Wikichild Blog Catch Up - 2012

Hi Everyone,

2012 has been an exciting year for Wikichild and we decided to wrap it up by blogging a selection of  child related articles from the last 12 months. Enjoy!

Rapid urbanization is leaving millions of disadvantaged children behind by guest blogger James Elder of UNICEF - March 5th

Kids in High Poverty Communities: 5 Ways it Affects us all by Laura Speer is the Associate Director for Policy Reform and Data at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore Maryland, USA - March 15th

The Arab Knowledge Report 2010/2011: Why focusing on Arab children and youth is necessary for the future of the region by Hannah Chadwick - Former Wikichild consultant - 6 April 

“I am fighting for my future” by Hannah Chadwick - 19 June 

Early stimulation and micronutrients interventions: the next frontiers to break the cycle of child poverty by Christelle Chapoy, 3ie International Initiative for Impact Evaluation - 13  July 

The Child Development Index 2012 by Alex Cobham, Save the Children - 19 July 

The Global Whole Child by Sean Slade, ASCD the Whole Child - 8 August

A Kony 2012 for Syria??? by Hannah Chadwick - 19 August 

Education for All - A Focus on Nutrition by Robbie Lawrence, Wikichild Coordinator - 1st November

The threat of inequality to children by Robbie Lawrence - 20 November 

Thank you to all who have followed us in 2012 and stay tuned for a diverse and interesting range of Child Well-being blogs in the new year. 

Robbie Lawrence 

Wikichild Coordinator 

@Wiki_child

@robbielawrence1

Giving Children A Voice

Image taken from 'Out in the Cold' ©Save the Children

The Syrian conflict has now entered its 21^st month and is showing few signs of abating. Over the course of this period between 40,000 and 55,000 Syrians have been killed and about 1.2 million people are said to be displaced.

The violence has been universal, afflicting all parts of the country's population, but one of the most striking features of this civil war has been brutality enacted on children. Thousands of children have died in attacks and many more have been injured, traumatised and driven from their homes.

Save the Children has followed the conflict closely; having published a number of timely reports the charity, like UNICEF, has set up an appeal to protect Syria's children and provide them with food, shelter and emotional support.

Save the Children's most recent report 'Out in the Cold, Syria's Children Left Unprotected' documents the appalling winter conditions facing child refugees who have dispersed across the Middle East, attempting to find refuge in Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan. Sub-zero temperatures have already hit the region and “startling low levels of aid” (Out in the Cold, page 14)  mean that children will have to endure this winter without enough support. According to Justin Forsyth, the chief executive of the STR, world leaders must act quickly:

“[the] international community needs to match its diplomatic and security concerns with funding to help children. Unless there is a surge in funding, thousands of children are going to spend a bitter winter without proper shelter from the cold, and many will become sick as a result.”

One only has to look at Andrea Bruce's devastating photo essay published earlier this year by The New York Times to understand the truly horrendous effects that cold can have. Bruce's haunting, Caravaggio like pictures tell the story of Lailuma, an Afgan mother living with her family in a refugee camp outside Kabul who lost nine of her children over the course of the winter.

'Out in the Cold' follows a similar structure to Save the Children's previous report 'Untold Atrocities,The Stories of Syria's Children' in that the majority of its contents is made up of first person accounts of the deteriorating situation for refugees. Among the testimonies are stories of children huddling three to a blanket, sleeping in makeshift shelters made of billboards and falling sick as temperatures plunge in the region. One such story comes from 11 year old Ali, who has been living in an abandoned school in northern Lebanon for close to two years:

“I need clothes to wear... My parents dont have money, they dont have anything. Who should I ask for clothes from? I'm not happy at all. We would love to go back to Syria.”

A feature of these reports is that they break from what might be seen as a more traditional style of research based dissemination. Instead, they aim to allow the emotive force of the featured children's stories to emphasise the need for changes to be made. This is certainly not a new form of reporting; organisations from past and present have released similar reports and campaigns, however, it seems that these groups are increasingly using children's voices to deliver their message in a bid to inform policy making. Aside from STR, UNICEF has dedicated a section of their overall mission statement to the VOICE's of children, the UN followed up on its MACHEL Strategic Review by publishing a compilation of the views and recommendations of some 1,700 young people from 92 countries to raise awareness about the issues facing children in armed conflict and Defence for Children International has released a number of publications voicing the issues faced by Palestinian's in East Jerusalem.

