The Global War on Children

Nick Turse

Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.

“War is not healthy for children and other living things,” reads a poster titled “Primer” created by the late artist Lorraine Schneider for an art show at New York’s Pratt Institute in 1965. Printed in childlike lowercase letters, the words interspersed between the leaves of a simply rendered sunflower, it was an early response to America’s war in Vietnam. “She just wanted to make something that nobody could argue with,” recalled Schneider’s youngest daughter, Elisa Kleven, in an article published earlier this year. Six decades later, Schneider’s hypothesis has consistently been borne out.

According to Save the Children, about 468 million children — about one of every six young people on this planet — live in areas affected by armed conflict. Verified attacks on children have tripled since 2010. Last year, global conflicts killed three times as many children as in 2022. “Killings and injuries of civilians have become a daily occurrence,” U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk commented in June when he announced the 2023 figures. “Children shot at. Hospitals bombed. Heavy artillery launched on entire communities.”

It took four decades for the United Nations Security Council to catch up to Schneider. In 2005, that global body identified — and condemned — six grave violations against children in times of war: killing or maiming; recruitment into or use by armed forces and armed groups; attacks on schools or hospitals; rape or other grave acts of sexual violence; abduction; and the denial of humanitarian access to them. Naming and shaming, however, has its limits. Between 2005 and 2023, more than 347,000 grave violations against youngsters were verified across more than 30 conflict zones in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, according to UNICEF, the U.N. agency for children. The actual number is undoubtedly far higher.

From the extreme damage explosive weapons do to tiny bodies to the lasting effects of acute deprivation on developing brains, children are particularly vulnerable in times of conflict. And once subjected to war, they carry its scars, physical and mental, for a lifetime. A recent study by Italian researchers emphasized what Schneider intuitively knew — that “war inflicts severe violations on the fundamental human rights of children.” The complex trauma of war, they found, “poses a grave threat to the emotional and cognitive development of children, increasing the risk of physical and mental illnesses, disabilities, social problems, and intergenerational consequences.”

Despite such knowledge, the world continues to fail children in times of conflict. The United States was, for instance, one of the members of the U.N. Security Council that condemned those six grave wartime violations against children. Yet the Biden administration has greenlit tens of billions of dollars in weapons sales to Israel, while U.S. munitions have repeatedly been used in attacks on schools, that have become shelters, predominantly for women and children, in the Gaza Strip. “Make no mistake, the United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” President Joe Biden said recently, even though his administration acknowledged the likelihood that Israel had used American weaponry in Gaza in violation of international law.

And Gaza is just one conflict zone where, at this very moment, children are suffering mightily. Let TomDispatch offer you a hellscape tour of this planet, a few stops in a world of war to glimpse just what today’s conflicts are doing to the children trapped by them.

Gaza

The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place on Earth to be a child, according to UNICEF. Israel has killed around 17,000 children there since the current Gaza War began in October 2023, according to local authorities. And almost as horrific, about 26,000 kids have reportedly lost one or both parents. At least 19,000 of them are now orphans or are otherwise without a caregiver. One million children in Gaza have also been displaced from their homes since October 2023.

In addition, Israel is committing “scholasticide,” the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Palestinian education system in Gaza, according to a recent report by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian advocacy group. More than 659,000 children there have been out of school since the beginning of the war. The conflict in Gaza will set children’s education back by years and risks creating a generation of permanently traumatized Palestinians, according to a new study by the University of Cambridge, the Centre for Lebanese Studies, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East.

Even before the current war, an estimated 800,000 children in Gaza — about 75% of the kids there — were in need of mental health and psychosocial support. Now, UNICEF estimates that more than one million of them — in effect, every kid in the Gaza Strip — needs such services. In short, you can no longer be a healthy child there.

