UNICEF Believes State of War Exists Against World’s Women and Children

By Austin Ruse

     (NEW YORK – C-FAM)  The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) believes an "undeclared war" exists against the world's women and children. In it's just released "State of the World's Children 2000," UNICEF contends that, "Despite the progress made on many of the goals set at the 1990 World Summit for Children, this has been a decade of undeclared war on women, adolescents and children as poverty, conflict, chronic social instability and preventable diseases such as HIV/AIDS threaten their human rights and sabotage their development."

     According to the report, "there is no way to calculate the exact number of young boys and girls whose lives are in endangered by their sale and trafficking, by debt bondage, serfdom, forced or compulsory labor, forced or compulsory recruitment into armed conflict, prostitution, pornography or by the production and trafficking of drugs. The report, however, quotes the International Labor Organization as estimating that nearly "60 million children between the ages of five and eleven work in hazardous circumstances."

     The report also estimates that each day 8,500 children and young people around the world are infected with HIV. UNICEF also estimates that while 200,000 Africans died as a result of armed conflict in 1998, 2 million Africans died from complications related to the HIV virus.

     Life expectancy is dropping precipitously in many countries of the world, mostly centered in the Sub-Sahara Africa. Twenty-two countries report life expectancy of less than 50 years, with the lowest in Sierra Leone at 39 years old. Life expectancy in Malawi is 39, Zambia, and Uganda, 40; Rwanda, 41; and Burundi, 43. Experts attribute this to the prevalence of wide-spread diseases such as HIV-AIDS and malaria.

     The report issues alarming statistics in the area of safe water and adequate sanitation. Twenty-one percent of the reporting countries provide safe water to less than 50% of their people. Forty-two nations are able to provide adequate sanitation to less than 50% of their people.

     The report also reveals that some countries have a higher prevalence of contraceptive use than availability of either safe water or adequate sanitation. In Brazil, for instance, contraceptive prevalence stands at 77% while access to clean water is 76%, and safe sanitation is available to only 70% of the population. In China, 83% of the population has access to contraception while only 67% has access to clean water, and 24% has access to safe sanitation.

     Developing world countries complained during the five-year review of the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo+5) that UN agencies and the developed world were more interested in "reproductive rights" and population control than in development questions like clean water and safe sanitation. The final document dealt almost exclusively with population questions, and rarely mentioned clean water and safe sanitation.

     Moreover, UNICEF has come under fire in recent years for its promotion of "reproductive rights" which, according to the World Health Organization, includes access to abortion.

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