We complete what the government cannot

One summer day in 1998, 60-year-old Mahfouz Shamakh, a prominent Yemeni businessman, found himself taking on the juvenile justice system in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa. He had ventured downtown to help a neighbour’s 14-year-old son who had been detained for stealing. “I left in complete shock,” he says. “The jail was horrible.”

The water was scarce, everything was extremely dirty, there were so many lice you could see them crawling on the floor,” he continues with a look of disgust. “Until then I had no idea that children were put in the same jail with adults. You can imagine the abuse they were exposed to.”

Shamakh, a lifelong champion of child rights, knew he had to get the boys released. He vigorously lobbied powerful political friends who, like him, had been unaware of the problem. And he pushed the government to take action. “The Minister of the Interior and the Prime Minister were happy to try. They were embarrassed about the situation,” he says.

His neighbour’s son was released that first night. The last of the 60 jailed boys left 18 months later.

But Shamakh did not stop there. He built a model partnership with the government, based on a social policy that is now garnering wide support in Yemen: Young people who commit crimes need to be helped as children, not punished as adults.

To put this principle into action, Shamakh founded the Yemeni Care Society for Youth. Next, he teamed up with the Social Orientation Centre (SOC), established by the Yemeni government in the 1970s. SOC houses at-risk adolescent boys who might otherwise find themselves on the streets and vulnerable to a life of crime. The centre agreed to take in boys who were serving out their sentences, added another metre to the height of its walls and covered the cost of guards. The boys were then transferred from the jail to the centre for the remaining two to three years of their prison terms.

Shamakh’s Care Society helps fund the SOC detention centre with both money and materials — everything from schoolbooks to clothes and a ping-pong table. The centre’s focus is solidly on rehabilitation instead of retribution. The boys study a regular school curriculum and also learn carpentry and metalwork.

“Because I’m a private citizen, I can proceed without the bureaucratic roadblocks the government must deal with,” says Shamakh. “We complete what the government cannot.”

The impact of the project on the young boys has been immeasurable. “They had to carry me to prison because I used to be so afraid of being beaten,” recalls 12-year-old Sabri, who was convicted of stealing bikes. He says younger boys were exposed to ‘bad deeds’, a euphemism for rape according to SOC staffers. Once he was transferred to the SOC centre, Sabri began taking classes — the first in his life. “When I leave here I will go to work with a relative who has a carpentry shop,” he says with a hint of pride.

Shamakh has donated books and furniture to a newly established juvenile court, which will begin reviewing cases this year. But the work of reform is far from over.

“People in general are not helping these children,” he says. “When they get older it could be too late — we could lose them.” But in Sanaa, at least, there’s one man who is determined not to let that happen.

Prepared by UNICEF on behalf of the Global Movement for Children, January 2001.