Lebanon

Over four days in late September, as Israel ramped up its war in Lebanon, about 140,000 children in that Mediterranean nation were displaced. Many arrived at shelters showing signs of deep distress, according to Save the Children staff. “Children are telling us that it feels like danger is everywhere, and they can never be safe. Every loud sound makes them jump now,” said Jennifer Moorehead, Save the Children’s country director in Lebanon. “Many children’s lives, rights and futures have already been turned upside down and now their capacity to cope with this escalating crisis has been eroded.”

All schools in that country have been closed, adversely affecting every one of its 1.5 million children. More than 890 children have also been injured in Israeli strikes over the last year, the vast majority — more than 690 — since August 20th, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health. Given that Israel has recently extended attacks from the south of the country to the Lebanese capital, Beirut, they will undoubtedly be joined by all too many others.

Sudan

Children have suffered mightily since heavy fighting erupted in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. More than 18,000 people have reportedly been killed and close to 10 million have been forced to flee their homes since the civil war there began. Almost half of the displaced Sudanese are — yes! — children, more than 4.6 million of them, making the conflict there the largest child displacement crisis in the world.

More than 16 million Sudanese children are also facing severe food shortages. In the small town of Tawila in that country’s North Darfur state, at least 10 children die of hunger every day, according to a report last month in the Guardian. The population of the town has ballooned as tens of thousands fled El Fasher, North Darfur’s besieged capital. “We anticipate that the exact number of children dying of hunger is much higher,” Aisha Hussien Yagoub, the head of the health authority for the local government in Tawila told the Guardian. “Many of those displaced from El Fasher are living far from our clinic and are unable to reach it.”

More than 10 million Sudanese children, or 50% of that country’s kids, have been within about three miles of the frontlines of the conflict at some point over the past year. According to Save the Children, this marks the highest rate of exposure in the world. In addition, last year, there was a five-fold increase in grave violations of Sudanese children’s rights compared to 2022.

Syria

More than 30,200 children have been killed since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Another 5,200 children were forcibly disappeared or are under arrest.

However little noticed, Syria remains the world’s largest refugee crisis. More than 14 million Syrians have been forced from their homes. More than 7.2 million of them are now estimated to be internally displaced in a country where nine in 10 people exist below the poverty line. An entire generation of children has lived under the constant threat of violence and emotional trauma since 2011. It’s been the only life they’ve ever known.

“Services have already collapsed after 14 years of conflict,” Rasha Muhrez, Save the Children’s Response Director in Syria, said last month. “The humanitarian crisis in Syria is at a record level.” More than two-thirds of the population of Syria, including about 7.5 million children, require humanitarian assistance. Nearly half of the 5.5 million school-aged children — 2.4 million between the ages of five and 17 — remain out of school, according to UNICEF. About 7,000 schools have been destroyed or damaged.

Recently, Human Rights Watch sounded the alarm about the recruitment of children, “apparently for eventual transfer to armed groups,” by a youth organization affiliated with the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration for North and East Syria and the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, its military wing.

Ukraine

Child casualties in Ukraine jumped nearly 40% in the first half of this year, bringing the total number of children killed or injured in nearly 900 days of war there to about 2,200, according to Save the Children. “This year, violence has escalated with a new intensity, with missiles, drones, and bombs causing an alarming rise in children being injured or killed in daylight blasts,” said Stephane Moissaing, Deputy Country Director for Save the Children in Ukraine. “The suffering for families will not stop as long as explosive weapons are sweeping through populated towns and villages across Ukraine.”

There are already 2.9 million Ukrainian children in need of assistance — and the situation is poised to grow worse in the months ahead. Repeated Russian attacks on the country’s infrastructure could result in power outages of up to 18 hours a day this winter, leaving many of Ukraine’s children freezing and without access to critical services. “The lack of power and all its knock-on effects this winter could have a devastating impact not only on children’s physical health but on their mental well-being and education,” said Munir Mammadzade, UNICEF representative to Ukraine. “Children’s lives are consumed by thoughts of survival, not childhood.”

