IT is hard for normal societies to realize that in some parts of the world, children, far from being a joy and a delight, are little more than unwanted extra mouths to feed. The latest UN report on children thus makes extremely sober reading.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has analyzed 27 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and concluded that millions of children are living below the poverty line. The report makes clear that children living below the poverty line are malnourished and sick and their growth is often stunted. Further, a significant number have been either thrown out by their families or orphaned by disease or armed conflict.
Some of the horror stories concerning children have made the headlines. We have all seen articles about over-extended Romanian orphanages in which children, especially the disabled, have been dumped by their parents. We have also read of street children who live in the sewers beneath Romania’s capital, Bucharest. As a result, Romania has been roundly condemned. It is no doubt unfair to single out only one of these emerging economies for criticism. It should be pointed out that there is a perceptible pattern here, certainly among countries which once lived under communist economic theory. The state bureaucracies managed to house, feed, educate and find some kind of job for virtually everybody. By removing that state safety net, which existed for two or three generations, citizens were plunged into a competitive environment in which the few strong became stronger and the many weak became weaker. Yet countries such as Brazil, which never endured a communist economic system have also witnessed children thrown into the streets by their families. Young street criminals have been viewed as so great a menace in Sao Paulo, for instance, that there has been a barbaric butchering of these unfortunates by renegade elements in the police force.
The common denominator, therefore, is that governments overseeing economic transformation believe that they have little time and even fewer resources to deal with the problem of child poverty. They work on the assumption that as their society prospers, the problem will be solved and so go away. This is apparently entirely wrong. The stunted, diseased, unwanted and undernourished millions around the world who are growing up in poverty with little or nothing in the way of education will never have a chance to join in any prosperity that comes to their countries. They are being condemned now to a life of drug addiction, prostitution and crime. In the way of such things, their own children are likely to be raised in the same distorted and disadvantaged way.
Leaving aside the strong moral case for action, it is in the obvious self-interest of every government confronted with these appalling problems to deal with them firmly and quickly. Resources simply must be found and it is no good relying largely on international agencies because these are local problems that require local solutions. A country neglects its children at its own peril since, for good or evil, they are its future.
