During my university years, I used to see children sleeping on top of each other on the sidewalks on my way to school in the early morning.
Children huddled together to protect themselves from the cold.
Nobody looks back, nobody wonders...
I made a promise to myself in those days:
“One day, if I have the power, I will provide such children with a home, with food, with love.”
Having a child in this country does not require a driver's license.
In my last year of medical school, when I was on duty at Konak Maternity Hospital, I remember a beautiful white baby born to a mentally unstable woman.
He had no clothes; the nurse wrapped him in surgical green.
That day I realized what a cheap lie the fairy tale of equality was.
28 years have passed; I still wonder:
Where is that child today?
Maybe he is alive.
Maybe he's grown up.
Maybe there was no one to surround him again.
Who knows?
Now back to today.
Child abuse cases in this country have increased 3-4 times in the last two decades.
TÜİK says that more than 600 thousand children were brought to security units in 2022.
If one leg of these figures is the increase in visibility, the other leg is the deepening of decay.
Illegitimate children, poor children, abandoned children...
Children that society rushes over, politicians ignore, the system forgets.
They are the most likely victims of the chain of neglect.
The house they were born in, their surnames, their families... None of it is their choice.
But they pay the highest price for the crime.
Congregations, closed structures, sects...
This may be a fact of society.
But any structure dominated by a culture of obedience stifles the voice of the child.
It is always in closed rooms that abuse is most often recognized.
Everyone knows about domestic violence, but no one talks about it. The child feels love even for the mother who beats him/her, thinking he/she is guilty. This is why the child is the silent victim of abuse.
Then there are the children of imprisoned parents. Babies growing up in prison, children left alone outside...
Today they are invisible, tomorrow they will be reflected in the mirror of society.
Psychology has been saying it for years:
A child who sees violence thinks that violence is a normal language.
The digital world is another quagmire.
Now a stranger enters a child's life not through the front door, but through a small screen in their pocket.
That is why we are still circling around the same question today:
What does this country say to its children?
The obvious answer is this:
“Just accept your fate.”
It's not fate, it's neglect.
It's not fate, it's inequality.
It's not fate, it's irresponsibility.
What determines the future of a society is not its budget, but what it offers its children.
Those children lying on top of each other in the street, that baby wrapped in surgical green...
They are shouting the only truth of this country:
“We are considered lost from the very beginning.”
And no reform, no law, no hope will be complete until this country really starts to hear the voices of its children.