World"s most dangerous places for Children by Reuters AlertNet 9:09am 12th Jul, 2006   London. 11 July 2006    Sudan is world"s most dangerous place for children, by Megan Rowling.    Sudan, Uganda and Congo are the world"s three most dangerous places for children due to wars that have brought death, disease and displacement to millions, a Reuters AlertNet poll showed on Tuesday.    Around half of respondents picked Sudan as one of their three choices, with many singling out the troubled western region of Darfur. Some 1.8 million children have been affected by a three-year conflict in Darfur, according to the U.N. Children"s Fund (UNICEF), where they risk being recruited to fight and are especially vulnerable to disease and malnutrition.    "It is a traumatised population and you can see it in the children"s faces," said Hollywood actress and UNICEF goodwill ambassador Mia Farrow, who last month visited camps for some of the 2.5 million displaced by Darfur"s war. "Everyone has lost family, seen villages burn, seen relatives raped, been raped."    U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres - who selected Congo, Uganda and the Sudan/Chad border, where some 200,000 refugees from Darfur eke out an existence - pointed to the physical and psychological consequences of living in crowded, underfunded camps "which are not conducive for a healthy child development".    In southern Sudan, children also suffer the effects of low-level violence, poverty and a lack of basic services. The region is struggling to recover from a 21-year civil war with the north that killed 2 million people, as 600,000 refugees forced to flee the country trickle home.    AlertNet, a humanitarian news website run by Reuters Foundation, asked 112 aid experts and journalists to highlight the world"s most dangerous places for children.    After Sudan, they chose northern Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Somalia, India, the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Myanmar - with the top three clearly ahead.    More than 2 million children worldwide have died as a direct result of armed conflict in the past decade, and about 20 million have been forced to flee their homes, according to UNICEF. More than a million have been orphaned or separated from their families.    CHILD SOLDIERS    "The most dangerous places are those conflict zones where children are actively recruited into the fighting forces, and the current worst offender...is Uganda"s Lord"s Resistance Army," said Gareth Evans, head of the International Crisis Group think tank.    "Its recruiting, indoctrination and battle tactics have left countless children either dead, or dreadfully physically or mentally scarred."    During its brutal, two-decade insurgency, the cult-like rebel group has kidnapped up to 25,000 children to serve as soldiers and sex slaves. Each evening about the same number of child "night commuters" trudge into towns to avoid abduction.    "What makes it even more dangerous is that no one is hearing about it... The long-standing and invisible nature of the situation has led to an entire generation of children growing up in camps," said Krista Threefoot of aid group Catholic Relief Services.    Military recruitment is also a major risk for children in Congo, as highlighted by former BBC war correspondent Martin Bell. "Despite partial demobilisation, (Congo) is believed to have more child soldiers than any other country in the world," he said.    He also pointed out that, here and in his other choices of Darfur and Iraq, poor security means large proportions of the population are beyond the reach of the aid agencies.    Congo"s first free elections in 40 years, set for the end of July, are meant to draw a line under its 1998-2003 war that killed millions, but conflict still simmers in the lawless east, where disease, hunger and violence kill about 1,200 a day.    "Women and children are regularly targeted by illegal and armed militias and other predators, who perpetrate unacceptable acts of violence and rape against them," said U.N. aid chief Jan Egeland, who also selected northern Uganda and Afghanistan.    PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA    The poll underlined the psychological trauma experienced by children caught up in violence.    "Children (in Iraq) may fear both American soldiers and insurgents; they fear being drummed out of their home if they"re from the wrong sect," said Lindsey Hilsum, international editor for Britain"s Channel 4 News. "They have no security and no sense of what tomorrow may bring."    Respondents who chose the Palestinian territories cited the long-term strain of living in a place with limited freedom of movement and access to basic services.    "A key concern, especially in Palestine, is that protracted emergencies lead to a lack of opportunities in later life adding to boredom and a sense of hopelessness," said Amalia Fawcett, a policy analyst for World Vision New Zealand.    Somalia and Afghanistan, where warlords are battling for political power, featured due to deteriorating security and widespread poverty.    In 11 provinces in Afghanistan, more than four-fifths of girls do not attend school. More than a quarter of children in Afghanistan and a fifth of children in Somalia die before their fifth birthday.    Journalist Aidan Hartley and humanitarian consultant Tony Vaux also chose Somalia due to the widespread practice of female genital mutilation.    FORCED TO WORK    Many children living in poverty are forced to work to support themselves and their families.    A large proportion of the world"s 218 million child workers are in India, which came sixth in the poll.    "An estimated 60 to 115 million children are classified as working children - the highest number in the world," said Anuradha Mittal, director of the Oakland Institute think tank. "Deprived of their childhoods, most have never seen the inside of a school."    U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees Wendy Chamberlin highlighted the case of Nepali girls who are trafficked to Indian cities, including Mumbai and Calcutta, for sex work. "They are really trapped," she said.    In Russia"s breakaway Chechnya republic, fighting has displaced at least 95,000 people and UNICEF says 99 percent of residents live below the official Russian poverty line.    Child soldiers and forced labour were key reasons why respondents picked Myanmar, where the military junta is accused of conscripting tens of thousands of children to fight.    