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The devastating effects of war on children
17-11-2009 Photo gallery
Today’s conflicts can have devastating effects on children, who get killed, maimed, imprisoned, recruited by armed forces or groups, sexually abused, exploited or trafficked. Conflict tears families apart, leaving thousands of children to fend for themselves and their siblings.
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Gaza city, the occupied Palestinian territory. A young girl, whose home (in the background) was destroyed by fighting.
Today’s conflicts can have devastating effects on children, who get killed, maimed, imprisoned, recruited by armed forces or groups, sexually abused, exploited or trafficked. Conflict tears families apart, leaving thousands of children to fend for themselves and their siblings.
The number of children forced by conflict to flee their homes as refugees or IDPs in 2008 has been estimated at 18 million.
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In Isale, Burundi, a young girl separated from her relatives by conflict gets her picture taken by an ICRC delegate to be used in efforts to locate them.
Children need the nurturing, protective environment of their family and community. Separated from their families, children are at great risk of neglect, exploitation, abuse, illegal adoption or trafficking. The very survival of babies and young children is at stake, while girls are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse and early marriage.
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There is joy and relief as Roger, 17, who was separated from his family by the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is reunited with his loved ones.
Around the globe, thousands of people similarly separated from their family members are reunited with them by the ICRC, working alongside other members the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and using thousands of specialized staff and volunteers.
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El Buen Pastor women's prison in Bogotá, Colombia.
The ICRC regularly visits the prison’s inmates, some of whom have their young children with them. It monitors their living conditions and the manner in which they are treated and pays transportation costs for relatives to visit the inmates.
Whatever the reason for their presence in prison, children are entitled to specific care and protection. If they are detainees, separation from their family deprives them of protection and causes serious emotional stress. They may be subjected to physical and psychological abuse. They are sometimes used as cheap labour, such as working in the fields and cleaning, and often denied a proper education. This, together with the possible influence of hardened criminals, jeopardizes their chances of reintegration into society.
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Primary school children in Kabul, Afghanistan, learn about the danger of mines and other explosive remnants of war (ERW), and how to avoid it.
Landmines, cluster bombs and ERW are often an invisible but deadly legacy of war, and pose a threat in more than 70 countries. The vast majority of the victims of ERW are civilians.
Nearly a third of all casualties of mines and ERW worldwide are children, but in Afghanistan, they represent about half of the casualities. Children account for just under half of civilian casualties worldwide.
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Muhammad, a teenager, who was badly injured at the age of 12 by a cluster bomblet, at Bassam M. Singer's limb-fitting and rehabilitation centre in Lebanon.
Singer worked from 1991 to 1995 in a limb-fitting and rehabilitation centre run by the ICRC. Ten years on, he is running his own centre, still helping war victims. More than half of his patients, including many children, are cluster-bomblet and mine victims.
Singer believes Muhammad’s artificial limbs will enable him to lead a normal life.
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Gaza City, in the occupied Palestinian territory. A seven-year-old boy recovering at Al Shifa hospital, following an operation.
Modern warfare spares no one, including children, who are injured, maimed and killed. In addition, during armed conflicts, social service facilities are destroyed or become rundown due to lack of maintenance. Access to health services and medicines is restricted, and sometimes the entire health system collapses. Needs often far outweigh resources.
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A sick child receiving treatment at the ICRC-supported Juba Teaching Hospital in Southern Sudan
In war and situations of armed violence, even the most common illness can kill. The authorities have much less money to spend on health, including vital immunization programmes and maternal and child clinics.
Difficulty in accessing regions engulfed in violence can also cause the collapse of such programmes. This can have fatal consequences, including outbreaks of measles or meningitis, especially – in congested conditions like refugee or IDP camps.
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Displaced people sheltering in a school in Central Mindanao, Philippines.
Clearly, displacement following conflict – within a country or across an international border – plays a major role in dispersing family members. In the event of mass displacement, the scale of separation may be huge. The tens of thousands of Rwandan children separated from their families in the 1990s or the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in recent years are examples.
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A clinic for women victims of sexual violence in the DRC, where, according to estimates, one in two victims of such violence is a minor.
Rape and other forms of sexual violence increase dramatically with conflict.
In a survey conducted in 2009 by the ICRC on the impact of conflict on civilians, 36% of the respondents in the DRC cited sexual violence as a major concern. This is exceptionally high compared with the findings in the other seven countries where a similar survey was carried out.
Armed groups can use rape to torture, injure, extract information, degrade, displace, intimidate, punish or simply to destroy the fabric of the community. The fate of children born from rape can be dire, with relatives sometimes rejecting or even killing them.
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Near Monrovia, in Liberia, child victims of war aged 10 – 18 undergo counselling and learn useful skills.
Trauma is another problem that victims of war grapple with. Psycho-social care can be defined as a way of creating the best conditions to help the victims recover by themselves.
Often, it is simply necessary to restore a sense of normality by: meeting basic needs; providing care and a nurturing environment; and restoring normal routines, structures, and recreational activities. Traditional rituals can help, particularly in reintegrating children associated with armed forces and armed groups into their community.
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In Colombia’s Regencia District, school children learn about the basic rules of international humanitarian law.
International humanitarian law protects civilian objects, such as schools or hospitals. Nevertheless, these have increasingly come under fire during conflict.
One specific problem arises when the regular armed forces of a government or armed groups use parts or the whole of a school or hospital for their own purposes. Not only do they deprive civilians of health and education, but they also put them at risk of attack by the enemy.
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Liberian military personnel/government militias in Ganta town, along the border with Guinea in 2003.
Children can be the victims of war, but they can also find themselves taking part in armed conflicts. There are tens of thousands of “child soldiers” in at least 18 countries around the world.
They do not always carry weapons, but may be used in a large variety of roles: cooks, porters, messengers, spies, human mine detectors, sexual slaves, forced labourers, even suicide bombers. The list is long.
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