Wars, climate change, migration, sexual assault, cyberharassment, forced marriages, mental illnesses and suicides: “unprecedented” violence in recent history is affecting hundreds of millions of children, protests in an interview with AFP the UN envoy on the matter, Najat Maalla M’jid.
This 65-year-old Moroccan diplomat and pediatrician has been the special representative of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres since 2019 for the fight against violence against children.
She will present a damning report to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday concluding that the violence suffered by the world’s children is of an “unprecedented scale.”
Also on Thursday, UNICEF will unveil “first estimates on sexual violence in childhood” which “reveal an alarming scale and devastating consequences for children” with “more than 370 million girls and women alive today – or one in eight – [qui] were raped or sexually assaulted before the age of 18.
“The world is not doing very well [avec] many crises”, summarizes from her New York office Najat Maalla M’jid, who nevertheless hopes that this “key moment” in world history will make it possible to “promote a political program whose men [et les femmes] policies will take into account.
“Conflicts, climate crisis, food insecurity, huge movements of children and more and more criminal activities, human trafficking, all crime facilitated by technology,” says this medical graduate from the Universities of Bordeaux and from Rabat, holder of a master’s degree in human rights obtained in Switzerland, and who was also UN special rapporteur on child trafficking, prostitution and child pornography.
This diplomat and politician adds to this dark picture “the COVID pandemic and the mental health problems” that it has caused among young people.
“Children pay a very heavy price,” she says.
Devastating photo
In fact, the global picture revealed in his report is devastating.
More than 450 million children were living in conflict zones at the end of 2022.
At the end of April this year, 40% of the world’s 120 million displaced people were minors. 333 million children live in extreme poverty and more than a billion are at high risk of being affected by climate change which acts as a “risk multiplier”.
Child labor affects 160 million and 640 million girls and women were forced into marriage during childhood, the report said.
And, according to UNICEF, “if we include “non-contact” forms of sexual violence such as verbal or online attacks, the number of girls and women affected rises to 650 million worldwide. , or one in five.
One in three students aged 13 to 15 are victims of bullying while 250 million are outside the school system.
A suicide every 11 minutes
Suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among young people aged 15 to 19. Every year, nearly 46,000 young people aged ten to 19 kill themselves at the rate of one every eleven minutes.
“Can we blame a child for being born in a country at war like Haiti, Sudan or Gaza, for having to flee, for not knowing what the future will hold?” storms the UN official who fears that “violence will become something normal” in an interconnected world and where “it will be impossible to stop the mobility of people”.
However, Najat Maalla M’jid remains optimistic: “it is possible to put an end to violence against children”, because this has an “economic” interest.
“Violence against children has a lasting impact on their mental health, their education, their performance and, later, their productivity,” explains the doctor.
She therefore recommends investing massively, emphasizing that, in certain countries, the cost of violence against children represents “11% of GDP” and sometimes “five to six times the budget of the Ministry of Health”.
