Be keen on child safety

This week has had its fair share of bizarre stories but very few can beat the gory story of a baby who was eaten by a pig on Saturday (Shock as pig eats one-month-old baby in Rakai, Daily Monitor July 5) or the one about a 14-year-old boy who was eaten by a crocodile (Crocodile kills 14-year-old boy in Kaberamaido, Daily Monitor July 8). 

In both instances, the victims were alone. The one-month-old baby was in the house alone while the mother was out in her banana plantation and the 14-year-old is reported to have gone on a lone fishing expedition on Lake Kyoga where he was plucked from the boat by the crocodile. 
Needless to say, these are extreme cases and can’t quite be blamed on the victims’ caretakers or parents but they still remind us ever so crudely about child safety and the need to be vigilant about it.

With the ongoing lockdown, closed schools and parents distracted by the struggle to keep their families afloat financially, conditions are rife for child abuse, household accidents and other kinds of harm that can be occasioned on the now idle children who seem to have run out of constructive ideas to keep busy as they wait the lockdown out.
If anything, the first lockdown should have been a learning point for us all.   
Last year, the ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development reported that at least 4,300 teenage pregnancies were registered in the first four months of the Covid-19 lockdown. And this is not to mention the unreported cases and other unfortunate events that happened to minors during that time. 
We might not have crocodiles or human eating pigs in our vicinities but evil lurks around in many forms and shapes such as sexual predators who could be relatives or close acquaintances, unsupervised internet use which exposes children to inappropriate content and TV shows, unattended to social psychological issues such as depression, anxiety, the list is endless.

Let us not be so consumed with news of vaccines, death rates, numbers of recoveries, relief funds and everything else that’s making news and forget to keep a watchful eye on our children otherwise, when this is all over and hopefully it will be soon, we will again be presented with unfortunate statistics of the state of our children.  
Yes, let’s fight the Covid-19 pandemic and all its relatives but not in a way that causes us to drop the ball on our core responsibilities as parents, caretakers and guardians to minors.