Part two of this report focuses on the growing crisis of missing, trafficked and abused children around the world. While every country has a deep concern for vulnerable children, and many end up heinously abused, trafficked or killed; nonetheless there are countries where crimes committed on children is exacerbated by extreme poverty, war and harmful traditions, such as female genital mutilation and child marriages.

Part One: Humanitarian Crises – Increased Exponentially In 2015.
Part Three: Humanitarian Crises – UN Fails To Protect “At-Risk” Nations.

Children Of War

As the number of families trying to cross the Eastern Mediterranean increases – so is the number of child deaths growing. Humanitarian agencies are calling for better protection for those escaping conflict and despair,  said IOM, UNHCR, and UNICEF in a joint report.

An average of two children have drowned every day since September 2015.

“With children now accounting for thirty-six percent of people fleeing conflict regions, the chance of children drowning in the Aegean Sea crossing from Turkey to Greece has grown proportionately.

“During the first six weeks of 2016, 410 people drowned out of the 80,000 refugees crossing the eastern Mediterranean. This amounts to 35-fold increase year-on-year from 2015.

“Since last September (2015), when the tragic death of toddler Aylan Kurdi captured the world’s attention, more than 340 children, many of them babies and toddlers, have drowned in the eastern Mediterranean.  The total number of children who have died may be even greater, the agencies say, their bodies lost at sea.

“This year alone, IOM reports that there have been 1,357 deaths of men, women and children who have entered Europe by sea (from January 1, 2016 to May 8, 2016).” [01]

Children have become acceptable collateral damage in war on terrorism.

The mass number of refugees fleeing violence has created a precedence setting crisis of its own, worsened by the resulting over-crowding of camps. Case in point is the Polykastro Petrol Station camp, which was built and staffed to accommodate five-thousand (5,000) people; however to date, the facility is housing, and attempting to feed nineteen-thousand (19,000) refugees, according to MSF Sea on Twitter. [02]

Contrary to their purpose, refugee camps have increasingly become a place of misery, lost childhood and despair; fenced inside camps where they are denied a child’s right to safety and adult supervision; and even the youngest are aware that danger is lurking around every corner; and for these forgotten children and youth, their worry and anxiety is largely aggravated by overcrowding both in and along the refugee routes of escape.

The younger children and babies are especially susceptible to disease, fever, pains, malnutrition and distress, all of which have caused a fatal health threat in camps; extending to the hundreds of thousands of families sleeping in wet ditches, then walking endless days along cold, muddy railroad tracks. These sufferings are thrust upon children too young to bear the burden of fatigue, exposure to the elements, and prolonged thirst and hunger.

Persistent heavy rain in Idomeni has also turned the makeshift camp into a quagmire and all the tents have been flooded.

• Scores of children are falling ill at the disease-stricken Idomeni migrant camp on the Greece/Macedonia border.
• Infections are rife with many of the vulnerable youngsters suffering from fever and diarrhea due to poor conditions. [03]

Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) says 40 percent of the Idomeni camp’s population are children, with many falling ill due to the poor conditions and sanitation.

Humanitarian workers, medical professionals, caregivers, teachers and parents are facing an entire generations’ upsurge in mental health illnesses, complex behavior and learning obstacles.

Additionally there are a countless number of children now burdened with a lifetime as a person with a disability; a direct result of injuries and loss of limbs incurred by the trauma of violent war; these children have survived near death, and witnessed their family killed, who are now orphaned, displaced and unwanted by society; ultimately dependent on a busted political system that is villainizing kids, treating them like the enemy – rather than the children they are.

MSF doctors and medical staff  have a message for the United Nations’ world leaders – Children are not a target.

The perils for refugee and migrant children in these camps increases for kids closer to age ten-years, teenagers included. Due to the lack of adult protection, both boys and girls are left defenseless to the sex-trade smugglers, rebel armies and terrorist cells.

Children are being used as soldiers, and weapons in suicide bombings.

Militant groups in the Middle East and Africa are notorious for stealing children from both villages and refugee camps. This is carried out by groups of armed fighters who will pull up in trucks; terrorizing and killing women and children in an unimaginable act of brutality – which can only be described as nonhuman behaviour; more akin to feral animals in my assessment.

The stolen children are confined, and with the use of torture, starvation and brainwashing, sadly even an affectionate child and peaceful youth can be turned into a mindless killing machine.

Adding to their trauma, the task of shooting or beheading people who do not follow regime orders will often fall to the children under the strict supervision of their murderous kidnappers. I cannot even begin to imagine the turmoil a child’s mind must experience, when their own survival is subject to killing another human being (whom may be a friend or family).