Ukraine also estimates that Russian authorities have forcibly removed almost 20,000 children from occupied territories there since the February 2022 invasion. A Financial Times investigation found that Ukrainian children who were abducted and taken to Russia early in the war were put up for adoption on a Russian government-linked website. One of them was shown with a false Russian identity. Another was listed using a Russian version of their Ukrainian name. There was no mention of the children’s Ukrainian backgrounds.

West and Central Africa

Conflicts have been raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for decades. World Vision has called the long-running violence there “one of the worst child protection crises in the world.” A 2023 U.N. report on children and armed conflict documented 3,377 grave violations against children in the DRC. Of these, 46% involved the recruitment of children — some as young as five — by armed groups.

Violence and intercommunity tensions in the DRC have forced 1,457 schools to close this year alone, affecting more than 500,000 children. And sadly, that country is no anomaly. In May, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, reported that more than 5,700 schools in Burkina Faso had been closed due to insecurity, depriving more than 800,000 children of their educations. And by mid-2024, conflicts had shuttered more than 14,300 schools in 24 African countries, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. That marks an increase of 1,100 closures compared to 2023. The 2024 closures were clustered in West and Central Africa, mainly in Burkina Faso, the DRC, Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Niger. They have affected an estimated 2.8 million children.

“Education is under siege in West and Central Africa. The deliberate targeting of schools and the systemic denial of education because of conflict is nothing short of a catastrophe. Every day that a child is kept out of school is a day stolen from their future and from the future of their communities,” said Hassane Hamadou, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa. “We urgently call on all parties to conflict to cease attacks on and occupation of schools and ensure that education is protected and prioritized.”

Feet of Clay

It’s been six decades since Lorraine Schneider unveiled her poster and her common-sense wisdom to the world. She’s been proven right at every turn, in every conflict across the entire planet. Everywhere that children (not to mention other living things) have been exposed to war, they have suffered. Children have been killed and maimed. They have been physically, psychologically, and educationally stunted, as well as emotionally wounded. They have been harmed, assaulted, and deprived. Their bodies have been torn apart. Their minds – the literal architecture of their brains – have been warped by war.

In the conflict zones mentioned above and so many others — from Myanmar to Yemen — the world is failing its children. What they have lost can never be “found” again. Survivors can go on, but there is no going back.

Schneider’s mother, Eva Art, was a self-taught sculptor who escaped pogroms in Ukraine by joining relatives in the United States as a child. She lost touch with her family during World War II, according to her daughter Kleven, and later discovered that her relatives had been killed, their entire shtetl (or small Jewish town) wiped out. To cope with her grief, Art made clay figurines of the dead of her hometown: a boy and his dog, an elderly woman knitting, a mother cradling a baby. And today, the better part of 100 years after the young Art was forced from her home by violence, children continue to suffer in the very same ways — and continue to turn to clay for solace.

Israa Al-Qahwaji, a mental health and psychosocial support coordinator for Save the Children in Gaza, shared the story of a young boy who survived an airstrike that resulted in the amputation of one of his hands, while also killing his father and destroying his home. In shock and emotionally withdrawn, the boy was unable to talk about the trauma. However, various therapeutic techniques allowed him to begin to open up, according to Al-Qahwaji. The child began to talk about games he could no longer play and how losing his hand had changed his relationship with his friends. In one therapy session, he was asked to mold something out of clay to represent a wish. With his remaining hand, he carefully shaped a house. After finishing the exercise, he turned to the counselor with a question that left Al-Qahwaji emotionally overwhelmed. “Now,” the boy asked, “will you bring my dad and give me my hand back?”

Job cutting escalates across New Zealand

Tom Peters

With the assistance of the union bureaucracy, the New Zealand government and businesses are carrying out a savage program of austerity measures and job cutting which is ratcheting up unemployment and putting downward pressure on wages.

Official figures released on October 16 show inflation has been brought down to 2.2 percent from 7.2 percent at the end of 2023. This has been achieved through drastic increases to benchmark interest rates by the Reserve Bank. Since early 2022 the official cash rate has gone from 0.75 to 5.25 percent, with the explicitly stated goal of increasing unemployment and triggering a recession.

