Childhood challenged

To mark the 30th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the World Press Photo Foundation and UNICEF jointly present a selection of stories showing the impact of mass migration on children, awarded in the World Press Photo Contests from 2016 – 2019.

Thirty years ago, world leaders made a promise to every child to promote and protect their rights by adopting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – an international agreement on childhood. The Convention became the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. Since then, governments across the world have taken action to ensure that more children survive and develop to their full potential.

Thirty years on, child rights have not changed – they have no expiry date. But childhood has changed. The rise of digital technology, environmental changes and mass migration are creating new threats for children. For too many children, migration is not a choice but a necessity.

More than 30 million children in the world today have moved across borders.

Migration has been omnipresent in the news and is a recurrent theme in the recent World Press Photo contests. Through different perspectives, these curated stories draw attention to the physical, emotional and psychological impact of mass migration on children from various parts of the world. It highlights the importance of protecting the rights of every child, wherever they are.

Central American migrants climb the border fence between Mexico and the United States, near El Chaparral border crossing, Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, on 25 November 2018.

Attacks on the villages of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and the burning of their homes, led to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing into Bangladesh on foot or by boat. Many died in the attempt. More than half of those fleeing were children. In Bangladesh, refugees were housed in existing camps and makeshift settlements. Conditions became critical; basic services came under severe pressure and most people lacked clean water, shelter and sanitation, bringing the threat of disease.

First (left to right): Minara Hassan and her husband Ekramul lie exhausted on the ground on the Bangladesh side of the Naf River, after fleeing their home in Maungdaw, Myanmar. 2 October 2017.

Second: A Rohingya woman with a disability is carried by fleeing relatives on the Bangladesh side of the border with Myanmar. 2 October 2017.

Third: A Rohingya refugee is helped from a boat as she arrives at Shah Porir Dwip, near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. 1 October 2017.

Fourth: Rohingya refugees carry their belongings as they walk on the Bangladesh side of the Naf River after fleeing Myanmar. 2 October 2017.

Fifth: A young refugee cries as he climbs on a truck distributing aid near the Balukhali refugee camp, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. 20 September 2017.

On 10 July 2017, after months of intense fighting, the Iraqi government announced it had retaken control of Mosul from ISIS. More than one million people were newly-displaced after the military operations to retake the city began in October 2016. Families had very little food and water, and few options to escape. Large areas of the city were left in ruins, and huge numbers of civilians were caught in the crossfire as battle raged.

First (left to right): Civilians line up for aid distribution in the Mamun neighbourhood of west Mosul, Iraq. 15 March 2017.

Second: A woman in the Jidideh neighbourhood of west Mosul screams out shortly after a mortar attack killed her son. 22 March 2017.

Third: Iraqi Special Forces soldiers survey the aftermath of an attack by an ISIS suicide car bomber, who managed to reach their lines in the Andalus neighbourhood, one of the last areas to be liberated in eastern Mosul. 16 January 2017.

Fourth: An unidentified young boy, who was carried out of the last ISIS-controlled area of the Old City by a man suspected of being a militant, is washed and cared for by Iraqi Special Forces soldiers. The soldiers suspected that the man had used the boy as a human shield in order to try to escape, as he did not know the child’s name. 12 July 2017.

Fifth: Nadhira Aziz looks on after west Mosul had been retaken and Iraqi Civil Defense workers excavate the remains of her sister and niece from her house in the Old City where they were killed by an airstrike in June. She sat in her chair just meters from the site and refused to move, directing the driver of the excavator and shouting to men to retrieve items she spotted in the debris. 16 September 2017.

A girl stands outside as members of a counter-terrorism battalion of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces search homes in Gogjali, an eastern suburb of Mosul, Iraq, during an offensive to liberate the city. Gogjali was retaken in early November, and most of Eastern Mosul by the end of January 2017.

Yemen is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with more than 24 million people – some 80 per cent of the population – in need of humanitarian assistance, including more than 12 million children. 

First (left to right): A woman begs outside a grocery store in Azzan, a pivotal southern crossroads town that had seesawed back and forth between government and insurgent forces in Yemen, on 22 May 2018.

