ABSTRACT
The past hundred 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.
