UNICEF report 2005: another evidence that this system is wrong
Category: Peace and Nonviolence..more than half the world's children are suffering extreme deprivations from poverty...
European Humanist Region
Peace and Nonviolence Secretary
December 2004
UNICEF report 2005: another evidence that this system is wrong
According to the 10th annual report on The State of the World's Children, more than half the world's children are suffering extreme deprivations from poverty, war and HIV/AIDS. More than 1 billion children are denied the healthy and protected upbringing promised by 1989's Convention on the Rights of the Child – the world's most widely adopted but least implemented human rights treaty.
In particular:
640 million children do not have adequate shelter
500 million children have no access to sanitation
400 million children do not have access to safe water
300 million children lack access to information (TV, radio or newspapers)
270 million children have no access to health care services
140 million children, the majority of them girls, have never been to school
90 million children are severely food deprived
At least 700 million children suffer from at least two or more of the deprivations.
Nearly half of the 3.6 million people killed in war since 1990 have been children.
Every deprived child is a future potential violent person, since the relationship between childhood abuse of any type (sexual, psychological, physical) and damage to the adult individual is becoming more and more clear in scientific research.
If the international community wishes to be taken seriously in its declamations concerning the prevention of terrorism, it will ensure that every child in every part of the world has access to all the basic needs and all the human right.
What the UNICEF report does not say is that all of this is ingrained in the current, violent and inhuman system. A system that can’t be “improved,” it is not “perfectible.” It is simply wrong and can only produce these bitter fruits.
It is important to denounce all the injustice and violence against the children (the weakest and most helpless ones), as the Unicef report does and to demand that the international institutions and the rich countries respect and increase their commitments toward the poor ones and cancel their foreign debt, one of the greatest causes of poverty and underdevelopment.
But this is not enough: what is really needed is a radical transformation of the current system of values as well as the entire social, political and economic organization, to create a world that is finally human. A world in which each person, simply because they were born, sees acknowledged their fundamental rights to healthcare, education, equal opportunities, to a life with dignity, but also the rights to happiness and the fullness of one’s existence.