Driven AWAY: the 28 million child victims of WAR and terror
A UNICEF report found there are 10 million child refugees around the globe, one million child asylum-seekers and 17 million children displaced by conflict but still living within their home country. Forty-five per cent of the children come from two countries: Syria and Afghanistan.
Some 28 million children around the globe have been driven from their homes by violent conflict, with nearly as many abandoning their homes in search of a better life, UNICEF said in a report released Tuesday.
The report found that while children make up about a third of the world’s population as of 2015, they accounted for nearly half of all refugees, with the number of child refugees having doubled in the last decade.
“What’s important is that these children on the move are children. And they should be treated as children,” said Ted Chaiban, UNICEF director of programs in Geneva. “They deserve to be protected. They need access to services, such as education.”
According to the report, there were 10 million child refugees and one million child asylum-seekers, whose status had not yet been determined. The remaining 17 million children displaced by conflict remained within their home countries’ borders.
The report said 45 per cent of the children refugees came from just two countries: Syria and Afghanistan.
Increasingly, these children are travelling alone, with 100,000 unaccompanied minors applying for asylum in 78 countries in 2015, three times the number in 2014, the report found. Because these children often lack documents, they are especially vulnerable.
Another UN agency, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, says about 11 million Syrians have been displaced by war, including about 100,000 in just the past eight days.
The report estimates another 20 million children are migrants, driven from their homes by poverty and gang violence among other things.
“Children do not bear any responsibility for the bombs and bullets, the gang violence, persecution, the shrivelled crops and low family wages driving them from their homes,” the report said.
It says Canada has about 600,000 child migrants, the tenth most among nations. The United States, with 3.5 million child migrants, has the most.
Refugee and migrant children face a host of risks including drowning during sea crossings, malnourishment, dehydration, kidnapping, rape and murder.
“The world hears t he stories of child refugees one child at a time and the world is able to bring support to that child, but when we talk about millions it provokes incredible outrage and underscores the need to address the growing problem,” said Emily Garin, the report’s author.
Entitled, Uprooted: The growing crisis for refugee and migrant children, the report calls on the international community to provide protection, education and health services to these children and asks governments to address the root causes contributing to the largescale movements of refugees and migrants.
Indelible images of individual children — Alan Kurdi’s small body washed up on a beach after drowning at sea or Omran Daqneesh’s stunned and bloody face as he sat in an ambulance after his home was destroyed — have shocked the world. But each picture, each girl or boy, represents many millions of children in danger — and this demands that our compassion for the individual children we see be matched with action for all children. — Anthony Lake, UNICEF executive director