Taking the Necessary Steps to Curb Child Abuse in Kazakhstan

In Almaty, a young woman threw herself off a Ferris wheel, falling to her death. Before committing suicide, she had strangled her five-year-old daughter. The number of children in Kazakhstan has soared over the past decade, but so have the number of crimes committed against minors. When Mom and Dad are the murderers In 2023, twenty-five children were murdered in Kazakhstan, seven of them by their relatives according to the country’s children's ombudsman, Dinara Zakiyeva. This year, Kazakhstanis were shocked by numerous horrifying cases of child abuse. According to relatives and neighbors, the family of the woman who strangled her daughter lived in the Ile District of Almaty Region and were financially secure and successful. The regional commissioner for children's rights, Aigul Yesimbekova, explained that the woman had confesses her crime to her sister before committing suicide. “The child had Down's syndrome. The mother was most likely in an internal crisis and despair when she decided to do this,"Yesimbekova explained. "She went to her sister and told her that she was going to kill herself. When her sister tried to calm her down, she went to the park (the Central Park of Culture and Leisure in Almaty). Her husband is an IT specialist, and the financial component [of her life] was fine. She was not registered with psychiatrists, her husband makes money, and everything seemed fine, but the child was sick. Probably, her soul was in such a state of crisis; it is hard when a child is sick. Maybe she murdered the child in a rush of emotion, and then, unable to cope with the guilt, she took the step she did.” According to Zakiyeva, such families are in critical need of psychological support, and child protective services should supervise them. However, the situation with psychologists and child social workers in Kazakhstan is poor. At the end of June, a court in the Turkestan Region convicted a mother of killing her two children. Their bodies were found in a rented apartment in February 2024 in the city of Turkistan. The mother was sentenced to 15 years in prison. After killing her children, the woman called her friend and told her what she'd done. Even against the backdrop of Kazakhstan’s high birth rates, the Turkestan Region - as is the entire south of the country - is an outlier. The percentage of people under the age of 18 in Kazakhstan stands at 34.1%, whereas in the Turkestan Region, this figure is 43.3%, followed by the Mangystau Region at 41.9%, and the federal city of Shymkent at 40.6%. Experts say that it is in the regions with the highest birth rates that the highest rates of violence against children are recorded. In September of last year, a pedophile raped and brutally murdered a five-year-old girl who lived next to him in the village of Zhibek Zholy in the Turkestan Region. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and chemical castration. News of the murder almost sparked a riot and deadly reprisals against the rapist;...