El Salvador Launches New Strategy Against Child Abuse

In 1980 a group of 11-year old boys in El Salvador made a simple agreement: to stick together and defend one another on the dangerous streets they called home. They called themselves Mara Salvatrucha. Today, it’s one of the deadliest gangs in the western hemisphere and has more than 25,000 members across Central America. Street children aren’t just victims of violence. Because of their vulnerable situations they’re perfectly primed to be recruited into gangs, or even form them.

El Salvador is the smallest and most densely populated country in Central America. It’s slightly bigger than Wales, but with 7 million people. A majority of Salvadorans work on farms, usually growing coffee, and many parents send their children out to work in the fields as extra labourers to help feed the family. Extreme poverty causes all kinds of problems within families, and as our regular readers will know the number children who are abused in their own homes is scarily high. These children so often end up fleeing their homes and living a life on the streets, where they aren’t expected to survive longer than about four years… if glue sniffing, disease or malnutrition don’t kill them, violence often will.

What does God think about Child Abuse?

The fact can’t be denied that millions of children everywhere in the world are physically, emotionally and sexually abused. Child abuse has been called a ‘national emergency’ in the United States, and in India 223 million children (73 million of whom are boys) have had some kind of sexual activity forced on them.

Abuse isn’t just physically harmful to a child – although every year 80,000 Latin American children die of abuse-related injuries in their own homes. Adults who have survived child abuse are often haunted by fear, mistrust and poor relationships with their own spouses and children. It’s a crime that affects multiple generations.

Ready, Set, PRAY!

As you may have heard, this weekend is our World Weekend of Prayer for children at risk. Around the world millions of people – the majority of them children! – will be involved in prayer events in churches, hospitals, orphanages, city streets and around breakfast tables.

But you don’t need to hold a special event to pray - if you’ve got a minute you could even just spend 60 seconds devoting prayer to children at risk. If the same numbers as last year are involved, then that would mean more than two million people taking a minute to pray – which amounts to almost 4 years’ worth of prayer for children over one weekend! Very exciting. So let’s look at what we can pray about...