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War And Effectson Chlidren

War affects children in all the ways it affects adults, but also in different ways. First,
children are dependent on the care, empathy, and attention of adults who love them.
Their attachments are frequently disrupted in times of war, due to the loss of parents,
extreme preoccupation of parents in protecting and finding subsistence for the family,
and emotional unavailability of depressed or distracted parents. The child may be in
substitute care with someone who cares for him or her only slightly – relatives or an
orphanage. A certain proportion of war-affected children lose all adult protection –
“unaccompanied children,” as they are known in refugee situations.
Second, impacts in childhood may adversely affect the path of children far
more than adults. Consider children who lose the opportunity for education during war,
children who are forced to move into refugee or displaced person camps, where they wait
for years in miserable circumstances for normal life to resume, if it ever does. Consider a
child disabled in war; they may, in addition to loss of a limb, sight, or cognitive capacity,
lose the opportunity of schooling and of a social life. A girl who is raped may be
displaced by her society and lose the opportunity for marriage. Long after the war has
ended, these lives will never attain the potential they had before the impact of war.
Listing the impacts of war on children is a sad straightforward task:
Death -. Hundreds of thousands of children die of direct violence in war each year (1).
They die as civilians caught in the violence of war, as combatants directly targeted, or in
the course of ethnic cleansing.
Injury - . Children suffer a range of war injuries. Certain weapons affect them
particularly.
A landmine explosion is more likely to kill or seriously injure a child than an adult (2).
Thousands of children suffer landmine injuries each year (3).
Disability -. Millions of children are...