Millions of children worldwide suffer abuse

By RAVI NESSMAN

updated 7:21 p.m. ET Nov. 20, 2009

NEW DELHI - Arun Kumar was born to disabled parents, beaten by his grandparents, ran away from home, got a job in a garment factory and had all his savings stolen by the police.

He was only 11.

Today, at 13, he shares a cramped, dingy shelter with 63 other runaways and former street kids in New Delhi.

He is one of the lucky ones.

Twenty years after the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, multitudes of children across the globe are still suffering from poverty, abuse and disease.

Each year, 4 million babies die before they are a month old, 150 million children are engaged in child labor, more than 500 million have been affected by violence and 51 million have fallen so far through the cracks they have not even had their births registered, according to the United Nations.

In China, infant mortality rates are five times higher in rural areas than in the wealthier cities. In Mexico, more than a million children under the age of 14 are working.

The U.N. convention, adopted Nov. 20, 1989 and ratified by every country except the United States and Somalia, calls on nations to protect children from abuse and sexual exploitation, reduce child mortality and give children access to health care and education.

Somalia's transitional government announced Friday it intends to become a party to the convention. Rozanne Chorlton, UNICEF representative to the war-torn Horn of Africa nation, said the government's commitment comes at a crucial time when "no child in central south Somalia has had the experience of living in peace."

Some successes, but fewer than hoped
President Bill Clinton's administration signed the convention but never submitted it to the U.S. Senate for ratification because of claims that it infringed on the rights of parents and was inconsistent with state and local laws. But President Barack Obama says he wants to try again for ratification.

There have been successes. Fewer young children are dying or underfed, more are attending school and getting vaccinated and dozens of countries have adopted laws recognizing child rights.

In Russia, an epidemic of homeless children in the 1990s was beaten back by a concerted government effort. In South Africa, some children infected with HIV are getting lifesaving medicines that were out of reach only a few years ago.

The convention "has had positive impacts across the world, but we need to say it hasn't had as much impact as we'd have hoped," said Jennifer Grant, a child rights specialist with Save the Children in London. "Children are not a political priority for governments."

At the U.N.'s official commemoration of the 20th anniversary, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told more than 300 diplomats, activists and young people at U.N. headquarters in New York that realizing the rights in the convention "remains a huge challenge."

"Children must be at the heart of our thinking on climate change, on the food crisis and on the other challenges we are addressing on a daily basis," he said.

In her travels, UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman said she has spoken to girls in eastern Congo who have been raped, to boys who were abandoned by their families as witches in central Africa, and to a girl forced into marriage at the age of 10 to a man over 30.

She urged people to remember "the unspeakable violations of rights that occur almost daily to the most innocent of innocents, children."

'I stand for the beggars'
Mayra Avellar, 18, who lives in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, was on hand to address the crowd.

"I stand for the beggars, I stand for the 8-years-old boy who died at 8 a.m. when he was going to the bakery, I stand for those who die without even knowing why," she said.

Some of the worst abuses play out every day on the dusty streets of India, where government and aid groups' efforts to help children are overwhelmed by the staggering poverty and the dislocation of millions of rural villagers who flood the cities in search of jobs.

Two million children under 5 die every year, more than 20 million are not in primary school and child marriage is routine in India. Children, some as young as 3 and clutching baby siblings, work the traffic-clogged streets begging for money. Others are constantly on the move, living on the construction sites where their parents work, with no access to education.

Arun was born in the northern Indian province of Himachal Pradesh to parents who cannot hear or speak, and grew up in his grandparents' crowded house. He was so ignored his family thought he had inherited his parents' disability, until at age 7 his grandfather sat down with Arun and taught him to speak.

As he grew older, Arun, a short, slight boy, began skipping school and fighting with his younger cousins, who teased him about his parents and his own late development. His grandparents started abusing him and one Sunday — after he was beaten for losing a family goat when he went off to play — he took 2,000 rupees (about $40) he had collected over nearly three years and fled to Delhi.

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