It is arguable that in highly politicized humanitarian crises like the one in Syria or nearby Palestine, the simplicity of a child's story transcends the debate over who is in the wrong and forces us to remember that innocent humans are suffering. There will of course be those who criticize such reports, arguing that they only provide a limited perspective on complex situations. However, it seems that if a one sided report is going to be effective - using first person child accounts to drive an argument may be a less fallible method than others as children are unlikely to approach their testimonies with a strong political leaning. Save the Children's Syrian reports are undoubtedly subjective, they have an agenda, but the stories coming out of them are far from politicized, they do not point fingers, they only speak of the confusion and terror felt by children who cannot comprehend the violence going on around them. At a time when we are bombarded with information on a daily basis, 'Out in the Cold' and the reports that have preceded it offer a concise, easily accessible and striking message that forces us to view the Syrian conflict through the lens of those who most need rescuing from it. 

Robbie Lawrence

Wikichild Coordinator

@Wiki_child

@robbielawrence1

Uncounted sexual violence

“We could scream but no one will hear us, they cover our mouths and threaten us.”

Unnamed child, Colombia

When we consider that 75 to 95 percent of rapes are never reported to the police in England , it will come as no surprise that we know very little about the full extent of sexual violence committed in conflict and post-conflict settings, let alone how many survivors of sexual violence in conflict are children. While many of these crimes go unreported and unpublished – a horrific example of the “uncounted,” for which this blog is named – we know enough to be able to say that incidents of rape and sexual abuse during conflict and instability are pervasive in countries from all regions of the world and that children often make up a significant number of survivors of sexual violence, and sometimes the majority.

A rape victim with a children’scounsellor - South Kivu, easternDRC - Hidden Survivors 

The following snapshots – outlined in our new briefing Hidden Survivors launched today – offer some indication of the prevalence and scope of the problem:

• During the post-election crisis in Côte d’Ivoire between 1 November 2010 and 30 September 2011, children made up 51.7% of cases of sexual violence. In more than half of the cases of sexual violence against children, the survivors were below 15 years of age.
• In 2008 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the United Nations Population Fund recorded nearly 16,000 cases of sexual violence against women and girls. Of those instances, 65% involved children, mostly adolescent girls
• In 2006, the Lancet published research estimating that nearly one-fifth of girls were raped in the greater Port-au-Prince areas during the armed rebellion between February 2004 and December 2005

While there is ample evidence of sexual violence against women and girls, there is little systematic documentation of the existence of or impact of sexual violence on men and boys. The evidence that does exist, however, points to a serious – if under-reported – problem. In the DRC it has been estimated that men and boys make up 4-10% of survivors of sexual violence who seek treatment. In Afghanistan, the UN Special Representative on Children and Armed Conflict and others have repeatedly brought attention to the sexual abuse of boys. There have also been reports of sexual violence against boys as well as girls in the current conflict in Syria.

Given the extent of the scourge of sexual violence in conflict and its impact on children we welcome the UK Government and William Hague’s personal commitment to placing this issue at the top of the agenda for the UK’s Presidency of the G8 next year. This week a group of around 60 experts on the issue of sexual violence in conflict from around the world gathered at Wilton Park to help the Foreign Office develop and shape this important initiative.

While the appearance of Angelina Jolie was the only aspect of the conference that captured media attention, there was much that was encouraging about the discussions at Wilton Park from a children’s rights perspective. William Hague recognised in the opening statements of his speech that children make up 50% of the survivors of sexual violence in DRC, for example. And the Minister of Gender and Development from Liberia spoke at length about the appalling impact of sexual violence in homes in post-conflict Liberia on children, pushing the issue beyond the confines of “rape as a weapon of war” and into a broader set of familiar development concerns such as grinding poverty, breakdown of social norms, and lack of respect for women’s rights.

