Catholic Aid Agency for England and Wales, CAFOD has faulted the culture of silence in reporting Child abuse cases in Malawi and appealed for concerted effort in dealing away with it. CAFOD’s Child Protection Advisor, Kate Iwi, said this at a two-day workshop for training of trainers in Child Protection, which took place in Lilongwe recently in view of Church institutions’ capacity building on the campaign.
“There is a culture here where children are not encouraged to speak out and complain. There are also broad taboos around speaking about sexuality. Although some research findings indicate that there are plenty of child abuse cases, we don’t really know the extent of it due to this culture of silence,” she said.
Iwi said that the unfortunate part of silence is that abused children in the country will not be protected. As a result, they such children are likely to perform poorly in school, to have emotional issues and social problems.
Furthermore, she said, that in such scenarios abused children are more likely to continue in a cycle of abuses, become violent, delinquent and even start abusing others in their turn.
As such, Iwi commended the Episcopal Conference of Malawi (ECM), for taking an initiative in protecting Children from all forms of abuses in the society.
“The Catholic Church in Malawi has so far worked tirelessly to improve the welfare of children living in situations of poverty and abuse. However there hasn’t been any mechanisms for encouraging abused children to bring complaints to Church institutions, nor has their been a team within each diocese who are equipped to respond to such complaints,” she said.
Education Secretary for the Episcopal Conference of Malawi, Brother Pascal Mtuwana, said it is against this background that ECM brought together the diocesan child protection to equip them on how best to raise awareness locally, establish local complaints mechanisms – like hotlines, suggestion boxes and lead the processes to redress complaints.
ECM is implementing the Child Protection project in a bid to contribute to strengthen the capacity of the Catholic Church in Malawi in dealing with child abuse and creating children’s safe environment.