Introduction

The Impact of War on Children: Fact Sheet
UNICEF / Graca Michel

In recent decades, the proportion of civilian casualties in armed conflicts has increased dramatically and is now estimated to stand at more than 90 per cent. About half of the victims are children.

An estimated 20 million children have been forced to flee their homes because of conflict and human rights violations and are living as refugees in neighbouring countries or are internally displaced persons within their own national borders.

More than 2 million children have died as a direct result of armed conflict over the last decade. More than three times that number, at least 6 million children, have been permanently disabled or seriously injured.

Millions of children have died as a result of malnutrition and disease caused by warfare. Since 1990, the most commonly reported causes of death among refugees and internally displaced persons have been diarrhoeal diseases, acute respiratory infections, measles and other common, preventable infectious diseases.

An estimated 300,000 child soldiers - boys and girls under the age of 18 - are involved in more than 30 conflicts worldwide. Child soldiers are used as combatants, messengers, porters, cooks and to provide sexual services. Some are forcibly recruited or abducted, others are driven to join by poverty, abuse and discrimination, or to seek revenge for violence enacted against themselves and their families.

During armed conflict, girls and women are continually threatened by rape, domestic violence, sexual exploitation, trafficking, sexual humiliation and mutilation. Investigative reports following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda concluded that nearly every female over the age of 12 who survived the genocide was raped. During the conflict in the former Yugoslavia there were an estimated 20,000 victims of sexual assault.

Small arms and light weapons are now the most readily available and deadly killing instruments in war and post-conflict situations. Deaths linked to small firearms run into the hundreds of thousands every year, with injuries exceeding 1 million.

HIV/AIDS has killed nearly 4 million children and orphaned more than 13 million more worldwide. Of the 17 countries with over 100,000 children orphaned by AIDS, 13 are either in conflict or on the brink of emergency and 13 are heavily indebted poor countries.

Of the 10 countries with the highest rates of under-five deaths, seven are affected by armed conflict. Angola and Sierra Leone have the highest under-five mortality rates: nearly one in three children dies before the age of five.

The shortfalls and disparities in humanitarian relief for war-affected children are a reflection not of need but of the political and strategic interests of donor countries. In 1998, official development assistance for Bosnia and Herzegovina reached US $238 per person. Poor countries with ongoing conflicts received much less per person: Burundi received $12, Afghanistan $6, and the Democratic Republic of Congo $3.

The major conflicts of the 1990s cost the international community an estimated US $240 billion. The social and economic costs to the countries at war have, of course, been far greater.