IT is painful, destressing and heart-rending. At no time is this more apparent than when the United Nations provides its statistics on child trauma and mortality worldwide.

Released last Monday, the UN report on Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC) outlines several dangers, including military coups, conflict escalation and violations of international law. It also provides details of the awful impact that armed conflict worldwide has on children.

The gravest violation was the maiming and killing of children, followed by the use and recruitment of children and the denial of access to humanitarian aid.

According to the report, an average of 65 violations against children occur every day, based on 24,000 verified grave violations last year. The actual number is likely to be much higher than this.

Those countries where children were most affected are given as Afghanistan, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

A UNICEF article from June of this year stated that, “From widespread killing, maiming, abduction and sexual violence to recruitment into armed groups and strikes on schools and hospitals, as well as essential water facilities, children living in conflict zones around the world continue to come under attack on a shocking scale”.

The figures are indeed horrific, with 47 per cent of all child casualties in 2020 resulting from explosive weapons and explosive weapons of war. More than 100,000 children were verified as killed or maimed in situations of armed conflict between 2005 and 2020, with more than two-thirds of these verified since 2014.

UNICEF confirms that children are the primary victims of armed conflict with over 400 million of them living in countries where there is armed conflict. And all of this means that children are deprived of their basic human rights, robbed of their childhood and left with a depth of trauma that remains with them throughout their adult lives.

Said Virginia Gamba, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for CAAC, “There is no word strong enough to describe the horrific conditions that children in armed conflict have endured…. Those who survived will be affected for life with deep physical and emotional scars”.

However, conflict is not the only threat to the lives of children worldwide. Apart from infectious diseases such as malaria and diarrhoea – claiming children under five in particular – UN News has announced that the ‘Horn of Africa’ is bracing for an “explosion of child deaths” because of the worsening hunger crisis.

There are terrible accounts of parents having to bury their emaciated children by the side of roads as they made treks of hundreds of miles to seek medical help.

In Somalia alone, 386,000 children are in acute need of treatment for severe malnutrition, following successive seasons of failed rains in East Africa – something not seen in 40 years.

Raina Dagash, UNICEF Director for Eastern and Southern Africa, stressed that, “The lives of children in the Horn of Africa are also at an increased risk because of the war in Ukraine… because Somalia alone used to import 92 per cent of its wheat from Russia and the Ukraine but now supply lines are blocked.”

The UN Officer explained that the number of children facing severe acute malnutrition has increased by more than 15 per cent in just the last five months.

The agency is calling on the international community to provide more funding for emergency assistance and what it terms “resilience-building measures” to save people’s livelihoods.

In a stirring statement to journalists in Geneva, Switzerland, Dagash said: “If the world does not widen its gaze from the war in Ukraine and act immediately, an explosion of child deaths is about to happen in the Horn of Africa.”