ABSTRACT
The past 100 years have seen a host of horrors inflicted on children in various parts of the world. Putting the same point another way: many of the very worst aspects of recent history have been visited on children. One need only think of the huge number of children caught up in the Holocaust during World War II, forced into camps, witnessing the degradation and deaths of parents, often themselves killed in the gas chambers. One and a half million children died in the Holocaust, of the estimated 1.6 million Jewish children alive on the European continent (outside Russia) in 1939. They were killed as Jews, of course, in the Nazis’ anti-Semitic frenzy, and not as children, but no beliefs in the special position of children offered them any protection. The many bloody wars of the twentieth century, the displacements of populations, including hundreds of thousands of children, that continue into the twenty-first century, are an integral part of the recent history of childhood. Contemporary war has blurred the boundaries between civilian and military, and this involves children in many ways. New levels of open hatred, as between ethnic groups, prompt direct attacks on children in ways less common in the nineteenth century. Children have been victims of collective barbarity in past times. Remember
the fate of many of those who went on the children’s crusade: being sold into slavery. Attacks on children, as a mean of intimidating adults or destroying the future of groups that might never seem trustworthy in the eyes of a conqueror, were hardly twentieth-century inventions. The past century, however, stands among the bloodiest, because of the frequency and scale of warfare and internal strife, and the new levels of weaponry involved. For many children, the “century of the child” proved to be a bad time to be one. The process began early, for example with the forced migrations, amid
great bloodshed, of Greek and Turkish populations after World War I. It continues today in civil strife in many parts of Africa and elsewhere. The subject is an inescapable part of the recent experience of many
children, and it moves us a great distance from the lives of most children in more settled societies and the implications of increasing adherence to the
modern model of childhood. Without detailing all the episodes, this chapter offers some examples of physical and psychological hardship. It describes some of the most common results of displacement, in exploited labor, sexual servitude, and the emergence of new kinds of child soldiers. A bit of subtlety is called for. This chapter deals with truly significant as
well as shocking aspects of the conditions of many children in the contemporary decades. There is no attempt to provide a complete list of atrocious situations, but a sampling is shocking in itself. The result shows the inadequacy of many international protective efforts and well intentioned proclamations. While the conditions are not characteristic of children around the world, they demonstrate that the spread of schooling and consumerism cannot be taken as fully characteristic either. The great variety in children’s experiences, however, imposes several further complications. First, some similar horrors lurk in societies that are not obviously torn by war and ethnic hatred, but simply suffer from dire poverty; there too, sales of children’s sexuality, labor, and even body parts respond to desperate situations. Several observers have noted that African-American children in violence-torn housing projects in Chicago have experiences not entirely different from children in outright war zones. Second, while there should be no sugar-coating the fate of children in war-torn regions or refugee camps, not all the stories lack some redemption; once in a while, a combination of outside intervention and family ingenuity produces unexpected improvements, including some access to modern schooling. And third, it remains important to remember that children in more stable societies, though sheltered from maimings and massive post-traumatic stress, face drawbacks of their own, some of them seemingly inherent in the modern model and in pervasive consumerism. There is a division in contemporary global history between societies under
siege, with children spared almost no imaginable atrocity, and societies working to install or expand the more widely recognized modern conditions of childhood. Children in the former societies deserve far more effective attention than they have often received, for despite some powerful commentary, the damage to children seems to proceed unabated. The horrors should not, however, distract us entirely from the issues, milder but nevertheless genuine, that children face in other settings. While the contrasts between children in war or civil strife and the
consumer-rich children of the Western or Japanese middle classes are vivid and real, some observers have nevertheless suggested an unexpected link: even children in many affluent sectors are increasingly exposed to violence, in media and video games, for example, even though their “real” lives are less touched. Are the distinctions between childhood and violence breaking down, though in different ways, on a global basis? No single process in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries killed as
many children as the Holocaust did, but the pattern of violence seemed to accelerate with World War II and the ensuing decades. Distinctions between
