Governments choose to hurt children

[The Straight Story]

Governments choose to hurt children


Tom Fox, NCR publisher

More than half the world's children are being deprived of their mental and physical health because governments have chosen policies that intensify the impact of poverty, war and HIV/AIDS, according to a report issued last week by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

"Too many governments are making informed, deliberate choices that actually hurt childhood. Poverty doesn't come from nowhere; war doesn't emerge from nothing, AIDS doesn't spread by choice of its own. These are our choices," UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said in London as she launched the State of the World's Children 2005: Childhood under Threat.

"When half the world's children are growing up hungry and unhealthy, when schools have become targets and whole villages are being emptied by AIDS, we've failed to deliver on the promise of childhood."
Carol Bellamy,
UNICEF Executive Director
The new UNICEF report reveals that the majority of the world's 2.2 billion children are living in extreme conditions that effectively deny them a childhood and hinder the development of nations.

The report stresses that the failure of governments to live up to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, the world's most widely adopted human rights treaty, is causing permanent damage to children and in turn blocks progress toward human rights and economic advancement.

http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/todaystake/

[villager]

1. "grown ups" -- I use the term very loosely

--are, taken as a whole, insane. Kids get on to this as they grow up, eventually, alas, becoming inmates in the "grown up" asylum themselves...