![]() Use of economic sanctions should be considered a war crime, just as is laying siege to a city to starve its population.ģ. Children and poor adults are those who suffer most from economic sanctions. Ensure that general economic sanctions against a country are never used again, as they were used in Iraq as a substitute for war. However, compliance with these instruments is poor, especially when recruiting children to armed forces is concerned.Ģ. In addition, they are intended to protect children from ethnic cleansing and recruitment into armed forces. The Geneva Conventions and the Convention on the Rights of the Child deal with protection of war-affected children with regard to food, clothing, medicine, education, and family reunion. Implement international humanitarian law regarding the protection of children in war. Making war less damaging to children (secondary prevention)ġ. ![]() They are particularly vulnerable to all of the impacts listed above ( 5). It is estimated that there are tens of thousands of young people under 18 serving in militias in about 60 countries. Children may lose their community and its culture during war, sometimes having it reconstituted in refugee or diaspora situations.Ĭhild soldiers. They may have their moral structure forcibly dismantled and replaced in training to kill as part of a military force. They may have to change their moral structure and lie, steal, and sell sex to survive. The experience of indifference from the surrounding world, or, worse still, malevolence may cause children to suffer loss of meaning in their construction of themselves in their world. These impacts may be prolonged by exposures to further privations and violence in refugee situations. Severe losses and disruptions in their lives lead to high rates of depression and anxiety in war-affected children. Children are exposed to situations of terror and horror during war – experiences that may leave enduring impacts in posttraumatic stress disorder. These phenomena which often occur in situations of war, ethnic cleansing, and refugee life leave lasting physical impacts in sexually-transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS, psychological impacts and changes in life trajectory. There is also interruption of population immunization programs by war which may be responsible for increases in child mortality. Refugee children are particularly vulnerable to the deadly combination of malnutrition and infectious illness. There may be loss of immunity to disease vectors with population movement. Conditions for maintenance of child health deteriorate in war – nutrition, water safety, sanitation, housing, access to health services. Children who survive landmine blasts rarely receive prostheses that are able to keep up with the continued growth of their limbs. A child may have to wait up to 10 years before having a prosthetic limb fitted. Millions of children are disabled by war, many of whom have grossly inadequate access to rehabilitation services. Thousands of children suffer landmine injuries each year ( 4).ĭisability. A landmine explosion is more likely to kill or seriously injure a child than an adult ( 3). Certain weapons affect them particularly. They die as civilians caught in the violence of war, as combatants directly targeted, or in the course of ethnic cleansing. Hundreds of thousands of children die of direct violence in war each year ( 2). Listing the impacts of war on children is a sadly straightforward task:ĭeath. Long after the war has ended, these lives will never attain the potential they had before the impact of war. ![]() A girl who is raped may be marginalized by her society and lose the opportunity for marriage. Consider a child disabled in war they may, in addition to loss of a limb, sight, or cognitive capacity, lose the opportunity of schooling and of a social life. Consider children who lose the opportunity for education during war, children who are forced to move into refugee or displaced person camps, where they wait for years in miserable circumstances for normal life to resume, if it ever does. Second, impacts in childhood may adversely affect the life trajectory of children far more than adults. A certain proportion of war-affected children lose all adult protection – “unaccompanied children,” as they are known in refugee situations. The child may be in substitute care with someone who cares for him or her only slightly – relatives or an orphanage. Their attachments are frequently disrupted in times of war, due to the loss of parents, extreme preoccupation of parents in protecting and finding subsistence for the family, and emotional unavailability of depressed or distracted parents. First, children are dependent on the care, empathy, and attention of adults who love them. War affects children in all the ways it affects adults, but also in different ways.
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