The Issue
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© UNICEF/ceecis/PEPoster |
A PROTECTIVE ENVIRONMENT FOR ALL CHILDREN
Hundreds of thousands of children in CEE/CIS suffer exploitation, abuse, violence and neglect. Almost 1.2 million children are deprived of parental care – about half of them growing up in institutions, isolated from family and community and at risk of abuse. Children are trafficked abroad, lured into the commercial sex industry, and work as labourers in the streets or fields or as domestic servants. Many are uprooted from their homes by war. More than two million people, most of them women and children, are refugees or internally displaced. Those born to HIV positive mothers are often abandoned to grow up in hospitals.
The results of failing to create an environment that protects all children are grim. At worst, they die. More often, their childhood fails to prepare them for adult life. Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, governments are obliged to protect all children and are accountable for failure to do so. But a gulf remains between the standard and its implementation. A society that fails to protect children denies them the chance to reach their potential and undermines its own chance to develop.
