2021-02-25 15:16:47
These children often knew their value because the adults closest to them were willing to fight and even die for them. Is there any more important gift to give a child, than to love them and teach them their value as an equal human being? Or, conversely, is there anything worse than when adults—or the world at large—treat children as if their lives and bodies don’t matter?
In a new report, humanitarian organization Save the Children warned that 72 million children live in proximity to armed groups that have committed sexual violence against children during the last year including rape, sexual abuse, sexual torture, sexual slavery and sexual mutilation. Child survivors are often left with horrific injuries, and PTSD and trauma that can last a lifetime. These facts are excruciating, hard to read and perhaps for some hard to acknowledge that they are allowed to happen in our midst.
Perhaps you are already thinking that you know all this. But that’s exactly the point. We’re aware, yet we seem numb to it. We’ve known about these crimes for decades—and yet they continue.
According to Save the Children’s new data, the number of children at risk of conflict-related sexual violence is nearly ten times higher than it was in 1990. This coincides with the period in which we were supposed to have begun to reduce violence against children globally. In a 1996 report the former Mozambiquan freedom fighter and First Lady of South Africa, Graça Machel, denounced the existence of a “desolate moral vacuum…devoid of basic human values” in which children were being killed, maimed, conscripted and starved as a result of conflict. Her account transformed the way the U.N. regarded the impact of war on children.
Yet a quarter of a century later, notwithstanding several landmark convictions for grave violations, children are still being brutally victimized in modern conflicts. They are still abducted and kept as sex slaves, and still conscripted and forced to take part in atrocities. The number of children who have been forcibly displaced from their homes now stands at over 30 million—an unprecedented figure. The moral vacuum is still around us.
The nature of modern war, and the mobility of armed groups today, is a factor. Groups like Boko Haram mount raids across national borders, attacking villages and refugee camps. Civilians now make up the vast majority of all casualties of war, in conflicts lasting decades.
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