The Children’s Commissioner’s Office should be an autonomous body falling directly under Parliament, commissioner Helen D’Amato is insisting.
She echoed the views of her two predecessors – Sonia Camilleri and Carmen Zammit – who yesterday spoke about the need for a legally-empowered office, something they have been demanding for years.
Ms D’Amato said that just as the Ombudsman was an officer of Parliament and was therefore not answerable to the Executive, the Children’s Commissioner should be autonomous. She stressed she meant no disrespect to past or present ministers.
It was, however, of vital importance that the commissioner was not absorbed within the Office of the Ombudsman as, otherwise, it would lose visibility.
The three generations of commissioners spoke during an event organised at Verdala Palace to mark the 25th anniversary since the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The event was organised by the President’s Foundation for the Wellbeing of Society.
Ms Camilleri, the first Children’s Commissioner who served between 2003 and 2006, said that, unfortunately, certain issues remained realities till today. These included the need to strengthen children’s voices in the law courts, providing adequate support structures in schools and implementing the long-awaited Children’s Act that had been in the pipeline since 2000.
While a lot had been done over the years, she said, such matters were not treated with enough urgency. “Children are now,” she said, echoing the slogan of a past campaign run by the commission.
President Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca also spoke about the urgent need to enact the Children’s Act that would bring all legislative measures involving children under one law. “We need a children’s law that is the mother of all laws,” she said, listing issues that had to be tackled.
She recounted how, last week, she visited two schools and had the opportunity to meet groups of children of various ages who shared their concerns; bullying and prejudice cropped up in all groups and across all ages.
“Prejudices emerged which I did not believe existed. I was under the impression that the main prejudice was due to immigration. But they spoke about prejudice because they wore spectacles, were fat or came from a one-parent family.
“This prejudice led to bullying,” she said.
The teen group spoke openly about self-harm and cutting, in a way that suggested they did not believe their life would ever improve. They did not want to report their problems to the school counsellor because they did not want their parents to get to know and did not want to be discussed in the staff room.
“We need to reach out to them,” Ms Coleiro Preca said, as she turned the subject to children in care who were also bullied.
Speaking about poverty among children, she said that, though she loved Malta, “I am ashamed” that poverty still existed, adding and there was no time to waste.
There were about 300 children living in homes and, though loved, it was not the individual love they needed. Something had to be done to change the adoption law to free up children for adoption.
During a discussion, Fr Savio Vella, director of the home Osanna Pia, said he came across several cases of failed fostering and adoption and such children needed support.
Ms D’Amato said her office commissioned a study to look into different aspects of fostering that included looking into why some cases failed.
A recent magnetic resonance imaging study has shown that it is possible to distinguish males and females with an accuracy of 93 per cent just using brain images.
Julio Duarte-Caravajalino and colleagues from UCLA used diffusion tensor imaging in a study reported in the journal Neuroimage. Diffusion tensor imaging is a new process by which connections between different parts of the brain (made by the white matter fibres, which are like tiny wires) can be imaged. They found that female brain connections were more symmetrical and had more connections from the left side of the brain to the right; male brains tended to be asymmetrical and had more connections between areas on one side of the brain.
The researchers found no interactions with age between the ages of seven and 22 (the ages of the persons studied), showing that these changes are not due to different cultural experiences.
Men are known to be better at visual orientation than women and this sex difference has been found in infants as young as three months. Men are better at rotating an object in their mind. Women have better verbal fluency and a better memory for objects. They remember better where things have been put. Men are better at navigating by cardinal direction (for example going northwards) whereas women tend to navigate using landmarks.
Personality differences between the sexes have been thought to be small but Marco Del Giudice, from the University of Turin, reporting in the journal PLOS One, found extremely large differences between men and women in a large US sample of over 10,000 people. It was noted that personality differences between the sexes have been consistently underestimated in the past because of inadequate methodology.
They spoke about prejudice because they wore spectacles, were fat or came from a one-parent family
One commonly quoted theory is that men and women start off with a single type of ‘intersex’ brain and that individuals’ personalities are made up of a mosaic of ‘masculinizing’ or ‘feminizing’ influences. Larry Cahill, professor of neurobiology and behaviour at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in Cerebrum in April, that there is no evidence to support this.
There is a limit to how much the brain can be changed by training, as, for example, a left-handed person who is forced to use the right hand will never be as good with his trained right hand. People’s brains are not just a ‘blank slate’ that is mouldable and we are just beginning to discover how large are the inherent differences in structure and function between the sexes.
New interesting research is also beginning to emerge on differences in moral judgements between the sexes. Manuela Fumagalli and colleagues from the University of Milan studied how men and women responded to several personal moral dilemmas. For example, they were told to imagine they were a doctor and they had five dying patients who could only be saved by transplanting five organs from a young man but against his will and that this would kill him. They had to give a quick yes/no answer. The researchers found that men were more likely to make ‘utilitarian’ judgements than women and would be more likely to choose to transplant in this situation.
In a separate study, Dan Bouhnik, from Israel, found that girls were more likely to make a ‘humane’ judgement and tended towards judgements that reflected adherence to peer-group conventions than boys.
These findings have implications for the new proposed legislation on gender in Malta. What is being proposed is that individuals who feel they have the wrong gender can freely and easily choose to change their gender. ‘Gender identity’ is defined in the proposed law as “each person’s internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth”.
Research is telling us that we have a hard-wired brain structure which underlies the sex-specific way we act. We can change the external way we act and look into that of the opposite sex but it is likely that a lot of the actions and decisions of transexual persons will be strongly influenced by the brain structure of their original sex.
The definition of ‘gender identity’ in the proposed law appears to be superficial and seriously lacking. Something that is so deeply written in our brain should not be changeable by a simple application to the Director of the Public Registry. An unhurried period of consultation with experts and assessments to ensure the right decision is being made and that the individual knows all the risks and implications should be mandatory.
The right to health
It is time to discuss whether childhood obesity should be treated as a form of neglect since allowing a child to overeat leads to health problems and bullying, according to Natasha Azzopardi Muscat, from the Health Ministry.
Maltese children, aged 11 to 15, are the most obese in Europe, according to the report Health at a Glance – Europe, published in 2010. While 29.5 per cent of Maltese children are considered obese or overweight, the EU average stands at 13.3 per cent.
Speaking about challenges in the health sector, Dr Azzopardi Muscat said the Child Development and Assessment Unit (CDAU), which offered therapy services to children with disabilities, required “a lot of investment” because it did not have any sensory integration facilities, among other things.
The unit is often criticised for its long waiting lists with children having to wait weeks, or months, for treatment that, at times, was needed more than once a week.
She spoke about the importance of working with children who survived cancer as they had specific psychosocial needs and added that there was the need to address services for mental health.