In the 12 months to June 2024, gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 0.2 percent; on a per capita basis, which more accurately reflects the impact on the population, the economy shrank 2.7 percent. The last time GDP per capita increased was in September 2022. “It’s effectively a recession that’s lasted two years,” Kiwibank chief economist Jarrod Kerr told the New Zealand Herald on September 19.

While the banks, property developers and other corporations continue to make billions year after year—helped by low taxes and government handouts during the first years of the pandemic—the previous Labour Party-led government and the current National Party-led coalition have made the working class pay for the economic crisis.

Unemployment was recorded at 4.6 percent at the end of June, but the real figure is much higher. A record 391,224 people, 12 percent of the working age population, are on welfare payments. More than half are getting JobSeeker support—the unemployment benefit—with the rest receiving illness and disability-related benefits or sole parent benefits.

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon delivering state of the nation speech [Photo: Christopher Luxon Facebook]

Pointing to falling inflation, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon declared on Monday: “we’re turning a corner and … brighter days are ahead for Kiwis and their families.”

Such statements fly in the face of reality. Wages have fallen well behind soaring rents, mortgages and other costs, and now mass redundancies are being announced nearly every week.

On Monday, Health NZ Te Whatu Ora (HNZ) confirmed about 450 staff had accepted “voluntary” redundancy after the government demanded hundreds of millions of dollars in cost cutting across the country’s public health system. The latest cuts follow a mass protest in Dunedin last month against the government’s decision to scrap a promised hospital redevelopment.

Across the public sector, the government has eliminated about 7,000 jobs so far this year. Recent announcements include a total of 562 job cuts at Kainga Ora, the public housing agency, 59 from GNS Science, the scientific research agency, and 140 from WorkSafe, the workplace safety regulator.

Private companies are likewise slashing thousands of jobs. On October 18, meat processing company Alliance Group confirmed the closure of its factory in Smithfield, Timaru, which has been in operation for more than 139 years, due to a drop in sheep numbers. About 600 jobs will be destroyed in the town of 28,900 people, and $40 to $50 million a year will be lost to the community.

In September, Oji Fibre Solutions announced the closure of its recycling plant in Auckland, resulting in 75 job losses. This followed the destruction of 230 jobs with the closure of Winstone Pulp International’s sawmill and pulp mills in the Ruapehu district. The companies cited increased power prices and other costs.

Last week, the state-owned company KiwiRail, which runs the country’s railways and Interislander ferries, emailed its 4,500 staff with an offer of voluntary redundancy. KiwiRail chief people and communications officer Andrew Norton said it was necessary to “reshape the business, lower our costs and create a solid footing for future growth.” This is in addition to proposals to sack 50 Interislander workers, dozens of railway job cuts in Napier and Palmerston North, and two dozen jobs with KiwiRail’s Zero Harm Group, responsible for health and safety.

The Rail and Maritime Transport Union, which is currently seeking to impose a wage cutting deal on Wellington train workers, criticised KiwiRail’s processes while making clear it will not oppose the cuts. Acting general secretary Karen Fletcher told Stuff on October 17: “[Management] need to work out where the surplus jobs are and identify and do a bit more of a needs assessment.”

The state-owned NZ Post is seeking to cut costs by up to $40 million this financial year at the expense of jobs and conditions. According to Stuff, about 100 workers could be made redundant or have their hours reduced. Last year NZ Post announced plans to cut 750 jobs over a five-year period.

In every case the unions have enforced redundancies and prevented any unified campaign against austerity by the working class. Following the Smithfield meatworks closure, the Council of Trade Unions said it was “calling on the government to show leadership” and “support workers with retraining and pathways into employment.” The unions know full well that the government will do nothing to meaningfully assist the tens of thousands of people being thrown out of work.

