Lord McConnell: Keeping children safe in emergencies

On three occasions this year I have come face to face with the dramatic and horrific impact of humanitarian disasters on innocent children.

In the Philippines in February I returned to the towns and villages most affected by Typhoon Haiyan in November 2013. There is still no calculation of the number of children who were stolen or tricked away from these islands in the immediate aftermath. Teenagers and sometimes very young orphans climbed on to boats with promises of homes and jobs and safety elsewhere. Many of them will have been trafficked far beyond Manila. Those that remain are traumatised and while support from UNICEF and others to rebuild their lives is important, those immediate days in the aftermath of the Typhoon were lost for child safety.

In Malawi in May I met orphaned children still living in camps where they have been since the floods of last winter. Children, still wearing the ‘clothes’ they had been wearing the day the floods came, living with friends and relatives in tents because they had lost their parents as well as their homes and belongings. Children unable to go to school, who had only survived because a member of their community had rallied round in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Child protection had not featured in the immediate response.

Back again in the Philippines in October, I visited Mindanao where hopefully a lasting peace may now be underway. But the impact of conflict over forty years is very dramatic indeed. Children in Muslim Mindanao are three times less likely to finish primary school and three times more likely to die before the age of five. And that is just compared to poor children elsewhere in the Philippines, not the rest of the world. We know that children always come off worst in conflict. We know that conflict damages development and that conflict affected states across the world will achieve none of the Millennium Development Goals by the end of 2015. Thankfully this has been recognised by the inclusion of Goal 16 on Peace and Justice in the new UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.

For all of these reasons, UNCIEF UK campaigned for the inclusion on Goal 16.2 which specifically identifies the need to end abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence and torture against children; and UNICEF have established the new Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, bringing together organisations who are committed to this goal.

Ending violence against children is an ambitious and challenging target because the violence inflicted takes many different forms, from normalized everyday violence and emotional abuse to the recruitment of child soldiers and trafficking. Achieving this target will take many, many years. But there is one thing that we can do immediately.

In 2016 there will be a Global Humanitarian Summit looking at how the world responds to humanitarian emergencies. There will be many things on the agenda, including resilience, the need for education and health services in the huge refugee camps on the border of Syria and elsewhere, and the amount of money available. But surely we can all agree that in any new guidelines for humanitarian emergency action, there should be included an immediate commitment to child protection. While food and clean water and emergency medical supplies are all essential, someone needs to have responsibility for child protection and that response has to be immediate as the traffickers will not waste their time in moving into an area where there will be easy pickings for their evil trade.

In the next phase of their Children in Danger campaign UNICEF UK have today published their latest policy briefing Keeping Children Safe in Emergencies. It calls for action by the UK and the global community, and it deserves to be read. These children – hundreds of millions of them worldwide – need us to seize this moment. I hope we will.