The issue of the lack of protection in the daily life of children in our country is painful and long-standing, from the situation of mass child labour, socially accepted in the fields and in mining since ancient times, to the last decades of the last century, including the shameful statistics of today, the rights of many children and adolescents have been violated in their basic needs of respect for their humanity.
But if there is something that is much more regrettable than this history of suffering, it is the cynical discourse of the politicians of our time, who campaign after campaign, programme after programme, have promised Chilean society to stop this primitive situation of allowing such great disloyalty, violence of all kinds and abandonment of those whom we are supposed to protect, care for and open opportunities for them to develop their life projects, without discrimination or arbitrariness, just because they were born.
These responses depend on establishing priorities in the use of the state’s economic resources, and also that the people who are in this situation do not evade taxes and are available to contribute even greater resources at the state level to provide definitive answers to this infamy. But such premises are not given and there is always a justification to leave these painful situations, as wounds that have no possibility of closing, because it is false, it is a gigantic lie that there is such a prioritisation of children first.
According to the report of the Observatorio de Derechos de la Defensoría de la Niñez, according to the 2017 Census, the number of children aged 0 to 8 years old reached 12% of the population (2 million individuals). By 2028 it is projected to decrease to 10 per cent.
16 per cent of children and adolescents live in income poverty, with 5.9 per cent living in households without basic needs being met.
18% of all children suffer from nutritional problems (malnutrition and obesity); thus, from 2019 to 2020, the number of children in pre-kindergarten with malnutrition increased by 1.7% and in kindergarten by 1.3%.
kindergarten. In both, total childhood obesity increased by 4.7%.
Child maltreatment cases reported in 2019 were 1547 and in 2020, due to the pandemic, only 539 cases were reported. The role of schools in the protection of children’s rights is key, this decreased in attention and referral of complaints, due to the suspension of face-to-face classes. School attendance spilled out 9% in 2017 and 7% in 2020.
Figures show that girls and boys are victims of abuse and other sexual crimes to a greater extent than adolescents. In addition, girls and female adolescents are more likely to be victims than boys.
The procedural status of the cases of human rights violations against children and adolescents known to the Public Prosecutor’s Office shows no progress (of all of them, there is only one conviction).
On the other hand, the ambits of the “childcare business”, to which the middle and upper economic class go for their children, at a general level, show an average monthly value for this year of $429,996 in nurseries and $373,454 in kindergartens.
In terms of enrolment fees, nursery schools charge $362,082 pesos, and kindergartens $305,643.
This was reflected in the study by Sodexo Benefits and Incentives, where they analysed the values of 409 nurseries and kindergartens throughout Chile, detecting an increase of 9% on average between 2022 and 2023 (remember that the minimum monthly salary in Chile is $401,000 pesos).
In this context, it is very important that companies comply with the childcare law for their workers, but this will not happen as long as the business mentality, which measures everything in monetary terms, does not overcome the inhumane look that it is cheaper for them to pay fines.
For example, here is just one example. The Court of Appeals of Valdivia, Los Ríos region, upheld a conviction in which a supermarket (the company Super 10 S.A. -Mayorista 10-) was fined for denying at least one hour a day to its workers to be able to feed their children under the age of two. In a unanimous verdict, the Court of Appeal upheld the previous ruling of the Labour Court of Valdivia and dismissed the claim filed by the convicted company for a fine of 153 UTM imposed by the Provincial Labour Inspectorate.
The stagnation of these unjustifiable situations against children, regardless of the political sign of the governments of the period, is revealing the underlying problem, in which there are conflicting directions and common sense, between an anti-humanist position and a humanist one.
The humanist position on the issue of children aims to definitively prioritise their needs and educate them to acquire values and capacities to develop in the world with coherence and solidarity. It is fundamentally to enable the new generations to take a non-naïve look at reality, in order to be able to transform and humanise more and more. The proposals for alternatives to conservative education are numerous, the most interesting of which emerge from some trade unions, social movements and political parties that question the capitalist, anthropocene, patriarchal and oppressive capitalist order.
Collaborators: Cesar Anguita Sanhueza, Guillermo Garcés Parada and M. Angélica Alvear Montecinos. Political Opinion Commission
