Today, December 28, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, ordered massacred by King Herod in his attempt to kill the Infant Jesus.
“Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under...Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping, loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.” (Matthew 2:16-18)
One account notes about 20,000 boys, two years old and below, massacred that day more than 2,000 years ago.
How are our children today? What is the state of the world’s children at present?
Is their plight much better than the massacred innocents thousands of years back?
In February 2023, the United Nations Population Fund reported about 1.9885 billion children throughout the world. Of these, about 160 million children were reported to be engaged in child labor, in jobs that deprive them of their childhood protections and rights, interfere with schooling, or harm their mental, physical, or social development. Nearly half of them — 79 million children — work under hazardous conditions.
While there is agreement that “every child has the right to health, education, protection, and every society has a stake in expanding children’s opportunities in life,” sadly, “around the world, millions of children are denied a fair chance for no reason other than the country, gender, religion or circumstances into which they are born.”
Poverty continues to extremely, disproportionately affect children. One out of six children lives in extreme poverty, on less than US$1.90 a day. Early deprivations of food, nutrition, health care leave lasting imprints on millions of children, with more children now who are stunted than the reported 149 million in 2019.
Millions of children are not enrolled in pre-primary education, “missing a critical investment opportunity and suffering deep inequalities from the start.” Including millions of our own Filipino children, many “leave primary school without achieving minimum proficiency levels in reading, mathematics.”
Armed conflicts/wars continue to harm children, with thousands recruited and used by armed forces/groups.
In 2019 data, 1.6 billion children (69%) were reported living in a conflict-affected country, and approximately 426 million children (over one in six) were living in a conflict zone “with millions unaccompanied or separated from their families and are at a high risk of grave violations in and around camps, and other refugee areas.”
Although the Convention on the Rights of the Child is clear about protecting children from violence, still, about one billion children have been reported to experience some form of emotional, physical, and sexual violence every year.
Every seven minutes, one child dies from violence which sadly, knows no boundaries of culture, class or education and which takes place in institutions, schools, and even at home.
Despite laudable initiatives, more need to be done to protect our children to reduce “preventable child deaths, getting more children into schools, reducing extreme poverty, and ensuring more people have access to safe water, nutritious food, addressing inequalities, promoting inclusive economic growth, protecting children from violence, and combating climate change.
Urgent action is needed to prevent millions of children from dying even before they are 5 years old between now and 2030, especially for children in sub-Saharan Africa where children are 16 times more likely to die before their fifth birthday; where 9 out of 10 children are living in extreme poverty; where more than half of the 60 million primary school-aged children will be out of school.
Girls need special protection as well vs state, cultural policies of female infanticide, genital mutilation, or early child marriages.
“These vast inequities/dangers do more than violate the rights and imperil the futures of individual children. They perpetuate intergenerational cycles of disadvantage and inequality that undermine the stability of societies and even the security of nations everywhere. “