me of the fire within. One of my early memories is of her lighting candles and placing Beatles albums around the house the night John Lennon was killed. The other time I recall her being worried about a public figure’s health was when Pope John Paul II was shot.

Losing her mother made her deeply sad. When my father had an affair, it changed her life. It set her dream of family life ablaze. But she still loved being a mother. Her dreams of being an actor faded as she found herself, at the age of 26, raising two children with a famous ex who would cast a long shadow on her life. After she died, I found a video of her acting in a short film. She was good. It was all possible for her.

Before her death, she told me that dreams can simply change shape. Her dream to be an artist was in fact her mother’s dream. And later she hoped it would be mine. I think of how true that must be for so many women before us, whose dreams have taken generations to realize.

Listening to “Winter” now, I realize how lonely and afraid my mother must have been, but also how determined she was to fight to make sure her children were all right. As the “w” faded on my hand, so did that feeling of home and protection. Life has taken many turns. I’ve had my own loss and seen my life take a different direction. And it hurt more than I imagined it ever would.

But now, with my girls growing up and being the ages I remember so well as a daughter, I am rediscovering my mother and her spirit. She was a girl who danced all night on the Sunset Strip and loved rock 'n' roll. She was a woman who loved, even after loss, and never lost her grace and her smile.

I now know what it’s like to be alone and to wrap my coat around those I love. And I know the overwhelming sense of gratitude at being strong enough to keep them safe and warm. When your children come into your life, they immediately and forever come first.

This Mother’s Day, I think of refugee mothers I have met, living in poverty and displacement. Every one began her journey of motherhood with a promise to do all she could to protect her child. To lay down her life if necessary. And if she is defeated and silenced, few things are more tragic.

Through refugees, I’ve come to believe that a mother is the strongest person on earth. The softness of her skin is deceptive. She is a force driven by love and loyalty. There is no one who solves more problems. When she has only love to give, it pours from her soul.

When a mother comes to you for help and you do not provide it, she may weep. But she will never give up. When you deny her child safety and shelter, she may seek it in a hostile land where her body is vulnerable to abuse. Her heart will be sick with loss. But she will fight on for her child. Because she is a mother.

Women who are abused aren’t “weak women,” they are often mothers. They are often trying to manage danger with no way out. They will stand between their child and harm. They will face isolation and criticism. But their only thought will be: “Hurt me, not my child. Insult and ignore me, not my child. Take away my food, but not my child’s.”

A woman like this will suffer unimaginable pain in war or in a refugee camp, but she will not leave her child and seek another life. She will sit for 10 years, 20 years or more if necessary. I remember all the beautiful faces of the refugee mothers I have met, like pages in a family album. Their eyes full of exhaustion, but never giving up. Because they who were once daughters must now wrap their own child in a blanket.

Nothing is more painful for a mother or father than to be unable to provide their child with the things they need. This is a reality many more families are facing during this pandemic, even in America. But I have learned that when children know how much you love them, sometimes that understanding counts for more than the thing itself. And when they grow up, knowing that you never abandoned them, or left them in an unsafe situation, or ever stopped fighting for them, will be what counts.

So to the mothers everywhere who feel helpless — yet who still give every last bit of energy, every last bite of food and the only blanket to their children— I honor you.

And to anyone who is grieving this Mother’s Day, I hope you will find consolation and strength in your memories.

credits : NY Times

The World's Refugee Crisis Is Bad Now—But It's Only Going to Get Worse

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Published on Saturday, 20 June 2020 12:56

Written by Angelina Jolie

As the burning injustice of discrimination and racism in America bursts to the forefront, we must also address persecution and oppression rising globally, depriving millions of their rights, their liberty and their physical safety.

The U.N. Refugee Agency has published its latest annual report on the state of human displacement in the world and it is stark reading. Nearly 80 million people—the highest number since records began, according to available data—have been forced from their homes by extreme persecution and violence, and are living as refugees, asylum seekers or people displaced within their own countries. For the first time, forced displacement is affecting more than one percent of humanity, or 1 in every 97 people.

