RESPECT Offers Knowledge For Donation
by Ian Foster
RESPECT International is offering to donate a set of four reference books to a refugee community in exchange for your donation of $20 US.
The four books, published by Youth Advocate Program International, cover the topics of 'Stateless Children', 'Discrimination Against the Girl Child', 'Children and the HIV/AIDS Crisis', and 'Child Soldiers'.
Youth Advocate Program International (YAPI) was founded in 1994 as a non-profit organisation in the US; and opened its Washington, D.C. office two years later.
Priorities of YAPI include 'advocacy, education and youth participation', and offering assistance - both inter-governmental and non-governmental - to partner organisations world wide with 'issue campaigns, advocacy efforts, and as an information resource targeting urgent and emerging issues and child rights issues' www.yapi.org/about.htm.
YAPI involves national and international policy-makers, students, the public, and teachers, coordinating their activities with 'numerous non-governmental advocacy, service, and other youth-serving organisations'.
The organisation seeks to increase knowledge in the public arena in areas such as the use of child soldiers, child labor, juvenile justice, the rights of the child, and the commercial sexual exploitation of children.
The first book in the series offered, 'Stateless Children', reveals and pinpoints the 'vulnerability of millions' of today's children who have the misfortune of not being recognised as citizens belonging to any country.
The second book, 'Discrimination Against the Girl Child', is actually the sixth booklet in the full series of publications distributed by YAPI on an international level, and 'describes practices that rob girl children of control over their persons and, in some instances, rob them of their very lives'.
Cultural and practical motivations lying at the roots of female infanticide, honor killing, and female genital cutting, are explored.
Supporting this indictment of outdated and often cruel practices is an examination of methods being used to combat such abuses of a child's human rights.
'Children and the HIV/AIDS Crisis' is the third publication offered, and examines the ramifications of the fact that younger persons actually represent the highest rate of new HIV infections on an international level.
Such children are often abandoned or orphaned due to their nearest relatives dying of the deadly plague, and this publication attempts to provide 'a valuable overview of a subject' we can no longer afford to ignore.
Perhaps the most terrible and inhuman problem facing several thousands of today's children is their use in wars as 'soldiers' - human weapons of war who are all too often barely able to carry the weapons they have been hastily 'trained' to use in the taking of the lives of others.
It is estimated that some quarter of a million children are involved in combat, not by accident, but deliberately.
These children, denied the right to grow and learn as children in other, less violent, areas of the world, often are not even aware of the reason for the 'uniform', the weapon, the hatred that is fostered in them by adult combatants.
'Child Soldiers', like its three partners in this offer, should be read, absorbed, and discussed in depth by every caring and concerned adult, especially those who have children of their own in a vulnerable situation that could conceivably see their names appearing on lengthening lists of the child-victims discussed within each publication.
It is highly recommended that all concerned persons should donate to RESPECT International today, and receive in return the key to doorways behind which lie horrors unimaginable to those of us far removed from the plight of these innocent young lives.