The Labour Party’s Camilla Belich issued a similarly hypocritical statement, falsely claiming that the previous Labour-led government had “supported workers and businesses to keep people in jobs.” Unemployment increased from 3.4 to 4 percent last year, and Labour campaigned in the 2023 election promising to cut thousands of public sector jobs.

Dennis Maga, general secretary of FIRST Union, speaks at NZ First Party convention, October 2024 [Photo: New Zealand First]

Meanwhile, FIRST Union has embraced the nationalist, anti-immigrant NZ First Party which is part of the National-led government. The aim is to deflect anger over the social crisis away from the capitalist system and to divide the working class by blaming immigrants.

Starmer government readies brutal UK austerity budget

Robert Stevens

Britain’s Labour government has finalised its austerity budget to be announced on October 30. With at least £40 billion in spending cuts and tax rises, the budget is a staggering acceleration of 14 years of brutal cuts already carried out by Conservative-led governments.

Within a month of Labour taking office in July, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced an “inheritance audit”, which concluded that the public finances were far worse than anyone understood. There was a £22 billion “black hole”. In order “to fix the foundations of our economy”, Reeves announced billions in spending cuts to begin immediately. The most brutal was £1.4 billion in cuts to pensioners’ incomes with 10 million pensioners—including nearly 2 million of the poorest—deprived of a Winter Fuel Allowance this year worth between £100 and £300.

Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer arrives for Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's first Cabinet meeting in 10 Downing Street, July 6, 2024 [Photo by Number 10/Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

This would only serve as a down-payment, with the Guardian noting that Reeves told the sans-civil service “Political Cabinet” last week that “the £22bn gap this year—which the government has blamed on their poor economic inheritance from the Tories—would be a recurring cost each year of this parliament.”

This mean that there was a “£100bn black hole in the public finances over the next five years amid concerns that ministers are yet to grasp the full scale of the fiscal deficit ahead”.

The immediate implications were that the budget would be far worse than previously slated, with savage cuts to living standards, including Reeves keeping a raft of brutal welfare cuts already mapped out by Sunak’s Conservatives.

The last time a similar deficit was made the pretext for attacks on public spending (£109 billion in 2010), Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron declared an “age of austerity”. His chancellor, George Osborne, announced £17 billion of spending cuts over the next four-five years in the June 2010 budget, then £81 billion in that October’s spending review. The Labour Party is well on its way to following suit.

Reeves trailed her cuts at last week’s International Investment Summit, saying that Labour’s mission of “being the most pro-business government that this country has ever seen” required “difficult choices” and “discipline on spending” to “restore fiscal and economic stability”.

The Financial Times backed the election of a Keir Starmer government, the first time it had backed a Labour victory since Tony Blair in 2005, on the basis that it would continue the imposition of austerity.

The FT lauded the fact that “Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall will press ahead with £1.3bn in annual cuts to UK sickness benefits announced by the previous Conservative government.” The newspaper cited Resolution Foundation thinktank analysis showing that under the measures “about 450,000 fewer people will be considered to have a ‘limited capability for work’ and therefore have their benefits cut by up to £4,900 a year, by 2028.

The pro-Conservative Daily Telegraph also welcomed the cuts, with a front-page article last Friday rejoicing in planned cuts even larger than those noted by the FT, as “Reeves will cut benefits by £3bn to tackle worklessness crisis”.

Kendall is to release a Green Paper on Labour’s welfare cuts—dubbed the Get Britain Working plan—prior to the budget based on a “pro-work, pro-opportunity, and pro-reform” agenda. It “will herald a major shake-up of job centres and will devolve power and resources to metro mayors and other local leaders so they can come up with innovative solutions to get more people into work.”

On Friday, another DWP work and pensions minister, Alison McGovern, boasted that Labour wouldn’t simply continue the Tories welfare cuts, “We will need to make savings like all departments, but we will bring forward our own reforms.”

