A child’s smile should never be a mask for pain.Yet today, in this same country where we celebrate Children’s Day with balloons and hashtags, too many little ones are hiding bruises beneath their uniforms.
Sexual abuse, child marriage, and domestic neglect, these are not distant stories, they are next door. Sometimes within the same home that is supposed to offer protection.
We post colorful pictures, but behind some of those pictures are shattered childhoods and stolen innocence.
She wanted to be a lawyer, but now she is a wife at 13. He wanted to be a footballer, but now he is too afraid to speak after his uncle touched him.
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know, see, or hear all these.
Let’s stop celebrating children while ignoring the systems, homes, and cultures that destroy them.
This Children’s Day, we raise our voices, for the child silenced by fear, for the boy who thinks no one will believe him, for the girl whose body became a battlefield before her 10th birthday.
Every child deserves: love not trauma, protection not exploitation, dreams not nightmares.
Let today not just be a celebration but a wake-up call.
Because a child’s smile should never be silenced.
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