Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, wrote a post in TomDispatch.com about the problems affecting children around the world.
When it comes to creating bitter futures, the Trump administration’s treatment of children at the border is of a piece with the larger global attack on them. While on a smaller scale than in the Greater Middle East and beyond, acts against the young at our southern border certainly should evoke their counterparts elsewhere. In December and January, for example, the first deaths of children were recorded at American border detention centers.
In addition, widespread neglect and obvious acts of cruelty continue to define those centers. Tots are left in soiled diapers and otherwise unsanitary conditions, while children of all ages are often separated from their mothers and fathers, initially housed in bitterly cold jail-like conditions, and terrified about what might lie in store for them and their parents.
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And the mistreatment of immigrant children on the border is just a sign of the times. Among U.S. citizens, there is trouble as well. In an ever more unequal society, 21% of children in this country now live below the official poverty line, a rate that is the highest among the world’s richest countries. In 2009, a Department of Justice report found that more than 60% of American children witnessed or were the targets of violence “directly or indirectly.”