The only consternation in ruling circles at any of Reeves’ mooted plans is the increase in National Insurance (NI) taxes on employer pension contributions. Employers currently pay 13.8 percent on earnings above £175 a week, or £9,100 a year, under Class 1 NI contributions. According to data compiled by HM Revenue & Customs, a 1 percent increase in the Class 1 rate could raise £8.45 billion for the Treasury over the 2025 to 2026 tax year, and a 2 percentage point hike could raise £16.9 billion—which the government has said would be used to fund a shortfall in the National Health Service, allowing it to “stay still” after factoring in inflation and pay.

Both Prime Minister Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting have repeatably declared that they will not throw any more money down the NHS “black hole”, and all future health spending must be tied to “reforms”, including major further incursions by the private sector into provision.

The cost will still eventually be borne by the working class.

The Times noted it “would ultimately be a tax on working people because it would result in lower wages.” The newspaper cited Institute for Fiscal Studies Stuart Adam economist who said, “Employer national insurance contributions are a tax on the earnings of working people. In the short run, the cost of higher NICs may be absorbed into lower firm profits, which would ultimately be felt by shareholders. But in the long run we would expect the majority of a rise in employer NICs to be passed on to workers in the form of lower wages.”

Reeves herself, seeking to score a few points at the expense of the Tories when they increased employees’ and employers’ National Insurance in 2022, said of an Office for Budget Responsibility assessment at the time: “This evidence that employees will be hit twice shows just how poorly thought through their tax hike is”.

Reeves’ austerity budget is being imposed on a population already bled white by a decade and a half of austerity, with many of the cuts imposed by Labour Party-run local authorities on behalf of central government. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015 made no difference, with Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, instructing Labour councils to impose Tory government cuts and set balanced budgets.

This has resulted in approximately 12 million people in Britain living in absolute poverty—a quarter of all children and nearly 15 percent of all those in work.

So vicious is the budget being finalised that the Labour-supporting Guardian presented the Cabinet meeting as a showdown between Reeves and Starmer and ministers who are concerned with what Politico described as “politically unfeasible cuts in their departments”. According to reports, the ministers—just three of them, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner (who also has a housing portfolio), Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Transport Secretary Louise Haigh—wrote to Starmer separately over their concerns.

That Starmer is fully on board with Reeves’s cuts was made clear by the quashing of what some reports called a “revolt” within the space of an hour-long meeting. At most, according to a report in the i, government departments will get nothing more than a 1 percent real-terms cash increase compared to what was planned under the previous Tory government.

Significantly, before applying the final measures to her budget Reeves will travel to Washington this week for talks with International Monetary Fund officials. Reuters commented that Reeves, who was previously employed as a Bank of England economist at the British Embassy in the US capital, “would stress how the new government was ‘prioritising economic stability’ as ‘the essential precondition for the secure and resilient growth needed to address... global challenges’”.

The Starmer government has made clear that no swingeing cuts will be made at the Ministry of Defence (MoD). On the contrary, Labour is committed to ramping up military spending by tens of billions of pounds to 2.5 percent of GDP as soon as conditions allow. This will result in billions cut from public spending shoveled into Britain’s backing NATO’s war against Russia and Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians.

At the same time as the budget was cleared, Defence Secretary John Healey announced that thousands of troops were being placed on standby for deployment to Estonia. In a joint declaration signed at the NATO Defence Ministers meeting in Brussels Thursday, “thousands of troops from the Army’s 4th Brigade” will be “held at high readiness, ready to defend NATO’s eastern flank, in addition to those deployed in Estonia.”

Britain already has 1,000 troops stationed in Estonia, with the plan envisaging that as many as 5,000 troops could be placed on standby under the pact, which will begin in July 2025. The MoD said the Estonian commitment underlines “the UK’s ‘NATO-first’ policy and the Government’s unshakeable commitment to the alliance.”

The statement said that Britain “will also take part in the European Long-range Strike Approach programme. Working alongside international allies, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland, the UK will develop new cutting-edge long range missile capabilities, with the project expected to play a key role in Europe’s defence by the 2030s.”