1. Globally, 1 billion children aged 2–17 years experienced physical, sexual, emotional or multiple types of violence.
2. About one billion children live in countries and territories affected by armed conflict.
3. In the wars of the last decade, more children were killed than soldiers.
4. About 6 million children have been seriously injured or permanently disabled
5. Countless others have been forced to witness or even to take part in horrifying acts of violence.
6. About 10 million are psychologically traumatized.
7. 20 million have been forced to flee their homes.
8. Millions were held in a situation, in which they thought they were going to die.
9. Today, about 150 million children worldwide are orphans. It is estimated that 13 million of them have lost both parents.
10. About 124 million children and adolescents do not attend school, and 2 out of 5 leave primary school without learning how to read, write or do basic arithmetic.
11. Almost half a billion children around the world are living on less than $1.90 per day.

Wars and Violent Conflicts

In recent decades, the proportion of civilian casualties during wars and armed conflicts has increased dramatically and is now estimated to stand at more than 90%. About half of the victims are children.
This is partly a result of the fast military technology elaborateness. Aerial bombardment has extended the potential battle zone to entire national territories. Modern wars show a massive increase in indiscriminate killings.

Another cause of the rising death toll of civilians is that most contemporary conflicts are not between states, but within states. Rather than being planned and organized battles between contending armies, these are much more complex affairs - struggles between the military and civilians, or between contending groups of armed civilians. They are as likely to be fought in villages and suburban streets as anywhere else. The "enemy" is all around, and distinctions between combatant and non-combatant disappear in the suspicions and confusions of daily strife.

Families and children are not just being caught in the crossfire, they are the targets. This is because many contemporary struggles are between different ethnic groups in the same country. When ethnic loyalties prevail, the escalation from ethnic superiority, to ethnic cleansing, to genocide is inevitable. Killing adults is then not enough, future generations of the enemy, their children, must also be killed.

Not only large numbers of children are killed and injured but countless others grow up deprived of their material and emotional needs, including very fundamental structures of social and cultural life. The entire fabric of their societies, their homes, schools, health systems and religious institutions are torn to pieces.

Warfare Consequences

All tactics are employed during wars, from systematic rape, to scorched earth tactics such as destroying crops, poisoning wells and spreading diseases, to ethnic cleansing and genocide.

When food supplies run short, it is children who suffer the most, since their growing bodies need steady supplies of essential nutrients. When water supplies are contaminated, children have the least resistance to the dangers of diseases.

Millions of children have died as a result of malnutrition and disease caused by warfare. Since 1990, the most commonly reported causes of death among refugees and internally displaced people have been diarrhoeal diseases, acute respiratory infections, measles and other common preventable infectious diseases. In poor countries where children are already vulnerable to malnutrition and disease, the situation is of course much worse.

Landmines

There are about 110 million anti-personnel mines in at least 108 countries around the world, killing or injuring about 70 people a day. One every 20 minutes.

Naturally curious, children are likely to pick up strange objects such as the infamous toy-like 'butterfly' mine which was designed "especially" for children. Sometimes a doll is attached to the mine to attract children to lift it.

Every 90 minutes a mine explodes on a child.

Child Soldiers

In dozens of countries around the world, children have become direct participants in war. Denied a childhood and often subjected to horrific violence, around 300,000 children are serving as soldiers in current armed conflicts. These young combatants participate in all aspects of contemporary warfare. They wield AK-47s and M-16s on the front lines of combat, serve as human mine detectors, participate in suicide missions, carry supplies, and act as spies, messengers or lookouts.

Child soldiers are often used because they are obedient and cheap, do not question orders, easier to manipulate and most importantly they are fearless, which leads them to the front line. They are often fed drugs and alcohol, and then forced to witness, and commit horrifying atrocities.
Many are abducted or recruited by force, and often compelled to follow orders under threat of death. Others join armed groups out of desperation.
As society breaks down during conflict, leaving children with no access to school, driving them from their homes or separating them from family members, many children perceive armed groups as their best chance for survival. Others seek escape from poverty or join military forces to avenge the death of family members.

Child soldiers often start out doing support functions. Boys serve as porters or as messengers. Girls may prepare food or attend to the wounded and are also forced to provide sexual services or are forcibly married to other soldiers. However, both boys and girls are soon forced into the battlefield where their youth and inexperience leave them extremely vulnerable. Often they are unaware of the real dangers they are facing, they may even forget to take cover.

Refugees

Each year, millions of humans are forced to flee their homes due to armed conflicts, widespread violent situations, persecutions, and natural catastrophes. More than half of them are children.

Many of the child refugees are internally displaced, meaning they didn’t cross international borders but are displaced within the borders of their own nation.

Child refugees of both kinds are at the highest danger of sexual exploitation, abuse and violence, forced labor, recruitment to armed forces, adoption in irregular conditions, lack of access to education, and discrimination within their communities.

Child Trafficking

Estimations are that every day 3,000 children are victims of child trafficking. The profits from human trafficking, particularly that of women and children, reaches up to 10 billion US dollars a year according to estimates made by the International Organization for Migration.

Conditioned to obey through physical and psychological violence, children are often kept in foreign places. Linguistic and geographic isolation strengthens the grip that traffickers have on their victims who are unable to escape.

Children are sold for the purposes of sexual exploitation, begging, or for forced marriages. They risk themselves in construction work, working in factories, or are employed as domestic servants. Children are also given for a substantial sum of money to parents waiting to adopt. And in recent years, to escape their living conditions, more and more children are ready to sell one of their kidneys for money.
The sale of organs represents between 5% and 10% of kidney transplants performed in the world each year.

