By Ankeli Emmanuel, Sokoto
The Sokoto State Coordinator of Legal Aid Council of Nigeria, Barrister Akilahel Shettima has advised citizens to ensure that they carried out their responsibilities to avoid breeding criminals.
Barrister Shetima spoke on, “Children In Conflict With The Law”, at the ongoing 2 day capacity building workshop on “Approach to Victim Identification and Reintegration of Trafficked Children and other Vulnerable Children for Child Protection Officers”, in Sokoto South and Illela local government areas of Sokoto state.
The workshop was organized by the National Agency For the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) Sokoto Zonal Command with the support from United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) under the Access to Justice Project for Vulnerable Children and Children on the Move.
“By the time we develop the culture of parents and society abandoning their responsibility to children, it often time leads to vulnerability, which in most cases makes them willing tools for others to entice and recruit them in diverse forms of unacceptable acts in the society,” Shetima observed.
While decrying that criminals are products of society and parental failures, Barrister Shetima added that until we collectively learn to imbibe and demonstrate the right attitudes, the society will continue to be saturated with children without fear of God, good morals and virtues.
According to him, some of the good things of life are actually not complicated as expected but others make it so because of greed.
“When we learn how to embrace each other with love, share to each other with passion, feel each others pain, and share in each other’s joy, the world will be a better place for all,” he said.
In his explanation on children in conflict with the law, Barrister Shettima said anybody under the age of 18 is considered by law to be a child, adding they become children in conflict with the law when they do anything at all that brings them before the law.
He therefore admonished security personnel to see and treat children in conflict with the law with dignity and innocent until proven otherwise.
On his part, Muttaka Suleiman from Sokoto State Ministry of Women and Children Affairs, who delivered paper on “Child Protection Management Information System (CPIMS)” said without reliably verifiable data, you can not have a meaningful plan of action in any thing you do.
Addressing participants earlier, Sokoto State Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Women and Children Affairs, Barrister Aisha Mohammed Dantsoho, thanked donor agencies, NAPTIP and all other stakeholders for their respective contributions towards ending Gender Based Violence (GBV) in Sokoto.
Dantsoho further assured that the State Government, through their ministry have and will continue to demonstrate the needed political will towards ending the menace.
In his welcome address, the Sokoto Zonal Commander of NAPTIP, Abubakar Abdullahi Tabara said, protecting children is a responsibility for all.
Tabara further insisted that, participants who are security personnel from the various agencies were carefully drawn from the two local government of Illela and Sokoto South to help equip them with better understanding of how to approach cases of trafficked and vulnerable children.
