Emergency: Violence against children is at crisis levels in Papua New Guinea.

No child should feel afraid in their own homes. Yet so many children in PNG are caught in a waking nightmare.

Domestic and sexual violence is at crisis levels in Papua New Guinea. Yet care for victims is nonexistent in many areas. So many children have no choice but to return to unsafe, violent and potentially sexually abusive environments. 

Jenny Nicholson works as a Mental Health Officer for Médecins Sans Frontières in Port Moresby. She tells her story to Mamamia…

Back home in Australia I worked as a clinical psychologist in a big children’s hospital; with the last few years specialising with children who are traumatised as a result of different forms of child abuse. Through-out my career I’ve always worked with children and families in child mental health, and have always felt that it is a much neglected area of medicine.

When I saw that Médecins Sans Frontières employed mental health officers it was the perfect opportunity for me. In what seemed like no time at all I was matched with a project working with Family and Sexual Violence (FSV) in Papua New Guinea (PNG).

PNG seemed a long way from the African regions of conflict I had imagined myself in. I had a picture in mind of a tropical paradise that didn’t quite fit with the job description of working with the large number of children who were survivors of FSV.

The level of violence and sexual violence here in PNG is really disturbingly high – so high that Médecins Sans Frontières responded as they would to any other epidemic or natural disaster. The majority of women live in relationships characterised by significant domestic violence. This means children are bought up seeing their mothers, aunties, siblings, cousins, being regularly beaten. Additionally a large number of children are badly maltreated and abused themselves.

Whilst the story of every one of these children stays with you, some remain particularly vivid. Rebecca* came into our clinic one afternoon with an ‘Aunty’ who had finally taken pity on her and helped her to seek the medical attention she needed. Rebecca looked tired and drawn; her face bore the bruises of the most recent assault she had suffered at the hands of her family and visible across her arms and legs were the scars of her previous beatings. She was just fourteen years old, but there was no youthful playfulness about her. Her face remained impassive as she recounted the story of how she had finally come to the clinic, but the silent tears rolling down her face betrayed her pain.

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Rebecca had been taken in as baby by a couple with a large family, as her own mother couldn’t afford to care for her. These types of informal adoptions are very common here in PNG, where children are frequently given up to be cared for by family members or distant relatives who have more resources to provide for the child. Sadly for Rebecca however this was not to be the happy ending her mother had probably hoped for her. She described to me how she had been bought up differently from the other children in family; always scape goated for problems, severely beaten for small mistakes, treated as the family servant – having to fetch the firewood and water and being refused access to even basic education.

The day before she came into the clinic one of her sisters and her husband had begun drinking heavily. Knowing this was likely to end in violence towards her she tried to hide from them, however they had found her and as punishment they stripped her naked and the husband proceeded to rape her, as her sister restrained her and beat her around the head to try and stop her screams. In spite of their threats to kill her if she told anyone of her ordeal, she finally managed to escape the house where a neighbour who had heard her screams was able to get her some help.

Rebecca’s story stays in my heart not because it is different from the many, many other children that we see who have experienced sexual violence – sadly it is all too familiar. It stays with me because of the plea she made to us as she finished recounting what had happened to her. “Please don’t make me go back to that family.” After the bravery and strength that it had taken for Rebecca to escape from her situation, get the medical help that she needed, and begin to process her experiences in order to start the journey of psychological healing, I was painfully aware that whilst we would try everything we could to ensure she would have somewhere else to stay, the lack of protective services or alternative accommodation for children in Rebecca’s situation meant that I couldn’t in all honesty make this promise to her.

Sadly, child abuse and sexual violence happens through-out the world. However, what I have found hardest in PNG is this lack of protective service available to children and adolescents once they have been brave enough to come forward and disclose their experience.

There is no functioning welfare service that we can refer children to; there are no children’s homes, foster homes or alternative care arrangements. Often there is simply no alternative at all but for children to return home to their abusers.

The children I have worked with here in PNG will remain with me forever; the pain, the suffering, the helplessness of their situation and the frightening lack of alternatives for them. But I also have hope that the work of Médecins Sans Frontières will remain with those children forever too. That individually they will take away the understanding that what happened wasn’t their fault, that their experience was something that shouldn’t have happened and they should have been protected from, and that they don’t need to grow up following the behaviour of their abusers.

Médecins Sans Frontières has already had successes in getting the medical protocols needed by women and children who experienced rape adopted by the national department of health. I remain hopeful that we can have similar successes in having the protection needs of these children recognised in a way that leads to real protective services being implemented. Only then will we be able to ensure these children don’t have to go home to their abusers.

Visit msf.org.au/IWD2015 read more about Médecins Sans Frontières’ work with women and adolescents. To find out more about Médecins Sans Frontières’ work in PNG visit here.

*Name has been changed