“Our chest, our front, our back, our lips – it’s forbidden for anyone to come and touch those parts of our bodies – no one has that right,” says Alican Mutlu, a youth worker with the Turkish Red Crescent, as he points to parts of his body.
“If someone comes to us ... what are we going to do?” Mr Mutlu asks the group of Syrian children sitting in front of him in a container classroom. He encourages one boy, Mohammed, to practise running away while screaming. “If someone comes, we have to go to mum and dad, OK?”
These children in Kirikhan, in south-eastern Turkey’s Hatay province, are learning about their rights over their bodies, and what adults and others should not do.
“We try to teach children that their bodies belong to them first,” Mr Mutlu said before the session. “We talk a little bit about that, so they can recognise good and bad touch, and we encourage children to scream in the event of such a violation. We also want them to run away and tell the people they trust the most.”
The programme is part of child protection efforts in area of Turkey devastated by earthquakes two years ago. The natural disaster not only killed more than 53,000 people in Turkey, and another 7,200 in Syria: it increased the risk of child abuse, early marriage and child labour among already vulnerable refugee and refugee-hosting communities, according to child protection specialists.
Unicef child protection officer
“We have seen unmet basic needs and increased humanitarian needs after the earthquake, which led to heightened protection risks, including gender-based violence, abuse, child labour, early forced marriages, children out of school, peer bullying within school, out of school and in the neighbourhood, everywhere,” said Ece Uluc, a child protection officer with the UN’s children’s agency, Unicef. In programmes funded by the EU, the body is joining forces with Turkish authorities and organisations such as the Turkish Red Crescent to raise awareness about the dangers among children and their parents.
The children in the makeshift classroom are among more than 1,200 Syrian refugees living in the adjacent camp of converted shipping containers. About half a million Syrians and Turks are still living in temporary accommodation throughout Turkey's earthquake-affected zone, which stretches across 120,000 square kilometres. Their communities have been ravaged not only by the natural disaster, but by 13 years of conflict in Syria, from where more than three million people fled to Turkey after a civil war began in 2011.
Child abuse is not the only danger that child protection specialists are aiming to combat in Turkey’s earthquake-affected regions, which are still heavily damaged. In Hatay’s provincial capital, Antakya, rubble is still being cleared and many buildings that were not completely destroyed stand like skeletons of past lives. With so much destruction and disruption to people’s lives, children have dropped out of school to earn money for their families.
“There's growing concern about school-aged children not in school in earthquake-affected areas – depending on the area, depending on the age group, we don't have the desired rates of school attendance,” said Filippo Mazzarelli, head of Unicef’s field office in Gaziantep, south-eastern Turkey.
Across the country as a whole, official Turkish statistics cited by Unicef say at least 720,000 Turkish children are working. In the earthquake-affected areas, with businesses lost and whole communities displaced, many families are forced to send their children out to work to survive. It is a reality worsened by chronic price rises in Turkey, where inflation has soared to more than 42 per cent.
The problem of child labour, especially among boys aged 14 and older, is an issue among both Turkish and refugee communities, although bureaucratic barriers exacerbate the issue for Syrians. In south-eastern Turkey, it is common to see teenage boys working in bakeries, tailors’ shops and unofficial building sites, as well as gathering scrap on the streets with their parents. “Child labour is our bleeding wound – we are fighting against it not only for Syrian children but also for Turkish children,” said Mr Mutlu.
Aid workers say families living in containers set up after the earthquake sometimes marry off their young daughters. The legal age of marriage in Turkey is 18, although the law permits girls as young as 16 to marry in certain circumstances.
“It's not like it’s the tradition always to make the children work, or make them get married early – it's mostly economic reasons,” Ms Uluc said. “But at the same time, we can say that, for example, after the earthquake, we saw it is observed by our partners as well, that many refugees had to live with six people in one container, so it's overcrowded. We saw that this is leading families to engage their children in early forced marriages.”
Awareness of women’s and girls’ rights is an issue that child protection workers are striving to improve. In the city of Sanliurfa, also in the earthquake-affected zone, teams from Turkish humanitarian organisation Support to Life are providing sessions on everything from menstrual cycles to self-worth. The province is one of the poorest and most conservative in Turkey, and social workers there are drilling home the fact that girls’ lives are valuable.
“We talk about both physical and emotional changes during adolescence, the situations that girls go through in that process, both mentally and psychologically, reproductive organs, menstrual bleeding,” said aid worker Sevda Cimen, after leading a session in which girls are asked to draw and write about society's beliefs about men and women.
On a large piece of paper, one of the girls writes: "Men must do work. There are some families that forbid boys from going to school."
Challenging stereotypes is part of the work here, but getting parents on board is key. Explaining to them the goals of the gender equality sessions plays a big part in their success, said Ms Cimen. Parents can be wary of their daughters being educated or aspiring to work, and fear talking about puberty with their daughters, she added.
“Since talking about these issues in society is generally seen as a shame or a sin, we want to support girls in this sense,” she said.
The fall of the Assad regime in Syria has drastically changed the dynamic between Turkey and its southern neighbour in the past seven weeks. Ankara has reopened its Damascus embassy and is keen to encourage the refugees to return to Syria.
Turkey’s Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya last week said 81,500 Syrians had returned home voluntarily since Mr Al Assad was ousted on December 8. Many others may be slower to return, having built lives in Turkey over the past decade and facing prohibitively high costs for rebuilding their homes back in Syria. The National asked Turkey's Ministry of Family and Social Services whether support programmes for refugees in the country had been affected since Mr Al Assad's fall, but did not receive a response in time for publication.
Back in the container classroom in Kirikhan, the children – both boys and girls – are energetic, squealing in excitement as they are told about their rights to their own bodies, health and a future. They are enthusiastic about thinking beyond their tough present. Asked what professions they aspire to, one of the girls, Aya, squeals, “a hairdresser!” Another boy exclaims that he wants to be a teacher.
