The forum, which is being organized by by The International Foundation for Mother and Child Health Care, will be a roundtable discussion aimed at combining various societal efforts towards the improvement of the status of children. The necessity of discussing the main directions of joint action in this field is connected with the fact that up to now there still remains a gap between existing legal rules, documents, and the actual situation in the provision of children's rights for survival, protection and development. The unstable economic situation, the inertness of social processes, the slow reform of health services and education system, the lack of action on the part of state institutions to develop and support the moral and intellectual sphere of children, the reductions in the network of children's sanatoria, summer recreational facilities for health promotion, physical activities and sports, the early start of labor activity, the decrease of the level of life in a large number of refugee and migrant families, general deterioration of ecological situation -- all this resulted in the stable rise of morbidity, disability, child neglect, devaluation of value orientations in the life of children, the increase in the number of children with asocial behavior (drug addicts, alcoholics, juvenile delinquents).

The following issues will be discussed:

• Legislative provision of children's rights under present socioeconomic conditions; the ways to overcome the lag between legal documents and measures taken in the interests of children;
• Social guarantees of providing support to families -- the natural environment of child development;
• Child health protection in the hotbeds of interregional conflicts and wars, in the regions of ecological disasters and that of foster children at boarding schools;
• Ways of solving the issues of cultural, intellectual, physical development, optimizing the social integration of children, including those with limited capacities and the disabled;
• Rights of children with limited capabilities for education, development of mental and physical faculties;
• Liquidation of occult (protein, vitamin, micro-element) deficiency;
• Protection of quality and safety of products and goods for children;
• Child labor and health;
• Forms of protection from physical violence and child abuse;
• Society and asocial forms of child and adolescent behavior (alcohol abuse and drug abuse, juvenile delinquency, prostitution, infringements of the law);
• Child and adolescent education and health; -- Participation of specialty public foundations in the protection of child and adolescent health (associations, union, etc.); Role of international non-governmental organizations in the support of socio-medical programs of child health care in Russia;
• Mass communication media in the formation of health;
• Forms of interaction between governmental and public organizations on child and adolescent health promotion.

The URL for this page is: http://www.friends-partners.org/~ccsi/announce/childfor.htm
Last updated: April 23, 1998

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