Giving Compass' Take:

• Save the Children breaks down the ways in which conflicts impact children around the world and how intervening on behalf of children can improve the world. 

• Are you in a position to use this information to guide your giving on behalf of children? 

• Learn how conflict and climate change are leaving people hungry. 

Right now, across the world, millions of children are caught up in conflicts they played no part in creating. Often their rights are violated with total impunity.

New evidence presented by Save the Children is damning:
  • 420 million children – nearly one-fifth of children worldwide – are living in a conflict zone; a rise of nearly 30 million children from 2016.
  • The number of children living in conflict zones has doubled since the end of the cold war.
  • 142 million children are living in high-intensity conflict-zones; that is, in conflict zones with more than 1,000 battle-related deaths in a year.
  • New analysis from Save the Children shows that the numbers of ‘grave violations’ of children’s rights in conflict reported and verified by the United Nations have almost tripled since 2010.
  • Hundreds of thousands of children are dying every year as a result of indirect effects of conflict – including malnutrition, disease and the breakdown of healthcare, water, and sanitation.

The protection of children in conflict – and with it the realization of the promises made in the declarations, conventions, and statutes of the 20th century – is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century.

The nature of conflict – and its impact on children – is evolving. Intra-state conflict is increasing, as are the numbers of armed actors involved. The world is witnessing deliberate campaigns of violence against civilians, including the targeting of schools, the abduction, and enslavement of girls, and deliberate starvation.

Armed conflicts are more protracted; for instance, the most prominent conflict in recent times – the war in Syria – has lasted longer than the second world war. The longer a conflict lasts the greater the indirect harm caused as essential services cease to function. And in many protracted situations the lines between ‘conflict’ and ‘peace’ have become blurred.

Conflict is also increasingly urban; in Mosul and Mogadishu, for example, children, their homes and their schools are on the front line, vulnerable to indiscriminate attack. In today’s armed conflicts, there is often no longer a clearly demarcated battlefield: children’s homes and schools are the battlefield.

Children on the frontline

Increasingly, the brunt of armed violence and warfare is being borne by children. Children suffer in conflict in different ways to adults, partly because they are physically weaker and also because they have so much at stake – their physical, mental and psychosocial development are heavily dependent on the conditions they experience as children.

Conflict affects children differently depending on a number of personal characteristics – significantly gender and age, but also disability status, ethnicity, religion and whether they live in rural or urban locations. The harm that is done to children in armed conflict is not only often more severe than that done to adults, it has longer lasting implications – for children themselves and for their societies. Children suffer in conflict in three broad ways:

  1. They may be deliberately targeted. The commission of atrocities against children is an exceptionally powerful way of terrorising a population – and, hence, a preferred military tactic for armed forces and groups in many of today’s conflicts. Children are also often targeted because they may be easily manipulated and exploited, for instance, as soldiers or suicide bombers. Schools become targets for tactical reasons – for example, as a recruiting ground or because they are being used for military purposes.
  2. Children suffer as a result of indiscriminate or disproportionate military action. For example, they may be killed or injured by landmines or the use of explosive weapons with wide-area effect in populated areas.
  3. Children suffer on a huge scale from the indirect consequences of conflict. These include displacement; the breakdown of markets and essential public services, such as healthcare, water and sanitation; and pervasive insecurity. While indirect effects and direct violations are both part of the same continuum of harm inflicted on children by modern conflict, these indirect consequences of conflict affect and kill many more children. More still miss out on school and the chance of a better future.