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Everyone wants to help children. So why are so many millions still suffering? Refugees from Sudan in the Horn of Africa. Credit: UNHCR/M.Awai She was 12-years-old. Her tormentors forced her to dance naked on a table before she was raped. The ordeal continued each evening for weeks. Eventually the child was ‘sold’ for 200 German marks to a Bosnian Serb soldier. Nine years later the schoolgirl remains missing. Sexual abuse is commonplace in war, but the significance of this rape was that the perpetrators were brought before the special U.N. War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. It was the first time such charges were recognized as a crime against humanity. A guilty judgement was the latest in an increasingly comprehensive set of international conventions, regional laws and special programs which help protect children, in this case sending out a warning to future would-be sexual predators that they will now have to pay for their crimes. Millions of young people are ‘at risk’ today. Many of them are refugees and displaced children who make up approximately half of uprooted populations anywhere in the world. Thus, though the fact is sometimes obscured by the use of the general term ‘U.N. Refugee Agency,’ UNHCR’s largest single ‘clientele’ among 22 million people ‘of concern’ to the organization are 10 million minors. A wider global interest and involvement in children’s issues has accelerated noticeably in the last decade or so. The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, for instance, which spells out children’s entitlements and the obligations of states toward them, has attracted more signatories than any other human rights treaty in history. They gave me training. They gave me a gun. I took drugs. I killed civilians. Lots. It was just war, what I did then. I only took orders. I knew it was bad. It was not my wish. A child soldier in Sierra Leone. Last year the U.N. General Assembly reinforced that document, approving two ‘Optional Protocols’ to the Convention, one covering the sale of children and child pornography and another establishing 18 as the minimum age at which children can be forcibly recruited as soldiers. In 1996 Graça Machel, wife of former South African President Nelson Mandela, authored a devastating report entitled The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children. In its 50 year history UNHCR successfully helped restart the lives of approximately 50 million refugees, about half of them children and in recent years it has established specific guidelines for helping these youngsters. And yet… Despite the plethora of conferences and meetings, laws and conventions, despite the unprecedented attention and commitment of resources by the global community, the lot of millions of children remains desperate. Consider: more than two million children were killed by war in the last decade, a further six million were wounded and one million orphaned. Unknown numbers of minors were raped and brutalised and millions more died of starvation and disease. AIDS alone claimed the lives of 3.8 million children and orphaned a further 13 million.

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