In reference to the photo above Breitbart reports, “ISIS has built numerous training camps specifically for children. Videos have shown children, known as Cubs of the Caliphate, participating in military exercises, which included proper gun mechanics. Other videos showed militants teaching children how to behead people by using toy dolls.” [04]

Girls in war-zones kidnapped and sold to Daesh fighters and wealthy Arabs.

Numerous accounts of very young girls forced into sex-slavery can be found on YouTube; girls who have testified how the rich, powerful Arab men (most counties call them pedophiles and pimps) go into the camps under the pretense as “humanitarians” and will approach families; offering marriage to their daughters – girls as young as ten-years-old – by convincing her guardians that she will be married and escape the camps.

When in truth the girl is forced into sexually slavery, assaulted daily, and unless she escapes, is never heard from again.

In my opinion, the only feasible way to protect the millions of internally displaced and refugee children at risk, is to put an end to the war on terrorism responsible for killing civilians in Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan and Yemen. At least then the masses of people escaping from airstrikes in those regions would have no reason to flee.

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Missing Children

There is not a single country spared the hardship of children who go missing, nor is any parent safe from the potential loss of a child, whether they ran away or were kidnapped, the majority of these children, from babies to youth are grossly abused, trafficked or killed.

The unacceptable number of children who are reported missing in war-zones around the world has continued to escalate at an alarming rate.

Repercussions from armed conflicts raging in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and South America have created an unprecedented loss of refugee children, numbered at 10,000 worldwide, with approximately 5,000 of those coming from the Middle East regions, according to a recent report by International Organisation of Migrants (IOM).

While there is government, non-government (NGO), and independent humanitarians working in war-zones who are attempting to find these lost children; others such as Your Ability Organization in Sana’a Yemen, who have converted their facility into dorms to house and care for Yemeni children they find orphaned in the streets. However, the task of monitoring and accounting for each unaccompanied child is overwhelming and shows little progress, even for the largest organisations, and volunteers with the best of intentions.

One of the NGO organizations that has stepped up at this time of crisis for children is Humanity First Canada, and they are providing safety and educations to orphans in the war-zones. Their organization has facilities in over a dozen locations worldwide, and their many lifesaving humanitarian missions includes ensuring refugee children will have a future that includes education. Humanity First is building schools, providing teachers and creating safe havens for these children – the hardest hit casualties of war.

“The Syrian civil war of the last two years has led to over 100,000 fatalities, 4.25 million internally displaced people and over two-million people displaced abroad, mostly in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt.

“Many of the worst affected civilians are women with young children who are suffering shock, minor trauma, and lack food, safe water, hygiene and medical attention. There are large temporary camps now such as Za’atari in Jordan where conditions are not ideal.” writes Humanity First on their website.

Humanity First is comprised mainly of volunteers working on the ground for a long term assistance program covering relief supplies, and medical assistance in the region. You can help them help the Syrian refugees by donating on their website at Humanity First.

INDIA

A child goes missing every eight minutes in India. Maharashtra  is one of the largest destinations for trafficked children in India. It was back in November of 2013 when the NHRC issued notice to authorities in Maharashtra, India for not acting on cases of children who go missing in Navi Mumbai.

In fact, few cases of missing children in the country were even filed with the police until the Supreme Court, in response to a petition by Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi’s to save the children (Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation), and made it mandatory in 2013 to register all cases of missing children in India.

It has been reported that six-hundred (600) children go missing in Navi Mumbai every year, and apparently the Navi Mumbai Police Department never takes the issue seriously, as it generally does not register complaints of missing children. [05]

Almost sixty-thousand (60,000) children in 2011 were reported missing from a total of twenty-eight (28) states and union territories according to the NCRB. Of these more than twenty-two-thousand (22,000) are yet to be located.

West Bengal had the highest number of missing children with more than twelve-thousand (12,000) missing in 2011. Madhya Pradesh was next with (7,797) cases while Delhi had (5,111) cases. These are the cases reported. The following states didn’t report any, which experts say is not credible: Maharashtra, Odisha, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Punjab. [06]

He said almost sixty-thousand (60,000) children in 2011 were reported missing from a total of twenty-eight (28) states and union territories according to the NCRB. Of these over twenty-two-thousand (22,000) are yet to be located.

The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) told media that hundreds of children who go missing are found begging near bus stands, railway stations, temples, markets and other public places, and the police had not registered a single case under the provisions of the Beggary Prevention Act in the last 10 years.

Maharashtra has come a long way since 2013, as Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis announced that the national “Operation Smile” (Muskaan), with a mission to find and reunite children with their families has succeeded in tracing more than 12,000 children since its launch in January 2015,

While some (children) are kidnapped or trafficked and forced to work, many are abandoned by families who cannot afford to care for them.

“Maharashtra has shown good results in bringing back the children and connecting to their families,” Fadnavis told the state assembly.

