Do Ukrainian teenagers need a curfew?

For three months now teenagers in Ivano-Frankivsk and Zhytomyr have not been allowed to stay on the streets unaccompanied by parents after 10p.m.: these cities’ councils introduced a curfew for them. the Kyiv authorities are considering this measure at the moment.

In early September NGO “Committee on Combating Organized Crime and Corruption” submitted a draft law to the Verkhovna Rada in order to implement curfew across Ukraine. This is fully supported by Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Afairs. Tetiana Bukhtiariova, head of the Criminal Police Department for Children’s Affairs, said they hope to curb juvenile crime with this measure, because in Kyiv alone over 500 violations were committed by minors, mostly at night. Experts are convinced that the curfew will also increase children’s safety, because 50 – 52 percent of crimes against minors are also committed at night.

Similar practice was adopted several years ago in the US, Russia, Belarus, and other countries. Here the results have met the expectations: juvenile crime levels plummeted. However, Poland has refused this innovation. Monika Platek, an expert with project to on strengthen and protect women’s and children’s rights in Ukraine that is run jointly by the European Union and the Council of Europe, said that Poles believe that this violates children’s rights, and a €500 fine is an unjustified punishment for parents whose child failed to make it home by 10p.m. At the moment, Ukraine is debating whether this step should be taken and weighing its pros and cons. The Day’s experts have commented on this.

Liudmyla ZHALOVAHA, deputy principal, Zhmerynka School No. 4:

“My colleagues and I fully support the implementation of a curfew—if this is done in a reasonable way, it will be useful. School-age children will have enough time by 10p.m. to stay outside and communicate with their friends. Then they will have time for their family and rest, because family communication is vitally important, taking into consideration the fact that many parents are so busy now that they pay too little attention to their children.

“I don’t see any violations of law here or any restriction of freedom of action. This will teach a child to be more organized, take care of his/her health, learn to plan his/her time, which is necessary in school, at home, and in public life. With time, children will get convinced that they need it for their own safety and health, in order to have enough rest and sleep, and get up in time. For it often happens that pupils skip their first or even second lesson because they stayed too long at a disco The Day before or in a computer club and overslept in the morning.

“Several years ago this kind of innovation was implemented in Kazakhstan, and it has taken root there. If we assume that part of our people are thinking and caring parents, it would be excellent if this innovation also took root in Ukraine.”

Lidia SMOLA, advisor to the Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security Council:

“A curfew is a violation of human rights to some extent. There is no wartime now— instead we have civil rights to certain actions. Therefore, it is better to speak about restricting full permissiveness. For example, in the US parents are forbidden to leave children under 16 alone at home. Otherwise they are fined or may be deprived of parental rights.

“Ukraine should toughen parents’ responsibility for children and their whereabouts. It is clear that such sanctions are hard to apply to parents in problematic and underprivileged families—social services should work with them. Speaking about stable families, parents there do not pay enough attention to their children and do not know where their children are and what they are doing. To overcome this, one should implement fines, because if a child is caught with alcohol on the street at night, it means that parents do not properly educate him or her, and this family believes it is normal for minors to drink beer.

“Fines should increase parents’ responsibility for what their children do. But it is not quite efficient to forbid children to stay on the street after 10p.m. altogether or make them carry their passports. A positive result of such a decision should be the right step toward stricter control over children. For the situation is catastrophic in this aspect—for starters, consider only the fact that minors can easily walk along the street carrying a bottle of beer and nobody pays attention to this. You won’t see anything of this kind abroad—it is not allowed even to carry alcohol outdoors unless it is wrapped in paper. Anyone, let alone children, will be fined for this. A teenager will be taken to a police department, and the police will call for his/her parents to pay the fine, the reason being that they don’t think about what kind of person their son or daughter is going to grow into.

“On the other hand, a total curfew will not be efficient due to poor legislation. First, we need to have the clauses in the Civil Code and other codes requiring parents to pay fines. Since we live in a democratic state, legal grounds are needed for any actions. We also need informational campaigns, i.e., the all-Ukrainian campaigns that will tell about these innovations. In the West they are based on parents’ responsibility, whereas in our country it is so far an echo of the repressive machine, because the term ‘curfew’ reminds of the Civil War.”

Yevhen ZAKHAROV, head of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union:

“Implementing a curfew violates the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of Ukraine, specifically the right to free movement. I consider this decision to be groundless and misguided. We don’t have a state of emergency or a direct threat to life or health that would warrant this step. Ukraine does not need any extreme measures. This will create additional possibilities for abuse.

“I understand that this is being done to curb juvenile crime, but in fact this is a family issue. Only parents together with their child can resolve when this child may hang out, take rest, return home, etc. This is a disproportional intrusion of the state into people’s private lives.

“One should work in a more efficient way with real criminals: find them and commit them for trial. However, we don’t need social measures of this kind. Besides, they violate a number of articles of the UN Convention on Children’s Rights, particularly that no child can be an object of an abritrary and unlawful intrusion into his/her private and family life. He or she also has a right to legal protection from such an intrusion or encroachment.”

Tetiana LEVCHENKO, teacher, Cherkasy School No. 7:

“Our city mayor has recently suggested implementing a curfew, so our community is engaged in an active discussion concerning this question. It has both advantages and disadvantages. If we forbid teenagers to hang out in the evening, they will have to spend their energy somewhere else, and they will do this at school. Parents will also fail to keep an eye on them, because when children return home after classes, they stay alone and have to occupy themselves with something.

“While it is possible to keep primary school pupils under control, punish them for bad behavior, simply talk to them, etc., everything is much more complicated with senior pupils, who are maturing both physically and psychologically. To forbid them to do something means to push them to taste the forbidden fruit.

“Now I am teaching 11th-graders, and, naturally, most pupils go to discos or nightclubs in the evening. But among them are children whom parents trust, and they keep this trust. There are quite different cases, though. For example, one student works at a nightclub, with the full approval and support of his mother who says that he should learn how to earn money. But she is not troubled by the fact that the child misses his first classes, does not keep up in his studies, and is physically tired. So, a lot depends on the atmosphere in the family and the relationships between parents and their children.”