From east to west, from north to south, people around the
world are suffering, increasingly unsafe, and preyed upon in ever larger
numbers. For years now, their deaths from disease, deprivation, starvation, and
conflicts of every sort have been on the rise. They are increasingly fodder for
war.
According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die daily worldwide due
to starvation. In the first three-quarters of 2018, for instance, 5,000
children were reportedly killed or maimed in war-torn Afghanistan. Save the
Children estimates that up to 85,000 children under the age of five may have
died of starvation in a Yemen being torn apart by civil war and, according to
the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, at least 1,248 children have
been killed and as many wounded in Saudi air strikes there since 2015. By the
end of 2017, at least 14,000 children had been reported killed in the war in
Syria. In Africa, violence and hunger threaten children in increasing numbers.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, millions are reportedly “at risk of severe
acute malnutrition.” The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, reports that the number of
displaced people, both those who have fled across national boundaries as
refugees and those still in their own countries, reached a staggering 68.5
million by the end of 2017. According to UNICEF, nearly half of that displaced
population are children, an estimated 30 million of them. Many of those
children are starving, without access to medical care or basic human needs like
toilets and clean water, not to speak of schools or a future. Inside and
outside the camps where so many of them are now living, youngsters are subject
to rape, violence, and abuse.
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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment