Keynote Speaker: Anna Pinto

Anna is Secretary and Programme Director of CORE (Centre for Organisation, Research and Education), an indigenous peoples' policy research and advocacy organisation based in the North East of India.

As an active member of the Indian Women's Movement for over two decades, Anna has contributed to the establishment, initiation and work of many women's groups in New Delhi. She presently supports and offers resources to many women's community organisations in the North East region of India.

Anna has written extensively on the question of armed conflict affecting indigenous communities, the impact of erosion of indigenous peoples' autonomous systems of resource management and governance, critiques of literary works as instruments of change, responses to and critiques of policy initiatives by the Government of India and international agencies such as World Bank impacting indigenous peoples. She has also participated in drafting advances in international human rights legislation and preparing training materials.

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Today, when there is the least excuse of ignorance, overall availability of resources, means and supposedly a fairly universal standard of norms, child abuse and neglect are not decreasing. Even in those societies where material needs are assured this occurrence is common, certainly common enough to warrant the UN Secretary General's concern expressed in the initiation of a study on Violence against Children.

The phenomenon cuts across cultural, socio-economic and geo-political matrices, exhibiting only (if that) disturbing variations of form and manner, from the outright brutal and indeed pedaphobic to a more insidious and general attitude of discounting, an ubiquitous belittling of the condition of childhood, the impacts of which are so ingrained in the social psyche that they are invisible, "normalized", even perceived as desirable. Possibly more children are deliberately and avoidably abused or neglected today both in large groups and as individuals than ever before.

The moral and ethical grounds of justification, the cultural rationalisations, the socio-economic excuses for permitting this to go unchecked are innumerable, more creative and intensive certainly than the efforts to eradicate the phenomenon. Which must then inevitably draw us to the conclusion that while such occurrence may, in its specificities and individual targets be the outcome of chance, it is integral to our social structures.

The seeds of tyranny and oppression must be sown early for the harvest to be bountiful. The exclusion of children from the purview of the fully human validates and assures the entrenchment and perpetuation of similar systemic exclusion and casual disregard of many discriminated and oppressed groups that characterises global societies today. The structures of our lives run on the assurance and threat of widespread repression making us, common well meaning people, the foremost and most efficient enforcers, as we are ourselves also the beneficiaries.