The state’s efforts have also brought the conviction rate for perpetrators up to fifty-two-percent (52%) from nine-percent (9%) before the campaign launched, he said.

Police must assume missing children are victims of kidnapping and trafficking, and conduct an investigation when a child is recovered to ascertain the involvement of organised gangs in trafficking and child labour, the court had said.

First information reports showed that less than a quarter of the children found had been filed as missing with the police, said the state’s Inspector General of Police Brijesh Singh.

“Most children are not even registered as missing,” Singh told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “That makes it very hard to trace them and return them to their families.“

• Nationwide, almost 29,000 children were rescued in two-month-long operations last year (2015), according to the home ministry. National data for this year’s January campaign are not yet available.
• In Maharashtra, 4,244 children were rescued in January, of whom only 665 had been recorded as missing, Singh said.
• Last July, 4,296 children were traced in the state, of whom about 1,400 were girls, he said. A similar number were rescued in January 2015.

Some children were found begging on the streets, and others had been forced to work. Some had been trafficked from the eastern states of Bihar and Orissa, Singh said.

As part of the campaign, police stations in the state appointed child welfare officers, and the state’s 12 anti-human trafficking units worked closely with child welfare centres. Police also tapped NGOs for help with rehabilitation.

“Sustaining the momentum may be difficult, as this was a concentrated effort,” she said. “But they have shown that it can be done, that we can get good results with these measures.” [07]

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Exploited Children

The countless deplorable crimes against children worldwide are too numerous to include in this report, so I have focused on the increasing crisis of child slavery, genital mutilation and marriages; even at that I cannot cover each country with an exceptionally high number of child human rights’ related crises.

Beggar’s Mafia

AFRICA

In a forty-three-page report, Exploitation in the Name of Education: Uneven Progress in Ending Forced Child Begging in Senegal, Human Rights Watch examines Senegal’s mixed record in addressing the problem of forced begging.

The report is based on interviews in October 2013 and January 2014 with Senegalese civil society activists, government officials, Quranic teachers, religious authorities, and current and former students in Quranic boarding schools.

It follows the April 2010 Human Rights Watch report, Off the Backs of the Children: Forced Child Begging and Other Abuses against Talibés in Senegal, which documented in detail how many men had twisted the country’s long tradition of religious education into a system of exploitation built on forcing young boys to beg.

Many boys Human Rights Watch interviewed said they were physically abused when they were unable to bring back the daily begging quota their teacher imposed. The abuse at times rises to the level of torture, including brutal beatings with whips, electrical cord, or ropes; being chained and forced into stress positions for long periods; and being burned with caustic substances.

In the town of Saint Louis, Human Rights Watch visited two Quranic schools, inhabited by boys as young as seven-years-old, that sit within ten meters of a garbage dump littered with animal carcasses, car parts, and burned refuse.

In the Dakar suburb of Guédiawaye, at least 150 young boys, some no older than six-years-old, sleep in an abandoned concrete structure with no door or windows, no electricity or water – except for pools of rainwater – hundreds of mosquitoes, and no toilet except for the dirt floor on which they stand to bathe. As is often the case in Dakar, the boys must each bring the teacher, who lives elsewhere, 500 CFA francs (US $1.00) a day from begging.

INDIA

According to UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, and the U.S. State Department, these children aren’t allowed to keep their earnings or go to school, and are often starved so that they will look gaunt and cry, thereby eliciting more sympathy—and donations—from tourists.

And since disabled child beggars get more money than healthy ones, criminal groups often increase their profits by cutting out a child’s eyes, scarring his face with acid, or amputating a limb.

Beggars on the streets of Dhaka told the Guardian that gang leaders took much of their earnings. According to Mohammad Nasim, 35, who begs in Bijoy Nagar, each gang of beggars consists of around 500 members, with syndicates of beggars working under sardars (leaders).

The following comments are from journalists Saad Hammadi and Jason Burke’s article in the The Guardian:

“…Abducted children, [were] kept for months in confined spaces or even in barrels and deprived them of food. Permanently disabled by their confinement and virtual starvation, the children were then sent on to the streets of the city either accompanied with a woman posing as their mother or alone…”

”The children are kidnapped, put under the bed and left without food for several months, so that they became weak and disabled” [08]

Some estimates put the number of people living from begging in the country as high as 700,000. The total population of Bangladesh is around 135 million.

According to one U.S. State Department report it’s not just happening in Africa and India. A man in Shenzhen, China can earn as much as $40,000 per year by forcing enslaved children to beg. Horrific examples of trafficking in children (and the elderly) for the purposes of organized begging have been found in Bolivia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Senegal, Pakistan, and even Austria, and other European countries, including the United States.

