The Most Dangerous Place to be Born

 

 

 

  Afghanistan is the worst place to be a child.
-UNICEF

 

 

 

 

 

As politicians, pundits, and diplomats endlessly debate the future of the world’s involvement in Afghanistan, it seems wise to reflect on the  innocents of Afghanistan over the decades of invasions, insurgencies, civil wars, and abject poverty. 

 

 

 

 

 

 “Afghanistan today is without doubt the most dangerous place on earth to be born.”
- Daniel Toole, UNICEF, Regional Director for South Asia

 

 

 

 

 

 The burden of wars, poverty, instability, and insurgencies has always been borne disproportionately by children.  They are killed and maimed by landmines and other explosives.   Schools are being destroyed by the Taliban, and girls who seek an education are often threatened and attacked.   Children are recruited by the Taliban to be suicide bombers and smugglers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 No one growing up in Afghanistan has ever known what it is like to live in a country at peace.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These pictures are hard to look at, but much harder for the parents 
to look at their children who are severely injured physically, emotionally, and psychologically. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 A UNICEF-supported study found that the majority of children under 16 years in Kabul suffer from psychological trauma. 

 

 

 

 

 

During the ten years the Soviets were in Afghanistan, they killed one million Afghans.  Five million became refugees.

 

 

 

 

UNICEF, the UN children’s agency, says that Afghanistan is the worst place in the world to be a child. One in five children do not live past the age of five.  Most of those deaths are caused by curable childhood diseases and malnutrition, compounded by the security situation, which means that parents are unable to access proper health care.

 

 

 

 

It is estimated that at least 30% of children from five to fourteen work to help their families survive.  Many weave rugs and work at factories making bricks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“It is very difficult to put a hard and fast figure to the number of children dying from hypothermia alone on Kabul’s streets as there would undoubtedly be other reasons that would make them sick or vulnerable in the first place,” UNICEF regional communications chief Sarah Crowe wrote.

 

 

 

 

 ”Extreme poverty, having lost a parent, being trafficked or displaced, or many other reasons may have forced them on to the streets where they would be deprived of their most basic needs (decent food, health, immunization, protection) and exposed to the extreme cold of Afghan winters.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.” 
- Khaled Hosseini,  The Kite Runner

 

Children at Work

In developing countries one in six children from 5 to 14 years old is involved in child labor.

Nepal, 1983

In the least developed countries, 30 percent of all children are engaged in child labor.

Boy working in candy factory, Kabul, 2006

Worldwide, 126 million children work in hazardous conditions, often enduring beatings, humiliation and sexual violence by their employers.

An eleven-year-old boy working in gold mine, Mindinao, Philippines, 1985

An estimated 1.2 million children — both boys and girls — are trafficked each year into exploitative work in agriculture, mining, factories, armed conflict or commercial sex work.

Tibetan Girl, 2002

 

Children work in an opium field in Badakhshan, Afghanistan. 1982

The highest proportion of child laborers is in sub-Saharan Africa, where 26 percent of children (49 million) are involved in work.

Niger, 1995

Boy sells flowers in busy road, India 1993

Young Welder, Bombay, India, 1994

“Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together,  and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.” -  Grace Abbott

Sources: http://www.unicef.org, http://www.ilo.org, www.crin.org

Children of War

Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone.

“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

AFGHN-10083, Afghanistan, 1992

Kabul, Afghanistan, 1993

Luzon, Philippines, 1986

Beirut, Lebanon, 1982

Kuwait City, 1991

A landmine victim, Pul i Khumri, north of Kabul, Afghanistan, 1992

Shepherd boy at Al Ahmadi, Kuwait, 1991

Kandahar, Afghanistan, 1985

Child with Dutch Soldier, Afghanistan, 2002

Tamil Tigers recruits during training, west of Batticola, Sri Lanka, 199

Kabul, Afghanistan, 1992