ARMENIA MUST DO MORE TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN
By Matthew Collin

The Moscow Times
March 29 2010
Russia

A young activist working as a volunteer at a residential school for
orphans and children with mental disabilities exposes allegations of
physical and sexual abuse. A nationwide scandal follows with calls
for a full investigation. What happens next? No, the whistleblower
isn’t praised but charged with slander and threatened with five years
in prison.

That was the situation in Armenia last year when activist Mariam
Sukhudyan took the allegations of child abuse to the national media.

But this month, after a long campaign, justice finally triumphed,
and Sukhudyan was vindicated. The charges were dropped, and an
investigation was opened into a former teacher.

A few months ago, I visited the school, an old Soviet institution on
a windswept hilltop outside Yerevan, to find out what had happened
there. The staff, desperate to prove that no abuse took place, gave
me a guided tour and insisted that Sukhudyan and other activists who
also worked as volunteers were deluded.

"Because they were so young and inexperienced, they didn’t understand
that every child here has mental disabilities and very active
imaginations," argued one staff member.

Disturbing video testimony from one of the children told a different
story, however.

The scandal exposed the grim conditions in some of Armenia’s aging
juvenile institutions, which child welfare experts believe should
be transformed or shut down. The government has been trying to
reform them, but not fast enough. Sukhudyan, who is also a committed
environmentalist, told me that she felt she had to speak out on behalf
of those who could not.

This view was echoed by the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, who recently
presented Sukhudyan with the embassy’s 2010 Woman of Courage award
and spoke of her "determination to act in order to right a wrong,
in spite of the personal sacrifices it entailed."

Sukhudyan hopes that the case against her has helped open up a closed
system to public scrutiny.

"We can already see some changes," she said. "Interest and attention
toward children in special schools has considerably grown, people
are more informed about the situation."

But although she no longer faces a jail sentence, it’s clear that
those in power still need to do more to protect those who can’t
protect themselves.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress