This time, I would like to look at the situation of children in Turkey. Local surveys show that Turkish adolescents are not immune to these trends. Like their Western counterparts, Turkish children increasingly engage in hazardous behavior, they get into fights and lose their sense of direction. Rapid urbanization has had a negative effect on the traditionally strong family structure, causing new domestic tensions. In addition, adolescents find it increasingly hard to reconcile their everyday reality with their expectations fuelled by growing consumerism. As a result, the authorities have reported a marked increase in teenage delinquency. A study published in January by the education workers’ union Eğitim-Sen revealed that drugs were found in 11.68 percent of Turkish schools and chemical stimulants in 15.15 percent. Drug use was most prevalent in Istanbul where stimulants in the form of pills were encountered in over a third of school establishments.
The report also revealed an increase in the number of violent incidents in and outside schools, sometimes involving guns and knives. While these appear to be modern issues, an old-fashioned approach to education may also contribute to creating a culture of violence: in 39 percent of schools, educators still resort to physical punishment to discipline their students.
In addition to urban challenges, Turkey’s children also face more traditional problems associated with underdevelopment and poverty in rural areas or in the suburbs of big cities. At the turn of the millennium, UNICEF estimated that 37 percent of children under 15 in Turkey were affected by poverty. They may not be starving, but they are severely deprived. The East and Southeast provinces are worst affected. There, poverty is due in part to the conflict that ravaged the region and forced hundreds of thousands of villagers to migrate. Household size is also a crucial factor that increases the risk of poverty: the more children a family has, the most likely it is to be poor.
In a 2003 report, UNICEF estimated that 873,000 girls and 562,000 boys between ages six and 14 were not attending school. Since then, Turkey has launched a major enrolment drive. A World Bank-financed scheme also provides financial incentives to the poorest families who send their children to school regularly. As a result, more children, particularly girls who were lagging behind, now get an education.
But more needs to be done. The social services in Diyarbakir attempted to assess the scale of child labor in their province and found 3,302 children working in the streets. Most of them earned less than YTL 3 a day. This is only the visible tip of the iceberg and does not take into account the children who drop out of school to follow their parents in search of seasonal work each year, or those who are rented out for agricultural work far away from home during the summer.
The underdevelopment and the rapid modernization that coexist in Turkey present a double challenge. The authorities have to combat new social threats caused by rapid urbanization and unemployment, as well as traditional attitudes that still keep children out of school or see them as cheap agricultural labor. These are problems that Turkey can overcome, but not without major investment in better social policies and a more equitable education system.