Second: Taif Fares gasps for air in the intensive-care unit at al-Sadaqa hospital, Aden, Yemen, on 21 May 2018. She had a heart disorder and required constant care. Supplies of oxygen and medicine to the hospital had been discontinued, and, on 14 May, a violent confrontation between a member of the militia controlling the hospital and a doctor had led to doctors going on strike. Taif died a few days after the photograph was taken.

Third: Wafa Ahmed Hathim, 25, lost her left leg when a mortar landed on her house in the strategically important Red Sea port of Hudaydah on 8 December – at a time when long-negotiated peace talks were taking place in Sweden. 

Fourth: A militiaman stands in a frontline position outside the besieged city of Taiz, southwestern Yemen, on 26 November 2018. Aid and supplies could be delivered to the city only along a road under the control of the Saudi coalition.

Refugee children, on their long journey to a new home, sleep where they can along the route.

First (left to right): Fara, 2, loves soccer. Her father tries to make balls for her by crumpling up anything he can find, but they don’t last long. 4 February 2015.

Second: Ahmed, 6, falls asleep in the grass after midnight. He carries his own bag on the stretches of the journey that the family covers on foot. His uncle, who has taken care of him since his father was killed in their hometown in northern Syria, says Ahmed is brave and cries only occasionally in the evenings. 28 August 2015. 

Third: Ralia, 7, and Rahaf, 13, sleep on the streets of Beirut, Lebanon. A grenade killed their mother and brother in Damascus, Syria. They are with their father, and have been sleeping outside for a year. 8 February 2015.

Fourth: Mohammed, 13, dreams of being an architect. He used to enjoy walking around Aleppo, Syria, looking at houses. Now, many of his favourite buildings have been blown to pieces. He says the strangest thing about war is that you get used to being scared. 3 March 2015.

Fifth: Lamar, from Baghdad, Iraq, sleeps on a blanket in a forest. After two attempts at crossing the sea from Turkey in a small dinghy, her family has come as far as Serbia to find the border with Hungary closed. 15 September 2015.

Sixth: Walaa, 5, in a refugee camp in Lebanon, is distressed at night because that is when attacks happened when she was at home in Aleppo, Syria. 10 February 2015.

Refugee children covered in rain capes wait in line to be registered. Most refugees who crossed into Serbia continued their journey north, towards countries of the European Union. 7 October 2015.

Najiba holds her nephew Shabir, 2, who was injured in a bomb blast that killed his sister, in Kabul, Afghanistan, in March. The bomb exploded in a relatively peaceful part of Kabul while Shabir’s mother was walking the children to school.

The ongoing conflict and rapidly deteriorating security situation across the country left more than 1,000 schools closed by the end of 2018. A generation of children have known nothing but war.

A baby is handed through a hole in a razor wire barrier to a Syrian refugee who has already managed to cross the border from Serbia into Hungary, near Röszke. 28 August 2015.

In July, Hungary began construction on a four-meter-high barrier fence along the entire length of the frontier with Serbia, to close off border crossings through all but official routes. Refugees attempted to find ways through before the fence was completed on 14 September. This group had spent four hours hiding in an apple orchard at night, dodging border police, being gassed with pepper spray, and trying to find a way across.

The bodies of Rohingya refugees are laid out after the boat in which they were attempting to flee Myanmar capsized about eight kilometres off Inani Beach, near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Around 100 people were on the boat before it capsized. There were 17 survivors.

An 11-year-old girl (left) from Nigeria, comforts her younger brother aboard a rescue boat after they had been picked up from an overcrowded dinghy in the Mediterranean Sea, en route to Italy, about 23 kilometers north of Sabratha, Libya, on 28 July 2016. Their mother had died in Libya, after crossing the Sahara.  

Djeneta (right) has been bedridden and unresponsive for two-and-a-half years, and her sister Ibadeta for more than six months, with uppgivenhetssyndrom (resignation syndrome), in Horndal, Sweden. Resignation syndrome is a condition believed to exist only amongst refugees in Sweden. The causes are unclear, but trauma, stress and depression are thought to be contributors.

Children play in the Tapajós River, home to the Munduruku people, in the Brazilian Amazon. 10 February 2015. The Munduruku is one of the largest ethnic groups in Brazil and for at least three centuries its people have lived along the Tapajós River.

The Tapajós is one of the last great Amazonian rivers without a dam, but construction plans threaten the Munduruku's way of life.