Every five minutes, a child in the world dies from violence.
More than 10,000 children have been killed in three years and seven months of civil war in Syria. This summer in Gaza, Israeli airstrikes killed 490 Palestinian children and wounded 3,000 others. Mexican drug cartels have targeted children and recruited young people in a drug war that's killed 100,000 people over nearly a decade.
It's not just violence from war and conflict that plagues the world's children. It's trafficking, rape, bullying, domestic abuse, violent crime, and more — a seemingly endless catalogue of ways for children to suffer. Violence disproportionately affects children born into marginalized, impoverished communities, but children around the world — of every race, religion, class, and nation — face violence in their daily lives.
That's why UNICEF UK has just released a new report — and a video designed to spread word of the report — highlighting what it calls an "epidemic" of violence against children and calling on governments to take individual and collective action. One of UNICEF's key recommendations is that curbing violence against children be included in a new set of development goals that will be adopted after the expiration of the United Nations' Millenium Development Goals in 2015. That really shouldn't need to be debated.
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