Childhood is the foundation of the world’s hope for a better future yet millions of children grow up amid poverty, conflict and disease. The gap between the reality and the ideal of childhood is the focus of this UNICEF report. What does childhood means for children and for countries? What must be done if the rights of all children are to be protected and the Millennium Development Goals met? The paper calls for swift and decisive action from the entire international community to ensure that every child enjoys a childhood.
Since the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989 there have been significant advances in the fulfilment of children’s rights to survival, health and education. However, in several regions and countries these gains are under threat from three key factors: poverty, armed conflict and HIV/AIDS.
- Children living in poverty face many deprivations to their human rights: survival, health and nutrition, education, participation, protection from harm, exploitation and discrimination.
- Children caught up in armed conflict are always the first to be harmed, if not killed or injured, then orphaned, abducted, psychologically or psychosocially damaged by violence, dislocation, poverty, or the loss of loved ones. Children are vulnerable to forcible recruitment into combat or servitude, sexual violence and exploitation, or exposed to the remnants of war.
- HIV/AIDS was responsible for the orphaning of 15 million children under 18 by the end of 2003. Losing a parent pervades every aspect of a child’s emotional well being: physical security, mental development, educational opportunities and overall health.
The world must reaffirm and recommit to its moral and legal responsibilities to children. Governments must apply a rights-based approach to social and economic development and adopt socially responsible policies. A key starting point would be to abolish school fees, encouraging poor families to enrol their children. More development assistance and public finances must be invested in children. The following steps are necessary:
- For children living in poverty: defining and measuring child poverty, ensuring that poverty-reduction strategies focus on fulfilling children’s rights, expanding basic social and education services and ensuring universal access, mobilising stakeholders towards meeting MDGs, promoting the family, eliminating gender discrimination, and encouraging local community participation.
- For children caught up in conflict: considering the impact of conflict or sanctions on children, ending the recruitment of child soldiers, ratifying and applying treaties designed to protect children from conflict, bringing war criminals to justice, improving monitoring and reporting on child rights violations, expanding demobilisation and mine-awareness campaigns, prioritising restarting the education of children caught up in conflict, and investing in mediation and conflict resolution.
- For children orphaned or made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS: making this an international priority, raising awareness to limit the spread of AIDS, dedicating specific funds from the total funding on HIV/AIDS, prolonging the lives of parents, mobilising and supporting community based care, and ensuring access to essential services (education, health) to orphans and other vulnerable children.
