By Fatima Bala Isah
Children are precious gift that comfort the hearts of parents, they deserve to enjoy each stage of their lives from infanthood, childhood up to adulthood. Some people are blessed with children while others are desperately praying daily to have even one but God did not grant them.
Some parents are naturally unconcern about their children while others have the heart to uplift their lives but do not have the means. The outweighing incidences of rapes and assaults to young girls and boys living in rich-men’s houses in the name of payable works are unarguably increasing; thereby teenagers’ constitutional freedoms, dignities and privileges are denied, abused as well as violated.
Parents in Nigeria are professionals in sheer verbal discussions about potentials and talents of their kids not harnessing them into becoming useful members of the society. Countries like Ghana, Ethiopia, Egypt and other African countries have turned similar potentials of theirs into realities.
It was very hard in the past to see parents neglecting their parental responsibilities, but in our present generation, some parents are habitually lazy to the extent that they succumb to pushing their teenage children to houses of rich individuals to be doing house chores while their age mates are in schools. At times, such teenagers especially under-age girls are sexually abused, then threatened to be killed if they tell their parents or guardians; the cases always die down unheard and the abusers continue harassing other girls that fall in their traps without been punished.
Poverty is one of the basic factors that necessitate parents to send their teenage children for house-helps; children from a family where father must go out struggle for hours before getting what to consume are easy to become victims of house-help, when those parents are sick, the family members do not have any option than to rely on food gotten from houses where their daughters or sons are working.
Negligence to parental responsibilities is the second factors for teenagers to engage in payable jobs, some lazy wives let seductively dressed maids be cleaning bedrooms while their husbands are still there; in that moment anything can happen. In other scenarios where wives are not either working or doing businesses and heads of families that go out early without giving kobo to wives make those and those heartless wives compel teenage children to work somewhere and get food in return.
In Bauchi where we predominantly live, you can see Girls across Wunti Traffic and filling station with blind men and Women begging , for your information all this adult girls have no time for any form of education, they end up going back home at night.
This however exposes them to illiteracy hardships , sexual abuses by men and at the end a backward to the society. Finally I’m using this medium to call the attention of government at all levels to take action by enforcing laws that will bring and end to street begging, house help, hawking among others.
Fatima Bala Isah writes from Mass Communication Department Abubakar Tatari Ali Polytechnic Bauchi.
