Violence and poverty on the rise
Photo: Raanan Azulay
Report says kids more violent, poor, religious
Israel National Council for Child issues report showing increasing number of non-citizen children. More and more children learning in religious, haredi school systems. Highest number of births in Jerusalem
The number of children living in Israel without citizenship status is on the rise, as is the children's involvement in criminal activity, as well as their need for welfare services, according to the annual report published Wednesday by the Israel National Council for the Child.
The report also revealed a fivefold increase in the number of children studying in the national religious and haredi school systems in the past three decades.
As of April 2009, 145,855 children were living in Israel without citizenship, a 17% increase since 2001. Seventy-four percent of them are Palestinian resident of east Jerusalem who have blue identity cards, but are not considered Israelis. The 38,000 other non-citizen children are mostly offspring of legal work migrants. The rest are the children of immigrants who have yet to solidify their citizen status and children of mixed marriages between Arab Israelis and Palestinians who are not considered Israelis because of the Citizenship Law.
However, the study's authors emphasized that the rate of non-citizen children is likely higher than the statistics show because children of illegal work immigrants are not represented in the numbers.
Neither are children of refugees. In January 2009, there were 1,000 child asylum seekers in Israel who had entered the country from Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, the Ivory Coast, Congo, etc. via the border with Egypt. Some 680 of them learned in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa school system. The rest of them were absorbed into school systems in the south, mainly Eilat and Arad.
Between 1970 and 2008, the percentage of children in Israel tripled, and now is 33% of the population. Similarly, the percentage of Muslim children tripled itself, who are now 24% of all children in Israel.
The highest rate of births in Israel was in Jerusalem, in which 20,875 were brought into the world – nearly three times as many as in Tel Aviv, which is ranked second on the list of births. The report indicated a downward trend in the percentage of children in a city or town as its socio-economic status increased, and vice versa. In towns classified as "weak," children are often a majority of the population.
Increase in religious school system attendance
Another interesting statistic in the report shows a decrease in the number of children who learn in the public school system, and a corollary increase in the number of children attending religious schools. In the last three decades, the rate of children studying in public schools decreased from 74.2% to 53.8%. The percentage of children learning in state religious schools and haredi schools in the same period jumped from 5.7% to 27.4%.
On the backdrop of the recent financial crisis, the report showed that every third child in Israel lives below the poverty line. This is a drastic rise that has continued over the past three decades. In 1980, the percentage of children living below the poverty line was a mere 8%, versus more than 34% in 2008.
Since the beginning of the decade, there has been a constant rise in the percentage of children receiving welfare. In January 2009, 414,267 children, about 17% of all children in Israel, received some form of services from the welfare authorities.
From January 2001 to January 2009, there was a worrisome 43% increase in the number of children receiving welfare services, with some 18% of them new immigrants, nearly two times their relative representation in the general population.
The recent waves of violence also manifested themselves in the council's report. In 2008, there was close to a 50% increase in the number of minors suspected of criminal offenses in comparison with figures from 2000. In addition, truancy officers in the past school year had 85,837 pupils in their care, as opposed to 58,299 five years ago, and 19,093 in 1995.
Yet another troubling figure presented by the report is a 60% increase in the past decade of cases filed for criminal offenses perpetrated against children within the family.
