War, AIDS and poverty 'rob children of their lives'

WAR, poverty and HIV/AIDS cause more than half the world's children to suffer, effectively denying them a childhood, according to a new UN report.

The United Nations Children's Fund's (Unicef) annual study showed more than one billion children are denied the healthy and protected upbringing promised by the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Researchers found one in six children are severely hungry, one in seven has no healthcare at all and nearly half of the 3.6 million people killed in war since 1990 have been children.

The State of the World's Children 2005 warns government failure to live up to the standards of the Convention causes youngsters permanent damage - and will hold back nations' development.

The study was launched at the London School of Economics yesterday, and executive director Carol Bellamy said: "Too many governments are making informed, deliberate choices that actually hurt childhood. Poverty doesn't come from nowhere; war doesn't emerge from nothing; AIDS doesn't spread by choice of its own. These are our choices.

"When half the world's children are growing up hungry and unhealthy, when schools have become targets and whole villages are being emptied by AIDS, we've failed to deliver on the promise of childhood." The report, entitled Childhood Under Threat, was compiled by working with researchers at the London School of Economics and Bristol University, and shows 400 million children have no safe water, with 500 million existing without a toilet or sanitation facilities.

It also found 640 million do not have adequate shelter; 300 million lack access to information, such as TV, radio or newspapers; and 140 million children, the majority of them girls, have never been to school.

The researchers found "poverty is not exclusive to developing countries", with a rising proportion of children in low-income households during the last decade in 11 of 15 industrialised nations. They also found the numbers of AIDS orphans has grown to 15 million worldwide, affecting every aspect of youngsters' lives, including forcing many children, especially girls, to drop out of school to care for their families.

The report's authors say improving children's lives is "a matter of choice" and call for a raft of improvements including the adoption of "a human rights-based approach to social and economic development", and socially responsible policies which keep children in mind.