At home the bleak fate of children in Nigeria is symptomatic of the gory lot of their counterparts in other parts of the world. Over 200 children were kidnapped by terrorists in the north-eastern part of Nigeria and up till this moment, almost a year after, forlorn is the hope of their rescue. Equally revolting is the unceasing and unabashed enslavement of women with its attendant sex slavery by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) appropriately captured this grim reality in its recent review of the lot of children in 2014. The world’s leading advocate for children with strong presence in 190 countries stressed the gravity of the situation when it posited that “never in recent memory have so many children been subjected to such unspeakable brutality.” It is most unfortunate that children’s lives were blighted by different experiences in 2014, a year in which the 25th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child was celebrated to mark the progress made for them globally.
The figure of children who suffered various forms of violence is mind-boggling. The UNICEF put it at as many as 15 million. Throughout the year, they were caught up in violent conflicts in the Central African Republic, Iraq, South Sudan, the state of Palestine, Syria and Ukraine. Hundreds of children were kidnapped from their schools or on their way to school. Tens of thousands have been recruited or used by armed forces and groups. In the Central African Republic, 2.3 million children were affected by the conflict in that country, about 10,000 children were believed to have been recruited by armed groups and more than 430 were killed and maimed, three times as many as in 2013. In Gaza , 54,000 children were left homeless as a result of the 50-day conflict during the summer that also saw 538 killed and more than 3,370 injured.
In Syria, more than 7.3 million children were affected by the civil war there including 1.7 million who are now child refugees. At least there were 35 attacks on schools in the first nine months of the year, which killed 105 children and injured nearly 300 others. In Iraq, an estimated 2.7 million children were affected by conflict and at least 700 were said to have been maimed, killed or even executed. In countries like Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, many young lives have been lost to protracted crises.
Even children who did not directly suffer from violence were not spared the calamities of the year. In South Sudan, for instance, an estimated 235,000 children under the age of five suffered from severe malnutrition. Almost 750,000 children were displaced and more than 320,000 live as refugees. New threat to children’s wellbeing was posed by the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone which led to thousands of children being orphaned or leaving school.
A condemnable danger posed by this year’s crises apart from their direct, tragic consequences is that the future of those children who were not killed like others is bleak. An unsavoury corollary of this is that even if the violence that claimed the lives of many children is checked, those children who are alive have been scarred for life. There is urgent need for governments across the world to sincerely consider how children have fared in the outgoing year and take decisive steps to break the horrendous cycle of misery in which they are now caught. Nations should put in place or strengthen existing laws that mete out appropriate sanctions to abusers of children through rape, abduction and recruitment as child soldiers. This is the path that may lead to assuaging the sad memories of the subjection of children to horror and despair in 2014.
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