Lois Whitman, director and founder of Human Rights Watch's children's rights division, is a general expert in children's rights issues. She has conducted human rights investigations and led missions to countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean and has written reports on abuses of children in Liberia, Northern Ireland, and Turkey, as well as other human rights reports. Previously, Whitman was the deputy director of Helsinki Watch, and before joining Human Rights Watch in 1984, she was general counsel to the New York City Human Rights Commission. Whitman received a B.A. from Smith College, a master's degree in social work from Columbia University, and a law degree from Rutgers University.

 

Human Rights Watch Reports

Easy Prey: Child Soldiers in Liberia (September 8, 1994)

Children of Northern Ireland: Abused by Security Forces and Paramilitaries (July 1992)

Nothing Unusual: The Torture of Children in Turkey (January 1992)

Profile By Michael Filtz

The idea for creating a division at Human Rights Watch to focus on children’s rights came to Lois Whitman during a Human Rights Watch research trip to Turkey in the early 1990s. “I found nine kids who said they’d been tortured by police,” Whitman said. The stories she heard were appalling; the children had been beaten and degraded beyond what anybody of any age should endure.

Whitman, a mother of three and grandmother of six, was shocked that people in positions of power could be capable of treating children as cruelly as the Turkish police had. She sought assistance for the children, but help was hard to find. “I thought there would be organizations working with kids in the way that Human Rights Watch was working with adults – but there were none,” Whitman said.

Whitman decided to see what she could do to fix the situation. She launched the Children’s Rights division and began raising money to fund it. Initially, she was the only employee, but the division grew swiftly and now has a staff of 10.

During the early days of the division, Whitman worked on a report titled “Children of Northern Ireland: Abused by Security Forces and Paramilitaries,” documenting abuses by both the police and paramilitary organizations during the conflict in Northern Ireland. Whitman was not sure what her expectations were, but she was stunned by the report’s impact.

“Part of the report worked, because it stopped the police from physically abusing children,” she recalled. “I was shocked. And I said, my God, maybe this could work.”

After that first success, Whitman moved confidently on to other concerns, including what has turned out to be one of the most horrific abuses of children in recent years: their recruitment as soldiers by military organizations and rebel groups. In 1994, she published “Easy Prey: Child Soldiers in Liberia,” which told the stories of children recruited by rebel forces during years of vicious conflict. Since then the division has released 20 more reports on the issue, and worked to end the use of child soldiers in 13 other countries, collaborating internationally with other groups to end this appalling practice.

Whitman and the Children’s Rights Division have worked on a variety of other human rights topics, including corporal punishment, juvenile justice, discrimination against children due to gender or HIV status, and child domestic workers. But increasingly, Whitman says, targeting one particular issue can be tough because of the division’s unique role. “We try to limit our focus,” Whitman said, “but it’s hard because unfortunately there are still no other groups like ours, devoted solely to exposing and trying to end human rights abuses against kids.”

Whitman feels the division has had a substantial impact, including helping to persuade the International Criminal Court (ICC) to limit its jurisdiction of those who can be tried for war crimes to people 18 and older. Also, the ICC has pursued several suspects for using children as soldiers, including the Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga and Joseph Kony, the leader of Uganda’s brutal Lord’s Resistance Army.

It is often more difficult to research issues that affect children than those that affect adults, Whitman said. Although Human Rights Watch does not use the names of children whose stories are being documented, the children are still exceptionally vulnerable to retaliation from those accused of abuses. Also, living through war is a traumatic experience for almost everyone, and often children have not yet developed coping skills to deal with the trauma. Interviewing them, Whitman said, can risk opening up old wounds, which is why researchers are trained to be especially sensitive when dealing with child interviewees.

So how does Whitman cope with working on such dark and difficult issues? It helps to see results: “Enough of what we do works,” she said, “and knowing that is how I handle the emotional stress.”

Whitman also credits the support she gets from the tight-knit group that makes up the Children’s Rights division. “The staff that I work with is absolutely extraordinary. If it weren’t for that I would have quit work a long time ago.”