Indicators for Children’s Rights

CONTENTS

Foreword by Elizabeth Musarurwa
About the authors
Acknowledgements

Introduction
The international context of children’s
rights
The Convention on the Rights of the Child
The African Charter on the Rights and
Welfare of the Child
The national context
Developments towards systematic monitoring
of the implementation of the Convention
Aims of the Zimbabwe Country Case Study
project
The purpose of this Report
Establishing the project in Zimbabwe
The structure of this Report
Figure 1: The regrouping og the Articles
of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Zimbabwe

1. Dominant themes in the Report
Definition of “child”
Definitions of a child in a Zimbabwean
context
Ethnicity and religion
The historical origins of ethnicity or
“tribalism”
Ethnicity at national and local levels
in multicultural environments
The Zimbabwean reality
Ethnicity and religion related to children’s
rights and welfare
A central absence: Participation
Data on children’s participation in Zimbabwe

2. Children-parent relations
Traditional children-parent relationships
The role of parents in child welfare
Registration of births
Custody and maintenance of children
Children’s privacy
The role of the community in child welfare
The role of the state in child welfare
State assistance to parents in their child
care responsibilities
Institutional care
Criteria used to determine which children
should be placed in state care
Characteristics of children in statutory
care
Orphan status
Referral to and stay in care
Child welfare staffing
Government provision for child welfare
Comments
Constructions of childhood and children
Data on children
Further research

3. Social and economic deprivation
Contradictions in Zimbabwean legislation
Literature on the economic exploitation of
children in Zimbabwe
Assumptions about and expectations of children
Zimbabwean perceptions of child economic exploitation
Data on economic exploitation
Links with other regroupings
Comments

4. Protection and survival
Child abuse
Definitions
Current data on child abuse
Sources of data
Data on child sexual abuse
Sexuality and childhood
Causes of child sexual abuse
Reporting child sexual abuse
Other forms of abuse
Refugee children
Data on refugee children

5. Juvenile Justice, Rehabilitation and
Implementation
Historical Development
Official and customary views of childhood
Figure 2: Diagram showing the differences
between official and customary approaches to child offenders
Existing data
Data within the Police Department
The Department Of Social Welfare
Data in the Ministry of Justice, Legal
and Parliamentary Affairs
Academic data
Availability and accessability of data

6. Development and education
Data on children’s health in Zimbabwe
Health Priorities and Programmes
The Mid Decade Goals for Children’s Survival
Data on health and development: some comments
Education system and policies
Data on education
Limitations of the data

7. Mudzi: a community case study
Why was Mudzi chosen as the area of Study?
Characteristics of the District of Mudzi
Process of data gathering in Mudzi
Data on children-parent relationships
in Mudzi
Data on Mudzi district national registration
Data
Data from Mudzi on child exploitation
Data on juvenile justice and rehabilitation
Data on the health situation of children
in Mudzi
Data from village community workers
Data from community children’s rights
committees
The Mudzi District children’s Rights Committee

8. Towards a monitoring system
The issue of the monitoring body
The current understanding of monitoring
in Zimbabwe
Comments and recommendations: beyond CRC
reporting

Bibliography

Appendix: Protocol for data collection