Enfance, Enfances - America

Enfance, enfances, 2001

Hiên Lâm Duc

When is a child a child? Until when, is he precisely a child? When can a child carry arms? What about boys and girl’s equity? What about the right for a child to express an opinion on decisions affecting it?

It has taken ten years to answer these and hundreds of other questions. Ten years for a working group formed around the United Nations Centre for Human Rights, UNICEF and a constellation of non-governmental organizations to elaborate the text of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted unanimously by the UN on 20 November 1989. Thanks to this agreement, the world starts to change. Lâm Duc Hiên’s photographs testifies to it.

Haïti

Engaged for several years into a hard transition towards democracy, Haiti struggles in unfathomable poverty. More than a quarter of children suffer from undernourishment, and one-eighth don’t live until their fifth birthday. In the slums surrounding the capital, children survive with limited means. The luckiest of them go to school …

Bolivia

Bolivia is the poorest country of South America. Illiteracy, poverty, undernourishment, exploitation are the daily reality of millions of children. Shepherds, sugar cane cutters, miners, hawkers, are the most common jobs imposed by poverty. In the women’s jails, children until they are eight, live with their mothers.

Ecuador

Small country located between Andes and the ocean, Ecuador struggles with structural poverty, in which are concerned more than two-thirds of the population. Every day, forty children under 4 years died from diseases that we know how to avoid or treat. However, a wind of freedom is blowing on the country, and brings some hope.