UNICEF—Protecting the Children of the World

October is UNICEF month. UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, is charged with protecting the world's children from violence and aiding their development. The organization is active in 190 countries, including those in which contemporary conflicts render life especially difficult for children—if they survive at all.

Below are some examples from World Conflicts Today of how children often bear the brunt of violent disagreements among adults:

• In November 2007, 59 school children were killed by a suicide bomber at a sugar factory in Afghanistan.
  
  
• On September 1, 2004, 300 people—at least half of them children—were killed in a school in Beslan, Russia, after being held hostage by terrorists associated with Chechen separatists.
  
  
• An article in a June 2005 edition of the Chechen newspaper Groznenskii Rabochii reported that five thousand children—the victims of land mines—needed artificial limbs.
  
  
• The youngest children in Darfur refugee families are often sent to collect firewood outside the security of refugee camps since their fathers run the risk of being killed if they go and their mothers of being raped.
  
  
• Many children have died in both India and Pakistan from landmines placed along those countries' borders.
  
  
• According to a 2008 UN study, North Korean children suffer from rising levels of malnutrition caused by their government's isolationist policy and a 2005 decision to order several international aid companies out of the country.
  
  
• A 2002 USAID study revealed that more than 30 percent of Arab children living in Gaza and the West Bank were chronically malnourished.
  
  
• Between 2000 and 2009, dozens of Israeli children were killed by Palestinian attackers and nearly a thousand Palestinian children were killed by Israeli security forces.

Sadly, children can also be drawn into conflicts in areas where there is relatively little overt violence. In Northern Ireland, for example, a 2002 survey showed that Catholic and Protestant children as young as three had learned to hold symbols of each other's traditions in contempt.

Read through the Overviews from the Colombia and Darfur reports in World Conflicts Today; then answer the essential questions for critical thinking associated with each of the photos below.



Juan Carlos Lecompte, husband of Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian presidential candidate who was kidnapped by the FARC in 2002 and held for six years, holds up pictures of Betancourt's two children.

He later scattered them on forests where Betancourt was believed to be held in the hope that they would persuade someone to provide information about Betancourt's whereabouts.

What are some reasons that people would hold up photographs of family member—and children in particular—killed in wars and conflicts?



Compare the power of photographs of a crisis with the power of pictures drawn or painted by children who have suffered in that crisis.

SPREAD THE WORD | DATABASE TOOLKITS @ PROQUEST