Broken Boned, Bitten and Burnt and No Foster Care in Egypt.

This is what the email Manadeel Waraq received said:

“Dear all,

Today the hospital admitted a three year old girl. Her mother and father bought her into hospital saying she had suffered a fall from the second floor. Upon examination, the doctor issued a report with the following:

– both arms broken
– concussion
– cigarette burns all over the three year old’s body
– second degree burns caused by an iron on both legs
– deformities in the body where the girl has been bitten, needing reconstructive surgery

We have called the police and the mother and father have been arrested.”

That was the email… A string of words that I am not ashamed to say made me cry while translating for this post. The email was so cold in its lack of emotion, it’s “factualness”, its rawness. But it had to be, because what words can ever capture the feeling the person who had gone to see this girl and writing to us reaching out for help, has experienced. What words could truly represent the fear, the pain, the cruelty, the injustice that this three year old girl had suffered, is suffering and will suffer? Damn words for being so limiting, damn her parents for their cruelty and damn life for making them so heartless.

The email was sent out to us, a group of individuals around the word who could do nothing but coordinate help, working with a reality that while we advocate for real social change towards children, we were working on the premise that we will save one child at a time. But what was to save here? We were a group of individuals working against a system bent on the victimisation of children, a government that’s every attempt to talk about children oppressed them further, a country whose children aren’t and never have been its priority.

I try, as much as I possibly can, to write my posts without emotion, without coercing my readers to feel a certain way, and definitely without trying to portray the children as mere victims but as agents capable of change, capable of influencing there own world. It’s what I teach, it’s what the new sociology of childhood is all about. But this three year old? How can I not ask you, reader, to cry with me? Or not ask you whose victim she is? Or your role in what’s going to happen to her if not what’s already happened.

I managed to enlist the help of one my heroes (Dr Hany Hamam) the reconstructive cosmetic surgeon who performed the rape scar surgery for one of my girls. He said he’d take care of that bit. Manadeel Waraq’s Amira Qotb enlisted the help of the head of the Coalition for Children’s Rights in Egypt lawyers, for the legal aspect of the case. Emails going back and forth throwing about ideas of which shelters we could move the child to temporarily. Great.. But then what?

If this little three year old girl miraculously gets better, she will need two things that will not be available to her: psychological help and shelter/ alternative care. Perhaps with the amazing twitter response I get to my call outs for help we’ll find the former, but what of the latter? There are only two types of child alternative care systems in Egypt: orphanages for biological orphans and street children shelters for social orphans. So what of abused children? What of foster care, kinship, adoption?

There is no where suitable for this three year old to go if she gets better. It cannot be up to our mailing list at Manadeel Waraq to deal with this alone or to forever continue working on a case by case basis. This is we’re we as a society must get together to advocate and be part of change – all of us. This is what we need to do:

– we MUST admit that familial abuse happens, torture, incest, gendered violence
– change the deep rooted idea that children somehow “belong” to their parents so that it is not society’s role to interfere
– we need to campaign for a foster care system that is well planned, structured and monitored

If you think what I am calling for is unrealistic, please let me remind you that in 1988 it took one Englishman, Richard Hemsley, to look around and notice that the only forms for alternative care in Egypt were old people’s homes and orphanages and he set up the first home for street children. We need to be progressive, it will only take a few of us to look around and see the truth that perhaps with a monitored, foster care system, we can not only get appropriate shelter for our three year old once she’s better, but perhaps a whole system that may mean kids have an alternative to the street.

Please, please let’s get the conversation going, please don’t think that you cannot help, you can, we all can… We all have to. It’s only a coincidence that it isn’t you, as a baby that’s waiting, burnt, broken boned, bitten, alone in hospital waiting for help. We have a responsibility we can no longer ignore. I hope you can forgive my first emotional call for help, I had no other choice.

In the end it seems that even the three year old can be an agent for change, if only we’ll let her