Universally, people regard children as the future of the world. As such, people tend to feel highly protective of them, and do everything in their power to ensure the safety of their young. The idea of an entire country turning a blind eye to children’s misery is appalling, but, in his Washington Post article “The Blood-Stained Indian Child Welfare Act,” George Will contends that most people are overlooking a great source of grief for many children and families. For this reason, Will unearths the atrocities surrounding the Indian Child Welfare Act. Will’s sophisticated diction assures the reader of his intelligence about the topic, allowing him or her to put faith in Will’s opinions. Will asserts that the ICWA permits the removal of children At the beginning, Will warns that the Act is “sometimes lethal, as some Native American children could attest, were they not dead” (Will). The abrupt, almost casual mention of the death of children stuns, repulses, and incenses the reader. Will then directs this myriad of emotions toward the ICWA, thereby aligning the reader with his views. Later, in the closing sentence, Will urges readers to act “before more bodies and hearts are broken” (Will). This sentence imposes a sense of urgency, causing the reader to worry about the fates of the endangered children, while subtly forcing readers to recollect the fact that many have already died due to the Act. Will plants pathos at the beginning and end of the article in order to snare the reader and keep him or her emotional, making him or her more susceptible to Will’s Will mentions that some tribes objectify children “by treating children… as little trophies for tribal power” (Will). By equating children to trophies, Will allows the reader to glimpse how some tribes view children as nothing but puppets in the political game. Readers are bound to despise and denounce the belittlement and objectification of children, exactly as Will hopes. Will adds that the ICWA makes it challenging for “parents who see only children, not pawns of identity politics” to adopt children (Will). Will paints a hopeless picture for Native American children and prospective adoptive parents alike, as he insinuates that the ICWA will not permit them to have the family they covet. In addition to this, he wounds the image of the tribes who benefit from the ICWA, which pulls readers to his side. In this manner, Will creatively weaves figurative language in a manner that allows the reader to see how some Native Americans degrade children. In his article “The Blood-Stained Indian Child Welfare Act,” Will successfully brings to light the horrors that accompany the ICWA. However, the ICWA is only one act in one nation. Given the existence of nearly two hundred countries in the world, more acts similar to the ICWA must exist, meaning that thousands of children are in danger. How many of these children could be saved if people simply became more
The issue of identity also emerged in her commentary on how many Native American women are forced to prove their ethnicity for equality in health care and school: “For urban Indian women, who are not registered in federal government records, social services and benefits are difficult or almost impossible to obtain” (page 222). This governmental requirement for people to prove themselves as being “indian enough” can be damaging to one’s sense of self, and is proof of ongoing colonialism because the oppressors are determining whether one’s identity is legitimate.
Lives for Native Americans on reservations have never quite been easy. There are many struggles that most outsiders are completely oblivious about. In her book The Roundhouse, Louise Erdrich brings those problems to light. She gives her readers a feel of what it is like to be Native American by illustrating the struggles through the life of Joe, a 13-year-old Native American boy living on a North Dakota reservation. This book explores an avenue of advocacy against social injustices. The most observable plight Joe suffers is figuring out how to deal with the injustice acted against his mother, which has caused strife within his entire family and within himself.
Stannard, David E., "Recounting the Fables of Savagery: Native Infanticide and the Functions of Political Myth"
I am going to critically review a newspaper article on the death of Hamzah Khan from Bradford. I will discuss the main findings the research methodology and the way in which it may or may not be useful in the contribution to our understanding of child welfare. I will also include information on child abuse and on the different agencies. The newspaper article is called Hamzah Khan: the harrowing story of an 'invisible' child. (Pidd, 2013)
This program is part of the PBS series American Experience. In this episode, a critical eye is cast on the early efforts by Congress to "civilize" Native Americans. This homogenization process required the removal of Native American children from their homes and placing them in special Indian schools. Forced to stay for years at a time without returning home, children were required to eschew their own language and culture and learn instead the ways of the white man. Archival photographs and clips, newspaper accounts, journals, personal recollections, and commentary by historians relate the particulars of this era in American History and its ultimate demise. ~ Rose of Sharon Winter, All Movie Guide
The history of Indian Child Welfare Act derived from the need to address the problems with the removal of Indian children from their communities. Native American tribes identified the problem of Native American children being raised by non-native families when there were alarming numbers of children being removed from their h...
Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 1986. Kinnamon, Kenneth, ed., pp. 113-117 New Essays on Native Sons. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. Macksey, Richard and Frank E. Moorer, eds.
Swan, Rita. 2010. “Equal rights for children under the law” Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty, Inc
Native Americans have undergone a horrific past of genocide, discrimination, forced acculturation, miscommunication, and misunderstanding. They were frequently dehumanized and stripped of basic human rights. Treated as “savages” they were herded into areas of confinement and robbed of their language, culture, and way of life. In many instances of genocide, experts have noted a type of historical trauma that may be passed down through families, known as generational trauma. While the potential effects of this concept are not proven, the stories, images, and memories of thousands of Native Americans continue to be shared with their children, thus perpetuating, and never forgetting the pain and embarrassment that their people have experienced.
Adoption boundaries have steadily extended since the World War II, Korean War and Vietnam War, where many children became orphans. As a response to them winners, especially Americans, started to adopt children from the war-torn countries (Wilkinson 1995, 174). Thus, it was a start point for international adoption. Intercountry (international or transnational) adoption is defined as adoption, where child is removed to the adoptees’ country. In recent times motives to adopt internationally are explained as charity of wealthier and more developed nations, a wish to help countries, which are fighting with economic problems, and also insufficient numbers of babies within the country. The rate of international adoption increased dramatically, rising more concerns about its ethics. While some people see international adoption as a positive intervention, which provides good opportunities to parentless children and to adoptive parents as well, other people see it as child trafficking, supporting this fact by evidences of child exploitation and abusing for sexual motives. Some countries, such as Romania, Vietnam, and Kazakhstan, started closing boundaries for international adoption for unknown time period. (Reference)So, the aim of this essay is to examine if international adoption is a positive intervention or not. Firstly, arguments for intercountry adoption will be presented. Then, the essay will progress to the presentation of the arguments against international adoption. Finally, it will attempt to evaluate arguments critically, and find if international adoption is good or bad intervention. It will be argued that considering child’s interests in the first place international adoption has more positive than negative effects.
Nevertheless, in the author’s note, Dunbar-Ortiz promises to provide a unique perspective that she did not gain from secondary texts, sources, or even her own formal education but rather from outside the academy. Furthermore, in her introduction, she claims her work to “be a history of the United States from an Indigenous peoples’ perspective but there is no such thing as a collective Indigenous peoples’ perspective (13).” She states in the next paragraph that her focus is to discuss the colonist settler state, but the previous statement raises flags for how and why she attempts to write it through an Indigenous perspective. Dunbar-Ortiz appears to anchor herself in this Indian identity but at the same time raises question about Indigenous perspective. Dunbar-Ortiz must be careful not to assume that just because her mother was “most likely Cherokee,” her voice automatically resonates and serves as an Indigenous perspective. These confusing and contradictory statements do raise interesting questions about Indigenous identity that Dunbar-Ortiz should have further examined. Are
Platt, Anthony. (1982). The rise of the child-saving movement. In Chris Jenks (Ed.) The sociology of childhood: Essential readings (pp. 151-169). London: Batsfords Academic and Educational Ltd.
Debatably, child maltreatment can be viewed as a human rights violation that is caused by various factors involving the individua...
Child labour is an issue that has plagued society since the earliest of times. Despite measures taken by NGOs as well as the UN, child labour is still a prevalent problem in today’s society. Article 23 of the Convention on the Rights of a Child gives all children the right to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child 's education, or to be harmful to the child 's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.1 Child labour clearly violates this right as well as others found in the UDHR. When we fail to see this issue as a human rights violation children around the world are subjected to hard labour which interferes with education, reinforces
Census (2011) of India indicates that there are over 12 million child workers in India. They are employed in textile factories, roadside restaurants (dhabas), hotels, domestic workers, in mines and so on. They are even seen doing hazardous work in firecrackers and matchstick industries. This is not a new scenario for India. The Government has been taking proactive steps to tackle this problem through strict enforcement of policies and laws.