military personnel and civilians declined, and children were often caught up in the process. Many children, of course, were caught directly in wartime sieges and bombings from 1939 onward, a massive explosion of violence deliberately directed at civilians. Some children were sent out of wartime London, and there was even an effort to evacuate some children from Leningrad (St Petersburg) before it was surrounded and besieged by German forces. Even evacuated children faced severe problems, in unfamiliar surroundings away from family, and suffering massive guilt that they had been sheltered while others were dying. Far worse conditions afflicted children who stayed amid bombings and artillery shellings that could reduce blocks of housing to rubble. Death and injury, loss of family members, inadequate food supplies, and massive psychological stress touched many. The problem was not European alone: children in Chinese cities under Japanese attack, and then children in the Japanese cities targeted by American bombers, had similar experiences. After World War II, attacks relevant to children eased briefly. The most
obvious exception was the violence and dislocation surrounding the formation of the state of Israel and the periodic wars and Palestinian uprisings that continue to this day. Violence on an even wider scale resumed with Vietnam and its aftermath. One of the most powerful photographs in the Vietnam War features a girl, her back aflame from American napalm, running naked down a street (she survived, amazingly). Subsequent civil war in Cambodia brought further massive bloodshed. Children were heavily involved in the violence in Central America during
the 1970s, and more recently in the drug-related strife in Colombia. Civil wars in Myanmar (Burma), including raids on Thailand, constituted another center. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought violence and displacement in several new nations in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Warfare in the former Yugoslavia, compounded by deliberate attacks on certain groups in the name of ethnic cleansing, involved many children. Two rounds of American and allied attacks on Iraq – particularly the Gulf War of 1990 and then the new invasion of 2003 – and an intervening period in which foods and medical supplies were limited by embargoes, involved many children. Hundreds of thousands were killed or wounded, or affected by lack of food and medical supplies. Endemic warfare in Afghanistan, from the Soviet invasion of 1979 through the oppressive Taliban regime to the American-led combat in the early twenty-first century, helped produce a situation in which children’s life expectancy rates plunged to among the lowest in the world. Tragically also, on an even larger scale, the several trouble spots in Africa, convulsed by civil strife and government counterattack, involved children from Sudan and Uganda to Congo and the dreadful genocide in Rwanda, and other places in the center and west. It has been estimated – and estimates are all that can be offered – that
150 million children have been killed in war and civil war since the 1970s,
around the world, and another 150 million crippled or maimed. It was as if every North American child born in the same period had been killed or injured. Further, estimates calculate that 80 percent of all people killed in late twentieth and early twenty-first century conflicts have been women and children, in struggles that have relatively rarely involved extensive engagements between conventional armies of adult males. Sometimes, children have been deliberately targeted. In the 1930s and
early 1940s, Japanese troops seized young girls in Korea, using violence to force them to become sex slaves; in one military brothel, 400 girls serviced 5000 Japanese troops on a daily basis. Forty years later, Cambodian Khmer Rouge forces, bent on ethnic cleansing, might club children to death in front of their parents, or hammer a three-month-old against a tree. Death pits could contain hundreds of children’s bodies. African combatants have killed their share of children in recent decades – a third of all those dead in the Congolese bloodshed in the 1990s were under five, but still more frequent have been maimings – an arm sliced off with a machete – and frequent rapes of young girls, deliberately designed to hurt and degrade. From yet another site of battle: 58 percent of the Palestinians injured in clashes with Israelis have been under 17. The aftermath of war could be dangerous as well. Many twentieth-century
struggles have involved land mines, easy for children to explode after the battles ended. A Cambodian boy loses a leg to a land mine on his way to get water from a well; it will be a year before he qualifies for a crude replacement, because the list of eligibles is so long. Much of the world knew that these episodes contradicted approved
international standards. One of the most common impulses of people under attack, including Iraqis protesting American invasion, was to highlight pictures of dead or injured children, knowing what resonance this would have when projected to world opinion. But the sense of horror did nothing to break the pattern. Throughout the century, but again particularly from World War II
onward, children were often forced to flee the scenes of war. Millions of children, in various places, have lived in refugee camps during the past 60 years, amid varying conditions but always facing considerable stress. As many as 4 percent of all people on Earth have had to flee their homes at least once in the past century, including over 20 million children. A 17-yearold in Azerbaijan explained his flight simply: “We left our village when the bombs began falling. … The bombs were like earthquakes that didn’t stop. You spend many years building up a home, and then, in one moment, it is destroyed.” The worst camps are those still perched on the edge of violence. A camp
in Thailand is shelled by rebel forces. Two boys lose their mother in the attack, seeing her die before them; one will also die because of wounds to vital organs; the other has had his stomach replaced by a plastic bag.