These are people fleeing attacks on schools and hospitals, mass sexual violence, the siege and starvation of whole cities, the murderous oppression of terrorist groups, and decades of institutionalized persecution based on religion, gender or sexuality.

It is not just the overall number of forcibly displaced people that is shocking. More people are being forced to leave their homes on a larger scale in more places and at one of the fastest rates in living memory. Global displacement has almost doubled since 2010. The number of refugees in sub-Saharan Africa has tripled in the same period. And the number of countries where the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is working to support internally-displaced people has gone from 15 in 2005 to 33 today. This is before the full economic devastation of COVID-19 strikes, threatening hunger and starvation and deeper insecurity for millions.

I’ve witnessed the change with my own eyes. My first 10 years with UNHCR, beginning in 2000, was focused mainly on helping refugees return to their homes in countries like Cambodia, Bosnia and Sierra Leone. It involved landmines being cleared, homes rebuilt, roads opened up and markets restarted. International institutions—however imperfect—delivered a small measure of justice and accountability.

From the mid 1990s until around 2010, the number of displaced people remained relatively stable worldwide, because even though new displacement continued, many refugees were eventually repatriated after peace agreements, or built permanent homes in their host nations, or were resettled in new countries.
United Nations Records Biggest Rise In Refugees In Its Records

But in the last 10 years, what little justice and solutions were available for refugees has dried up. I’ve visited Syrian refugees roughly a dozen times in the decade since the conflict in that region began. Refugees I met as children now have their own children and still live in the same unsafe tent encampments, with aid rations dwindling, and no prospect of a just, equitable political settlement in their country that would enable them to return home in safety.

Several factors seem to be at play. This past decade began with a global recession that has fueled hardship and anger and discontent. Many countries and communities around the world have shown extraordinary generosity to refugees living in their midst. But even as, across the world, refugee medics, nurses and healthcare workers serve on the frontline of the COVID-19 response, refugees are often regarded as a burden, greeted with xenophobia and racism, and denigrated and dehumanized in politics and the media.

Collectively, nations seem to have stopped regarding human displacement as a temporary, man-made phenomenon we have the power to influence. But from my personal experience the vast majority of refugees want to return home, and would do so, if their home countries were stable. Working to solve the conflict in any one of the top five refugee producing countries, from Syria to Myanmar, would bring the overall number of displaced people down by millions.

We are quick to criticize the human rights records of adversaries but silent when conflicts creating displacement and misery involve our allies. When we start to pick and choose which countries or peoples we help, from our humanitarian assistance to our asylum policies, we ourselves are discriminating: assigning different levels of importance to different peoples, races, religions and ethnicities, violating the fundamental principle that we are all born equal.

In our school years, we Americans are not taught enough to respect and admire the cultures and contributions of countries with histories far longer than our own. Or indeed to have a truly deep understanding of our own history, and the acts our country was built upon. That is one reason why, in my early twenties, I first wanted to work with UNHCR.

What has become clear to me through my work is that the fight for human rights and equality is universal. It is one fight, wherever we live, and however different our circumstances might be.

There is a dividing line running across our world between those who have rights and freedom and those who do not. Who we choose to stand with, and how much we are prepared to change and to fight, should not stop at our borders.

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Angelina Jolie: How the Pandemic Is Hurting Women in a World That Already Didn't Care About Them

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Published on Sunday, 18 October 2020 15:36

Written by Angelina Jolie

The UN Secretary General’s latest report on COVID-19 contains a chilling statement: “gains on gender equality risk being reversed by decades” by the pandemic. The numbers paint a stark picture of a possible 2 million additional cases of female genital mutilation globally by 2030, 13 million additional child marriages, an additional 15 million women and girls subjected to gender-based violence for every 3 months of lockdown, and a further 47 million women forced into extreme poverty.

