Nazgul Turdubekova, head of Child Rights Defenders’ LeaguePublic Foundation, sent an open letter to the President of Kyrgyzstan.
She asked Sadyr Japarov to pay attention to the situation of children, who suffer from violence through the fault of their parents and in boarding schools because of the distorted system of protection.
The human rights activist cited two examples when children have been under the yoke of violence by adults for years due to inaction of authorized bodies for the protection of children.
«In one case, a girl suffered sexual abuse from her father while living without mother, and in the other, children having migrant parents live in an orphanage, where the conditions are equal to torture. Both of these crimes against children could have been avoided, if child protection and family support services had been created at the level of the village council and the City Hall. Unfortunately, they have not been created in the republic for 30 years, the bureaucracy has always killed any initiatives, even though only 700 social workers for child protection were needed at any point. They were proposed in the new Children’s Code, but, alas, it has never been adopted, because the Ministry of Finance felt that it was too expensive to protect the children,» she said.
According to Nazgul Turdubekova, the girl was sent to a boarding school, not to relatives or to a foster family.
«The entire civilized world has already drawn conclusions that it should be more important for the state to keep children in their biological family or in a family environment, otherwise residential institutions will do irreparable harm to the child’s development. The Kyrgyz as an ethnic group survived because our ancestors grew up in families, not in orphanages or boarding schools. They didn’t leave a single orphan with strange people. Seeing how sensitive you are to the situation of young Kyrgyzstanis, I ask you to take urgent measures to protect them from violence and keep them in family environment,» she asks the head of state.
It should be noted that the number of cases of violence against children have recently increased. Here are a few examples that have become public. It became known yesterday that a 49-year-old man raped his underage daughter in Bishkek. In Dzhumgal district, a 54-year-old man is suspected of raping his 13-year-old daughter. A 14-year-old girl was forced into prostitution in Bishkek. In Sokuluk district, a young man had sexual intercourse with a minor girl for half a year.
