AEGiS-Bangkok Post: EDITORIAL: Children in a desperate plight

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2005. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

EDITORIAL: Children in a desperate plight

Bangkok Post - December 17, 2005

Unicef on Wednesday released its most damning report to date on the state of the world's children. The annual study is strong stuff and does not sit well on an empty stomach or ease the pangs of a guilty conscience, which Unicef seems to believe most of us should be suffering from with varying degrees of culpability. It made it clear that despite all the pledges, promises and good works, there are still hundreds of millions of children who are suffering exploitation and abuse, invisible to the eyes of the rest of the world.

The UN organisation accused society of letting the better part of a future generation fall between the cracks and become trapped and ignored after having been traded and abused or discriminated against. Such children, the flagship report said, grow up outside the reach of development projects, public debate and legislation. It described those hardest to reach as living in the poorest countries and most deprived communities, facing discrimination on the basis of gender and ethnicity while others are caught up in armed conflict, the sex trade or affected by HIV/Aids.

Unicef has always been the most outspoken of UN agencies but in this year's report it has come out with guns blazing and outdone itself. There is a reason for this and the organisation's new executive director, Ann Veneman, made no secret of it in launching the report. She is convinced that meeting the millennium development goals set out by world leaders at a UN summit five years ago and renewed last September, is contingent on reaching vulnerable, poor, exploited and abused children throughout the developing world.

The primary millennium development goal is to reduce extreme poverty by half by 2015. Other major targets include reducing the mortality rate among children under five years of age by two-thirds, primary schooling for all boys and girls, and a halt to the spread of Aids and incidence of malaria. What makes some of these children so hard to reach is their lack of an identity because they were not registered at birth. We have instances of this happening right here in Thailand.

She is not wrong in thinking the 2015 targets are in jeopardy, hence the dramatic appeal to UN member governments to heed this warning. Even if they do take notice, they will have to act quickly if they are going to improve the lot of more than a billion children facing a harsh and brutal existence because of conditions not of their making. Specifically, they lack at least one of the seven basic commodities deemed essential: shelter, water, sanitation, schooling, information, health care and food. Many also face the scourge of internal conflict and war.

The UN agency believes in keeping up the pressure on governments and, in an earlier report, estimated that because certain nations fail to meet their moral and legal obligations to respect the rights of children, over 30,000 boys and girls under five die of mainly preventable causes. Even more children and young people fall victim to illnesses, neglect, accidents and assaults that should not have happened.

Far too many governments fail to spend the minimum amount necessary to support basic social services. Unicef frequently, and with justification, points to poverty as being the greatest obstacle to development because it opens the door to the stark horrors of the sale and trafficking of young boys and girls, of debt slavery, forced or compulsory labour and children being pressed into armed conflicts, prostitution, pornography or the production, trafficking and consumption of drugs. Children around the world do suffer appalling abuses. Even those within the care of the state, have been subjected to abuse and mistreatment. Desperate circumstances call for desperate measures. The 2006 Unicef report leaves us in no doubt that we are just blundering along and doing more to perpetuate the poverty trap than eliminate it. That has to change.

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