This harmful practice not only deprives children of a childhood, it is detrimental to their physical and psychological health.

It seems that no country is immune to human trafficking. And when trafficked children get too old to beg effectively, they often graduate into forced prostitution, the black-market organ trade, or other gruesome fates. [09]

Child Labour

The use of children as a workforce is another brutal abuse of an adult’s power over a child;  inflicting a life of misery onto vulnerable children, whose only crime was being born.

INDIA

in the year 2011 there were 11.72 million child labours identified in India. The following statistics are from a report by “Tactful Management Research Journal: A CASE STUDY OF JALGAON DISTRICT:

The age demography of child labour  in India:

• Forty-six percent of child labour are of age thirteen years,
• twenty-two percent are of age twelve years,
• twenty-seven percent are of an age below ten years.

I ask, “How could society expect them to work at a job?”

The report also states that India has the largest number of child laborers under the age of fourteen-years (14) in the world.  Even though Indian law prohibits children below the age of 14 from working, 12.66 million children work as child laborers, according to the data.

Of those, twenty-one-percent (21%) of these children are employed in cigarette and bidi factories, seventeen-percent (17%) in construction and fifteen-percent (15%) as domestic workers. Others work as rag pickers, agricultural workers and in industries like fireworks and carpet weaving.

“Nearly eighty-five-percent (85%) of child laborers in India are hard-to-reach, invisible and excluded, as they work largely in the unorganized sector,” the government report states. Also, many missing children are never brought to the notice of the police, especially those in the commercial sex trade, say experts.

Workers as young as five-years-old are labouring seven days a week, up to twelve hours daily without without proper meals. Some very young children are made to work for only 2 annas for a day of hard labour.

Not surprisingly, ninety-four percent of the children in this study group were not aware of any worker rights, or regulation and human resources  for a workplace. [pdf]

Genital Mutilation

Practiced in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Oman, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, amongst others. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is one of the grossest, cruelest act of violence committed on girls. It horrified me to learn how many countries and religious groups still perform this painful procedure; which inflicts upon the female child a lifetime of genital pain and disfigurement.

“FGM is carried out with knives, scissors, scalpels, pieces of glass or razor blades. The mutilation is usually done without anesthetics. Instruments are usually not sterile. Mortality is high.

“The practice has dreadful costs: many girls die afterwards, the survivors suffer their whole life from the psychological and medical consequences of the operation. All are traumatized and suffer from adverse health effects during marriage and pregnancy.” [10]

World Health Organization reports: “FGM procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.

• Procedures can cause severe bleeding and problems urinating, and later cysts, infections, as well as complications in childbirth and increased risk of newborn deaths.
• Over 200 million girls and women alive today have been cut in thirty (30) countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where FGM is concentrated.
• FGM is mostly carried out on young girls between infancy and fifteen-years-old.

“Since 1997, great efforts have been made to counteract FGM, through research, work within communities, and changes in public policy. Progress at international, national and sub-national levels includes: revised legal frameworks and growing political support to end FGM; this includes a law against FGM in 26 countries in Africa and the Middle East, as well as in 33 other countries with migrant populations from FGM practicing countries.” [11]

Female Genital Mutilation may be the exception to a rise in use on female children, although, the groups fighting against tradition, still have a long way to go before this practice is stopped completely. Until then thousands of girls worldwide are still subjected to this barbaric practice.

Child Marriages

Very young girls are being handed over to much older men, and the repercussion is a life of misery and gross crimes committed against their physical and mental health. In most countries, a child marriage constitutes an indecent crime, the man is labeled a pedophile, and is never accepted back into society. So using the phrase “child-marriage” is a crime in itself.

These children are raped and confined by pedophiles. And Saudi Arabia has the highest number of “religiously sanctioned” pedophiles running their country.

SAUDI ARABIA

Research has found Saudi Arabia to have some of the highest levels of gender discrimination in the world, with the gender inequality index ranking it 135 out of 146 countries. The result is a misogynistic mess, where men are often immune from societal expectations while women are left baring extra burdens. [12]

It should be socially unacceptable for a young child to be viewed as a potential mate. While many in Saudi society have placed countless unfair and near-impossible expectations on women, men are left largely unaccountable for their actions.

Children should never be robbed of their childhood or exploited due to financial strains on their families, and no price justifies selling a child into a marriage of any kind. With an estimated 5,000 child brides nationwide, it is, sadly, not uncommon for Saudi parents to wed  their children to elderly suitors. [13]

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Part One: Humanitarian Crises – Increased Exponentially In 2015.
Part Three: Humanitarian Crises – UN Fails To Protect “At-Risk” Nations.

To learn more on the topic of child marriages, read our internship article: Child Brides: Education Is Competing With Tradition.

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