Report Reveals High Level of Violence, Death, Pregnancy in Mexican Youth Fernando Camacho Servin - La Jornada
go to original March 22, 2013

"Although in recent years there have been some advances in the country regarding attention given to children and adolescents, the levels of violence and social exclusion that they suffer continues to be enormous, but so far the new government has not unveiled a plan to solve this problem," warned the executive director of the Network for the Rights of Children in Mexico (REDIM), Juan MartÍn Pérez García.

During his presentation before the Senate of the report "Childhood Counts in Mexico 2012", in an event organized by the president of the Commission for Assistance to Vulnerable Groups, Hilda Flores Escalera, the expert indicated that children continue to face very adverse conditions that should have been overcome.

Proof of this, revealed in the study's more than eighty indicators, is that in 2010 at least one in five children was not duly registered at birth, which "can marginalize the basic right to identity and, therefore, of documents that permit access to school, health or work."

Similarly, the document notes that:

• 5.6 percent of girls between 15 and 17 became pregnant early or have already had a child, often the product of sexual violence; of this population, nine out of ten young mothers do not attend school;
• Three in ten adolescents do not complete junior high school [eighth grade];
• One in ten children performed some economic activity, forty percent of them without pay;
• In 2010 the mortality rate for teenagers rose to 14.6 per 100,000, seventy percent of whom died from gun shot wounds.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!