ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some of the most common results of displacement, in exploited labor, sexual servitude, and the emergence of new kinds of child soldiers. 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. The root cause of heightened economic exploitation of child labor has been the increasing dislocation of many children from traditional family economies in the countryside. 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. In the last decades of the twentieth century, new levels of contact among almost all of the world's societies often summed up as globalization, added important new elements to childhood.
