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Panel 3 - Children's risks in societies on the edge
Instability at century's end
Childhood is especially perishable in war. In the past 10 years, in much of the developing world, children have endured losses far out of proportion to their years and strength, of family and community members, of time to grow and learn, of the sense of hope.
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In one of the most horrific human cataclysms, an estimated quarter of a million children in Rwanda were slaughtered in 1994 in the genocide that took, by some accounts, a million lives over the course of weeks. Scores of thousands more children were tortured, some by their schoolteachers, some in their churches, others while they lay in hospital beds. Hundreds of thousands more watched in agony and fear as their parents and families and friends were stalked and massacred by people they had known and trusted for years.
Landmines, too many to count, waste lives and limbs. Girls and women are raped as a weapon of war; in Sierra Leone, amputations of arms and legs were a common horrendous alternative to outright massacre. Children have been coerced or lured into armed conflicts in more than 30 countries in recent years.
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An ethnic Albanian adolescent in Pristina, who lost both legs in a landmine accident after the end of the bombing in Yugoslavia, in tears while reading a letter from her brother.
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In 11 other countries in the same period, the blunt instrument of economic sanctions has taken a toll easy to miss without exploding shells or body counts. In Iraq, under sanctions since 1990, the infant mortality rate in the southern and central parts of the country, where over 85 per cent of the people live, has more than doubled since 1989. Under-five mortality rates are also more than twice what they were before sanctions were imposed.
Even in the absence of war, the lives and futures of children in a number of countries are endangered by political and economic crises. Some 150 million children in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union suffered during the region's precipitous decline in the early 1990s. Child mortality rates soared and diseases once conquered - diphtheria, polio, cholera, tuberculosis - returned.
In the East Asia and Pacific region, the economic meltdown of the late 1990s has begun to turn around for international investors and financial markets, but its effects on children will be of longer consequence.
These facts of children's lives can be so overwhelming as to paralyse anyone who might seek to make conditions better for them. That ways are found in such a world to help protect the rights of children and women - education and counselling are two - is testament to the power of the human spirit.
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Healing Games
Living through chaos can scar children's psyches and strangle their development, making programmes to address their psychological needs as necessary as those to bandage their physical wounds.
One such programme is 'The Return of Happiness', which was first developed in Mozambique during the 1992 civil war and engages traumatized children through music, art and play. Adaptable in various situations, it has been used in Ecuador with the children of soldiers, in Colombia after the 1998 earthquake and in Nicaragua following Hurricane Mitch.
That storm killed thousands in floods and mudslides. It wiped out roads, farmlands, water and sanitary infrastructures, health and educational institutions and left families destitute and homeless in Central America. But the ruins it left were the result of generations of chronic poverty, civil strife and social exclusion in the region, as much as they were the effects of that particular storm.
In Nicaragua, where three quarters of the people were already living in poverty and the nation was still healing from its earlier civil war, the rural poor were most affected. When the storm finally subsided, more than 100 health centres, as well as 512 schools and 17 per cent of all homes, had been partially or completely destroyed. Of the hardest hit, 45 per cent were children under the age of 14.
An estimated 10 per cent of children in the most affected communities suffered serious emotional trauma. Many saw family members carried off by flood waters or buried in landslides, others were separated from their families or made homeless.
Addressing their mental health needs became a priority for relief workers, who saw children traumatized by loss and languishing in refugee camps with no schooling and nothing to do. Like children affected by war, they experienced insomnia, nightmares, headaches, fear and dependent behaviour. With food shortages and the stress of family separation, violence among families increased in the camps.
Less than three weeks after the hurricane, in a refugee camp in the municipality of Polsotega, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education, with support from UNICEF, launched 'The Return of Happiness' programme, which uses structured activities, including sack races, singing, puppetry, art and a trust-building exercise called 'l Lazarillo', in which children lead each other with their eyes closed. The goals were twofold: to entertain the children while preparing them for the new school year and to identify those who were withdrawn and in need of follow-up care from psychologists. As of June 1999, more than 30,000 children had been reached in villages and camps in affected areas.
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