Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, wrote an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times about the problems affecting children around the world.
Just watch a night of television and catch the plentiful ads extolling the bouncy exuberance of our kids — seat-belted into SUVs, waving pennants at sports events or basking in their parents’ praise for doing homework. If you think about it, you’ll soon grasp the deep disparity between the image of childhood in the United States and the global reality of children in crisis.
North to south, east to west, children around the world are increasingly unsafe and preyed upon. For years, their deaths from disease, deprivation, starvation and conflicts of every sort have been on the rise.
This is especially the case, disturbingly, for countries in which the United States has been deeply involved in its post-9/11 global war on terror.
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Starvation kills 22,000 children daily worldwide. Nearly half of the world’s 68.5 million displaced people — fleeing violence, poverty or a combination of the two — are children. Many of those 30 million youngsters are hungry, without access to medical care, toilets or clean water, not to speak of schooling, or a future.
Children in refugee camps have often witnessed or experienced atrocities on a mass scale; they have been subject to rape, violence and abuse. They may have watched as their siblings and parents were killed. They may have been conscripted or tortured as war captives. By the hundreds of thousands, they represent a new generation of uncared-for, brutalized and deprived youth. To carry on their war in Yemen, the Saudis have been recruiting — literally, buying — soldiers from Sudan, “desperate survivors of the conflict in Darfur.” Many of them are, reportedly, teenagers as young as 14. In Ukraine, children as young as 8 are being trained to shoot to kill.