Children’s rights are the human rights of children, with particular attention to the rights
of special protection and care afforded to the young, including their right to –
• association with both biological parents
• human identity
• have their basic needs met for food, universal state-paid education and health
care, and
• criminal laws appropriate for their age and development.
Interpretations of children’s rights range from allowing children the capacity for
autonomous action to the enforcement of children being physically, mentally and
emotionally free from abuse. The question that was the subject of the research study,
of which this paper is a reduced reflection, is what protection is accorded to children in
Namibia?
On 2 October 2009, the front page of The Namibian, the country’s most widely read
daily newspaper, bore a headline stating that –1
[o]ur children face murder, rape and abuse on a daily basis.
The author of the newspaper article informs us that at least 200 children, from newborns
to teenagers of 16 years, have been murdered, raped or assaulted in Namibia so far
this year, or have died under suspicious circumstances. Horror stories of children being
stabbed to death, pushed into animal burrows and left to die, gang-raped, burnt to death,
and drowned while unattended, as well as babies being dumped by their mothers have
filled the daily crime reports released by the Police since the beginning of the year.2