Sexual Abuse of Children

It is estimated that there are more than 3 million children forced into prostitution networks. Being increasingly lucrative, this phenomenon is becoming ever more widespread.
These children work on the streets or in brothels, clubs, massage parlors, bars, hotels, and restaurants.

Sexual exploiters take advantage of children who are less able to defend themselves.

The main cause of child prostitution is poverty. Parents often sell their children to pimps because they can’t meet the needs of their family. Poverty also causes child abandonment which often leads to child prostitution as abandoned children are extremely vulnerable and so are the main targets of exploiters.

On a physical level, the damage to children includes vaginal tearing, physical after-effects of torture, pain, infection, or unwanted pregnancy.
On the psychological level, the damage to children include depression, aggressiveness, anger, trouble sleeping, loss of self-confidence, mistrust or hatred towards adults.

Child Sex Tourism

Child Sex Tourism is the sexual exploitation of children by humans who travel from one place to another to engage in sexual acts with children.
Often, they travel from a richer country to one that is less developed, but child sex tourists may also be travellers from within their own country 1 or region.
Child Sex Tourism exploits an estimated 2 million children worldwide every year.
Child Sex Tourism is especially prevalent in Asia, and Central and South America.
While the crisis is more pronounced in the aforementioned regions, tourists from nearly every country in the world fuel the sex industry and the demand for young children.
Today, the number of children who are victims of sex tourism continues to rise, in large part, due to the rapid globalization of trade and the growth of the tourism industry.
Additionally, inter-linked social and technological factors such as lack of education, discrimination against girl-children, widespread poverty, poor law enforcement, corruption, and advances in information sharing through the internet have exacerbated the problem.
Not a second goes by without a child being raped, tortured or abused somewhere in the world.

The War at Home

There is no such thing as "peacetime" in this world. No truce agreement can stop domestic violence. In Africa, for example, despite the notoriously poor statistics, it has been estimated that up to 60% of marital relationships involve abuse. This abuse includes rape and sexual assault.
Children, very often, become the silent victims. They might be victimized directly or indirectly, while witnessing the horror of a parent being repeatedly abused and sometimes killed in front of them. In these abuse cases, children often lose both parents, either when both are being killed, or when the father is being imprisoned.
Since the killing occurred within the context of the family, all routines familiar to the children are disrupted.
They then face being uprooted from their home, familiar environment and relationships. They may be parted from their sisters and brothers and suffer multiple losses of their parents, home, school, friends and valuables.
These children are often placed in foster care, where in some cases, they are being abused as well. Their last chance for sanctuary, their last hope to ever trust someone again, is gone.

Domestic Sexual Abuse

Approximately 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men report a history of some form of childhood sexual abuse. Most commonly, the offender is someone known to the child. In many cases the offender is a family member.

Children who are sexually abused display signs of fear, anxiety, and concentration problems consistent with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Sexually abused children are reported to have more behavioral problems in comparison to non abused children, and specifically have been found to display more sexual behavior problem.

The severest form of sexual assault is rape.
The effects on children are devastating. As a result of rape, the children have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder:
Fear that the trauma would happen again
Intrusive Thoughts About the Rape
Physical reactions such as Headaches and Stomachaches
Recurring Anger
Hyperactivity
Difficulty Establishing and Maintaining Friendships
Fear and Avoidance of Men
Uncharacteristic oppositional, aggressive and rebellious behavior
Decline in School performance
Depression
Mood swings Disturbed appetite
Inability to concentrate
Chronic and excessive fear and anxiety
Nightmares

A Global Phenomenon

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child calls the family "the natural environment for growth and well-being", but for many children home is not heaven but hell.
The place where they should be the safest – is for many the most dangerous of all, yet it is the place where violence is least visible.

Across 96 countries, about 1 billion children aged 2–17 years experienced physical, sexual, emotional or multiple types of violence.
One in five women and one in 13 men report having been sexually abused as a child.
90% of child sexual abuse victims know the perpetrator in some way. 68% are abused by a family member.
Worldwide, approximately 300 million (3 in 4) children aged 2 to 4 experience violent discipline by their "caregivers" on a regular basis.
1 in 4 children under age 5 live with a mother who is a victim of intimate partner violence.

As opposed to common assumption, children in western countries are not at all spared from abuse. According to the World Health Organization’s European report on child maltreatment, there is a ten-fold difference between official data of child maltreatment and those reported in surveys, revealing staggering statistics regarding the prevalence of child maltreatment in Europe.
13.4% of the girls and 5.7% boys are sexually abused. 22.9% of both sexes are physically abused. Almost a third of the children are emotionally abused. More than 16% are physically neglected and 18.4% are emotionally neglected.

About 30% of abused and neglected children will later abuse their own children, continuing the horrible cycle of abuse.

Every day, many children around the world are exploited, hit, kicked, threatened, ridiculed and isolated.
If an adult was subjected to any of these actions it would have been a criminal assault. But children are the property of parents so violence is absolutely acceptable.
Children are raised in a violent environment by violent parents, in a violent world.
To some extent every child is exposed to violence on a daily basis. Violence is so common in our world that much of it is considered normal.
With such terrifying amounts of violence that humans inflict on children, their own species continuation, and in so many cases to their own children, their own flesh and blood, it leaves no room for hope for anybody else.
The fact that even the lives of many of the children of the most privileged species on earth are horrible says something very depressing about this hellish world