The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has recently reported increased violence children in children in Haiti, the Central African Republic, Democratic Congo and Iraq, among other countries.
Although you will probably all be thinking about child abuse by parents or relatives of the children (I have also thought about it when I saw the news) the violence they speak of comes mostly from organized gangs and consequently it is news, In my opinion, chilling and shocking. Even so, it reflects a reality that many of us do not know and that we should know to understand the world in which we live.
In Haiti they have been abducting 50 children so far this year, and the kidnappers go unpunished. In the case of girls, many of them have suffered rapes, torture and murder. It is believed that these are organized bands with the aim of getting easy money. In the Central African Republic, with a similar modus operandi, armed gangs, who are terrified of rural communities, kidnap children to ask for money as a reward.
Thousands of children have been recruited by armed groups in the Democratic Congo and used as soldiers or captives as sex slaves.
In Iraq more and more girls are killed, kidnapped, raped or used in sex trafficking.
UNICEF makes a general appeal to exert common pressure on this problem, underlining that it is everyone's duty to protect the children of the world.