Egeland called on the international community to boost efforts to tackle children"s issues around the world. "We must do more to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, particularly as they relate to children, who are, of course, our future," he said.    09 July 2006    Sex abuse, work and war deny childhood to tens of millions, by Ruth Gidley.    Which is worse: being forced by a soldier to cut off another child"s ears with a machete in northern Uganda, risking rape on the streets of a Brazilian slum or being blowtorched by a boss in Togo?    The clear answer from an AlertNet poll of the world"s most dangerous places for children is that this is an impossible question - they"re all situations that no child should have to face, and yet thousands do, every day.    "It seems to me any place where there is some combination of conflict, breakdown of services, economic collapse or absence of governance is a potential deathtrap for children," said Christian Science Monitor journalist Fred Weir.    When AlertNet asked aid workers and journalists to think of the most dangerous place to be a child, they came up with a top 10 list that shines the spotlight on the world"s worst humanitarian hotspots, including Sudan, northern Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Somalia, the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Myanmar.    But their responses also highlighted a gamut of poverty-related suffering that rarely make world headlines. The top 10 list included India, where millions of hungry children are forced into hard labour and prostitution    There were wars that didn"t grab the poll limelight, but received enough votes to reflect their magnitude. Colombia - where more than 3 million people have been driven from their homes and medical agency Doctors without Borders estimates 37 percent of displaced people have witnessed the killing of parents, children or siblings - narrowly missed the top 10.    "PRACTICALLY INVISIBLE"    Child refugees, many of them on their own without loving families to protect them, featured prominently in the survey responses.    "There are large groups of children in every region of the world who are regularly overlooked by the media because their tragedy transcends geographic divides," Refugees International Research Director Maureen Lynch said. "They are practically invisible to the public eye."    Even once wars are over, children face the risk of sexual exploitation in squalid camps, or landmines that kill and maim up to 10,000 children every year, according to the U.N. children"s agency, UNICEF.    It"s not just war that puts children at risk. There"s the eternal problem of how to scrape together enough to eat.    Catholic aid agency CAFOD"s media chief, Patrick Nicholson, put it succinctly: "Poverty kills."    Out of every 100 children born in 2000, 30 will likely suffer malnutrition, and 17 will never go to school, UNICEF says. About 30,000 children a day die before their fifth birthday, mostly from illnesses that could easily be prevented with clean water and vaccines.    In South Africa, where almost one in five people between 15 and 49 years old are HIV-positive, children are put at extra risk by the myth that sex with a virgin will cure AIDS.    AIDS is also rife in Zimbabwe, a nation in the throes of a political and humanitarian crisis that has helped to turn it from Africa"s breadbasket into the country with the world"s lowest life expectancy and sky-high inflation rates that make it hard to buy the most basic staple foods.    Both countries had a smattering of votes, while some respondents mentioned concern for poor children in many parts of the world who face early marriage, sexual exploitation, forced labour or virtual slavery.    An estimated 1.2 million children are trafficked every year for labour or sex, and about 1 million children are thought to be exploited in the multi-billion dollar sex industry, UNICEF says.    The western African country of Togo - where annual gross domestic product per capita was just $362 in 2003 - was singled out for high risks to children of being trafficked or suffering brutal beatings by teachers and bosses. A June report on violence against children in Togo by the U.N."s news wire, IRIN, cited at least one case of a boy being burnt with a blowtorch for falling asleep on the job.    "Unpaid and untrained teachers (in Togo) use children to work on their land, sometimes in exchange for better grades," communications manager Elayne Devlin of children"s aid agency Plan International said.    ENDEMIC VIOLENCE    Togo is not the only western African country where violent abuse of children is endemic. An Oxfam aid worker reported that it"s common practice in parts of Liberia to punish naughty children by forcing their hands into boiling oil.    A lot of people mentioned child labour in their poll answers, with 218 million working children in the world, according to the U.N. International Labour Organisation. Some 5.7 million work in especially horrific circumstances, including the virtual slavery of bonded labour.    Aid experts expressed outrage at quasi-slavery in crisis-ridden Haiti, child labour in Uzbekistan"s cotton fields, and under-age labourers breaking ships into scrap metal in Bangladesh.    Sex attacks, prostitution and drug addiction are dangers for tens of millions of children who live on the streets and rubbish dumps of the world"s cities. Poll respondents mentioned Brazil as a particularly high-risk country for street children, who are regularly killed by vigilantes who view them as little more than pests.    There"s urban poverty in rich countries too, and a couple of respondents voted for the United States, citing gun crime and the execution of minors in some states.    Disasters experts said children in the world"s quake-prone zones were in constant danger in rickety homes and schools.    "It may not cause a change in the top three "most dangerous" places in the world for children (but) in any given year an infrequent, high-impact event (like an earthquake) may rank very high in terms of cause of deaths," Marla Petal, a consultant for Turkey"s Earthquake Research Institute, said.    If schools were made quake-proof, it might have saved more than 16,000 children who died in them in an October earthquake in Kashmir.    "This is one of those unacceptable things that we can do something about," Petal said.    Click on the link below for more details of the world"s 10 most dangerous places for children. Visit the related web page
	Next (more recent) news item
	Next (older) news item