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

Reuters NewMedia - December 14, 2005

In its annual State of the World's Children report "Excluded and Invisible," UNICEF said one-third of the estimated 150 million children born worldwide each year were not registered -- and the number was growing.

"Birth registration is vital to really start to know the extent of the problem, how many children there are out there, how many abuses are going on," report author David Anthony told Reuters in an interview.

Children not registered at birth may never officially exist, making it easy for governments to ignore them and for traffickers to make them disappear without risk of retribution.

From that stemmed an array of problems from pedophile abuse to slavery, the report said, estimating that 1.8 million children entered the sex industry, 5.7 million were sold into slavery and 1.2 million were trafficked each year.

"These numbers are huge, and we do have to push several buttons in every case," said UNICEF child protection chief Karin Landgren. "So we have to start by shining that light on the plight of these children."

But equally AIDS orphans and those forced into early marriages accounted for millions of children who simply disappeared either through being cast out by their communities and taking to the streets or just ceasing to be seen.

"Part of what this report does is to highlight the issue to the public to create an outrage about what is going on," UNICEF chief Ann Veneman said.

SEX TRAFFICKING

She said sex trafficking was an increasing phenomenon -- driven in part by cheap flights making sex tourism easier and in part by the spread of the Internet.

"Trafficking needs to be looked at as a global problem that is not just a developing world problem ... because the demand often comes from the developed world," she said.

And it was not just governments that bore the responsibility for taking action -- although they had the primary function of monitoring their own populations and ensuring that they enforced their own basic laws.

"The recommendations in this year's report particularly make it clear that it is not just governments that are involved here. Civil society has a huge role to play, communities have a huge role to play," the report's author Anthony said.

"It takes bold and courageous action to tackle some of these things in many countries," he added.

But matters were slowly improving.

"Just looking at governments' reactions in recent years, we have seen enormous changes. If governments talk about these issues -- as we have seen with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa -- it sends a signal that it is OK to talk about these things," protection chief Landgren said.

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