The recent poll of some 100,000 Israeli children being victimized and sexually abused is very alarming. It seems most parents in Jerusalem cannot protect their children from harm. If they can’t do it, who will? Parents should be held responsible about the welfare of their children.
Based on the polls, only a fraction of about 2.5 percent of 100,000 abused children cases in Israel was reported to the police. Such percentage was too small to consider the issue as a national concern if we would only rely on statistics. Some may even think of them as isolated cases.
Such findings were presented at the National Council for the Child conference in Be’er Sheva, where around 500 parents joined the polls. In addition, the poll showed that only 5 percent of the parents alerted the authorities that their kids were sexually harassed. A quarter of the parents had never told their children to avoid entertaining strangers.
Yuli Tamir, Education Minister, presented the data from the Central Bureau Statistics. He said for the last three years, there has been a decreasing dropout of 25 percent in high school. Last year, there were about 22,000 or 4 percent of the population of Israeli children who stopped studying. But Tamir said the Education Ministry is currently adopting a program to augment the declining dropout rates.