The prospect of “decades” of progress in women’s rights being undone by the pandemic is intolerable and ought to be unthinkable. It is over half a century since the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights promised equal rights for all women, yet basic rights, protections and freedoms are still non-existent in some countries. In others, they are built on such fragile foundations that it seems the pandemic might sweep them away.

These problems cannot be blamed entirely on the coronavirus. While the virus has inflamed inequities in societies, it did not create them. Humans — not disease — are responsible for unjust laws and systems, and racial and social inequality. The coronavirus is just the latest excuse for all that we didn’t fix ourselves.

Even before the pandemic, which has led to a shocking rise in domestic violence, more than three women a day on average were murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in America. Globally, an estimated one in every three women faced being beaten, raped or otherwise abused during her lifetime, with in most cases, the abuser being a member of her own family. There were over three times as many female victims of intentional homicide in 2017 worldwide than victims of terrorism — and over half of them were murdered by a family member.

We live in an era of artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Yet the basic rights of women to an education, the vote, control over their bodies, equal protection under the law, equal pay and full representation in society, are still debated in terms that would be familiar to early campaigners for women’s rights, with much of the same old unrepentant misogyny, worn out excuses, and outright violence. In our world, the existence of an entire hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo largely devoted to treating victims of brutal rape — among them babies and young children — is taken as normal.

Less than 1% of all international humanitarian assistance goes toward sexual and gender-based violence programs — a clear signal that preventing such crimes is not accorded high priority by governments. And previous pandemics such as Ebola have shown that more women are likely to die from a lack of services to respond to violence and illness than from the disease itself, yet international efforts to meet the needs of vulnerable women remain underfunded and subject to political backlash.

With hindsight, we’ve accepted or congratulated ourselves on progress in women’s rights that has been incremental, painfully slow, and all too easily reversible. The younger generation — including those voting for the first time in the upcoming U.S. election — should not be as patient or accepting of compromises.

The possibility of a setback in women’s rights globally ought to provoke a tidal wave of anger and concern, and pressure on governments to guarantee that they will not countenance this unjust and dangerous outcome. Continued suppression or reversal of women’s rights would lead to a more insecure and divided world, with greater numbers of refugees and increased conflict. It is as much a threat to our interests as it is an affront to our values. Women shouldn’t be the main voices in this fight. Men must take a stand.

This should not be a partisan issue. Yet it has emerged as a dividing line in next month’s Presidential election. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was allowed to lapse in February 2019 and has yet to be reauthorized. Only Joe Biden has committed to the authorization of VAWA in his first 100 days in office and to America leading in the fight against gender-based violence globally.

But we need more than a return to the status quo before the pandemic. At home, we need a far greater focus on safety: the prevention of domestic violence, greatly increased support and services for survivors including children exposed to violence and trauma, and a system that provides accountability.

Abroad, we and other powerful countries should acknowledge the blatant inconsistencies in our approach to foreign policy: our willingness to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses when they are committed by allies or partners with whom we want to do business, or when we simply decide that our own political priorities have shifted. Doing so makes it all too easy for others to shirk their responsibilities.

In Afghanistan, for example, after an invasion we justified in part on the grounds of the Taliban’s treatment of women and two decades of efforts to support Afghan women in their demands for an equal place in society, we have knowingly taken part in a diplomatic process that side-lined Afghan women. America is stewarding a peace agreement that may not even require the Taliban to guarantee the basic right of all Afghan girls to go to school, without exception. Equal rights should mean just that, not equal rights where expedient.

Not to use our influence to defend and promote women’s rights at a time when they are threatened would betray the fundamental principles of our democracy. It would also send a message to young girls everywhere — already conscious of growing up in an unequal, unjust world — that even though we could see their horizons narrowing during this pandemic, we didn’t care enough to try to stop it.

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