The most ratified treaty in the world turns 20 years old today. On November 20 1989, the Convention on the Rights of Child entered into force. Today only two countries remain outside the treaty: Somalia...and the United States. (Somalia is without a functioning government. The United States is without a functioning Senate.) To mark the anniversary, UNICEF released a report today, "State of the World's Children, 2009" and UNICEF director Ann Venemen
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. UNICEF is celebrating accordingly with a series of PSAs like the one above (here's one with Ewan McGregor and one with Claudia Schiffer). To date every country in the world has ratified the agreement, except the United States and, um, Somalia (which has no functioning government.) From CNN: The young girl whispered in a hushed tone. She looked down as she spoke, only glancing up from her dark round eyes every now and then. She wanted to tell more, but she was too ashamed. She was just 9 years old when, she says, Congolese soldiers gang-raped her on her way to school. ... The United Nations estimates 200,000 women and girls have been raped in Congo over the last 12 years, when war broke out with Rwanda and Uganda backing Congolese rebels seeking to oust then-Congo President Laurent Kabila. Rape became a weapon of war, aid groups say. "It is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman or girl," says Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch who has spent the last 10 years focusing on Congo. "These are often soldiers and combatants deliberately targeting women and raping them as a strategy of war, either to punish a community, to terrorize a community or to humiliate them." Most times, the women are raped by at least two perpetrators. "Sometimes, that is done in front of the family, in front of the children," Van Woudenberg says. She sighs, "What causes men to rape -- I wish I had an answer to that." I'm glad that my former boss, Hillary Clinton, is there speaking out forcefully about this issue. We need to draw more attention to it. More from my Dispatch co-blogger, Alanna. Don't get me wrong, I am wholly supportive of this step, mostly because of the consensus required to enact it: The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to name and shame countries and insurgents groups engaged in conflicts that lead to children being killed, maimed and raped. The council resolution will expand a U.N. list that in March identified more than 60 governments and armed groups that recruit child soldiers. But, first, it's already pretty clear which countries or groups are responsible for the deaths and rapes of children, isn't it? Second, naming and shaming alone obviously won't suffice. Anyone who can kill innocent children is likely lacking in the moral compunction department, so "shame" would seem to be out of their range of emotional responses to this crime. That said, this is an impressive and positive step for the Security Council to take unanimously. The tougher part, of course, will be following the naming and shaming with concrete and effective action. From UNICEF: Starting today, MTV audiences around the world will see a new music video that aims to raise awareness about sex trafficking. Featuring the rock band The Killers, the video is an exclusive collaboration between UNICEF, MTV EXIT (End Exploitation and Trafficking) and the US Agency for International Development. The track, Goodnight, Travel Well, is from the album Day & Age. The video is the second in a series of music video collaborations that highlight the danger and impact of human trafficking. The series launched last year with an award-winning film - produced by MTV EXIT that featured the Radiohead single All I Need. This is deeply disturbing: A top Taliban leader in Pakistan is buying and selling children for suicide bombings, Pakistani and U.S. officials said. Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud has been increasingly using the children in attacks, the officials said. A video released by Pakistan's military shows the children training for the task. In the video of a training camp, children can be seen killing and going through exercises. Mehsud has been selling the children, once trained, to other Taliban officials for $6,000 to $12,000, Pakistani military officials said. It's worth noting that with all this triumphant talk about the Twitter revolution in Iran - especially when it's about a lesser-of-two-evils candidate - we can't summon a fraction of the energy and passion to save abused, raped and battered women across the globe. Nor can we muster the same attention and will to deal with the plight of children who are dying of hunger, deprived of the bare necessities of life. Here are the brutal facts: * There are four million new hungry people every week, over a billion total. Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes - one child every five seconds. * Millions of women and girls (our mothers, sisters and daughters) endure one or more of the following: intimate partner violence; sexual abuse by non-intimate partners; trafficking, forced prostitution, exploitation, debt bondage, sex selective abortion, female infanticide, and rape. Perhaps it's boiling frog syndrome, the fact that global hunger and women's rights are ongoing tragedies/travesties without sudden spikes of interest. Or perhaps it's the futility of confronting these intractable issues, a sense that we're powerless to change such pervasive problems. That's not to say that there aren't many courageous and dedicated people working to alleviate hunger and protect women's rights. There are. But where is the massive outrage, the worldwide focus, the grainy images, the Twitter-mania, the color-coded avatars? Most importantly, where is the urgency, the immediacy? Clearly, something is happening in Iran with technology that signals a new era in global activism. This is the first period in human history when so many individuals, friends and strangers, can speak to one another simultaneously, on equal footing; there's never been a time when ten million people could converse at once, on the same topic, using the same platform. That also means they can shout and raise the alarm about injustice together. And as we're seeing with CNN, those millions of impassioned people can pressure the media to get on board, further increasing the level of attention. So why isn't this happening for oppressed and abused women or hungry and starving children, when their aggregate pain and suffering is far greater and the threat to them more severe than to the (brave) Iranian demonstrators? Where's the intense coverage, the excitement over the potential of Twitter and Facebook to alter the course of history? I'm not calling for less focus on Iran, but more, much more, on the mortal threat so many women and children face. I'll conclude with a clip from Channel 4 News in the UK, where I was asked to comment on Gordon Brown's statement that because of the Internet, there will be no more Rwandas. My answer: what about Darfur? We think we know what a child soldier looks like: the AK-toting, drugged-out boy "with anger burning in his eyes." But that isn't necessarily the case. To dispel the myths about child soldiering, read the whole piece. This is what hit me hardest: Sending children home via disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs is another favorite method of post-conflict planners. These programs are meant to get children and adolescents out of armies and back where they belong -- in schools or in jobs. But here again, results are mixed. Many organizers make the mistake of excluding girls from their programs. They often fail to understand the local economy and therefore train children for the wrong professions. In Liberia, for example, too many ex-combatants were educated as carpenters and hairdressers. Nor do the programs target the roots of intergenerational violence that will long outlast the active fighting. DDR initiatives are often too short term to do much more than superficial training, as even officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development will admit. [emphasis mine] Forgive the crude example, then, but Voldemort himself could renounce evil and free his child Death Eaters, but if the DDR process isn't done right, or followed up with rigorous attention to development concerns, then they will still not be able to return to society, or, worse, will be prone to returning to combat. DDR is one of the hardest of peacekeepers' tasks: convincing former partisans and killers to give up their arms, rejoin the nation they were fighting against, and live amongst their former enemies. With children who have been traumatized in myriad ways, abused and exploited, raised on a diet of economic, sexual, and military conscription, the process is even harder. And it's discouraging to think that it may not be working that well. UNICEF TV has this report on the agency's effort to cope with the rapidly unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Pakistan.