ABSTRACT
Children’s lives are often the fi rst and most serious casualties of the world’s confl icts, catastrophes, and crises. For instance, when a devastating tsunami hit Southeast Asia a decade ago, children-too small and weak to hold on to fi xtures or trees-died in disproportionate numbers; those who survived, orphaned or torn from their families and lost amid the wreckage, became easy prey for sex traffi ckers, as the BBC reported in 2005. In Africa, deadly disease epidemics have decimated child populations: 94 percent of child AIDS deaths worldwide have occurred in Africa, and over 40 million children have been orphaned by AIDS, ending up on the streets or in dire poverty as a consequence. Children are at increasing risk of recruitment and exploitation by armed groups as strife around the world becomes more intense and violent: children have been used as suicide bombers, as well as child soldiers and assassins. UNICEF reports that 17,000 children die every day; nearly half of all deaths of children under 5 are due to malnutrition; and every 10 min, somewhere in the world, an adolescent girl dies as a result of violence.