We do have lingering concerns that the UK Government’s initiative on Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict will – ironically, given the name – not go far enough towards prevention of sexual violence and instead focus on a narrow element of reducing impunity: that of increasing international prosecutions. Using international prosecutions to send a message at the highest levels that sexual violence in conflict will not go unpunished is an important part of the story, but it is only part.

So how do we lessen the extent to which survivors – and especially child survivors – of sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict settings that go uncounted (both as part of ensuring that those affected by these crimes receive the support and services they require but also as part of challenging the culture of impunity)? How do we prevent pervasive sexual violence from taking root in conflict and post-conflict settings in the first place?

Counting is a big part of the story. We have the tools to gather the data and monitor incidents of sexual violence, and other grave violations of children’s rights, but the relevant bodies within the UN and beyond often lack the funding and political support to fully exploit the potential of their mandates, as the SRSG on Children and Armed Conflict explained during her talk at Save the Children on Friday November 16th.

And we know that where there are no age-appropriate services for health or psychological care, where judicial systems are not designed to meet the needs of children, and where societies do not recognise the particular vulnerabilities that children face, reporting of abuse and exploitation of children will remain low. These systems and services will need funding from donors in many cases. And supporting governments to introduce and strengthen age- and sex- disaggregated data collection will need to be part of the response.

Increased funding, and a better understanding of how funding is currently allocated is also vital. Protective sectors like child protection and education – which play an important role in preventing children from being subject to sexual violence in the first place, as well as an important part of a the response mechanism for children who do survive violent abuse – for example, were the two worst-funded humanitarian sectors in 2009 – only 32% of requirements were met and many projects within that were only partially funded. Beyond these figures, we don’t actually know how much was spent on programmes that specifically aim to tackle sexual violence in conflict – so disaggregated data on funding for child-focused sexual violence programmes also needs to be publically available.

Sexual violence is one of the most shocking crimes committed during conflict. It happens all over the world – from Afghanistan to Colombia to Somalia – and its consequences linger long after the fighting has stopped. But it is not inevitable. And our shock and horror at the thought of children suffering these crimes should not mean they go uncounted.

Alison Holder

This article was first published on Uncounted - This blog is about inequality and development and those who are uncounted. It is written and maintained by Alex Cobham, Save the Children's Head of Research. Uncounted aims to stimulate debate but is not a reflection of official Save the Children policy

Europe, its children and tackling deprivation and poverty

There is widespread evidence supporting the argument that measuring monetary poverty and income alone result in inadequate assessments of child well-being. The multidimensional nature of child well-being requires measures which pick up on the individual components to ensure the effective tracking of progress or regression in particular areas and to allow for effective and targeted responses.

A recent study by UNICEF Innocenti on child deprivation, multidimensional poverty and monetary poverty in 29 European countries produced findings that add fuel to the fire as to why we need child well-being measures. In ranking countries according to the degree of child deprivation the study established four main groups:

      - Nordic countries and the Netherlands 10% child deprivation or less

      - Germany, France, Spain, United Kingdom, Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Ireland,    Luxembourg, Malta and Slovenia 11-20%

      - Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Italy and Greece - approximately 25 %

      - Portugal, Bulgaria, Romania - rates higher than 25%

Results were further disaggregated into the sub groups of children with lone parents, children living in large families, children in families where the adults are not employed and/or having lower levels of education. Across all of these countries children within these groups were found to be more likely to experience deprivation and although the living standards of many countries were comparable, they had significant differences in levels of child deprivation. Additionally, even in the majority of rich countries, child deprivation levels were found to be significant.

These results are cause for concern considering the current financial and fiscal crises affecting European countries which risk worsening existing levels of child deprivation and poverty and consequently impacting on overall child well-being. Given that data used precedes the crises, the actual reality of child poverty and deprivation in the region could be much worse considering the trickledown effect of economic shocks at the state level, to households and children. See the diagram below from another UNICEF publication.

 Nevertheless, the findings of the study, through a mixture of child deprivation, multidimensional poverty and monetary poverty measures have highlighted specific areas and populations for intervention. The application of these tools to monitor and evaluate over time allow for the identification of components of child well-being and sub populations that are particularly vulnerable to external shocks, they help to build evidence of strategies which prevent impacts and to address existing issues.

Hannah Chadwick

Wikichild Consultant