Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Fifty Million Children Have Been Uprooted Worldwide: What Will the
West Do About It?
________________________________________
Fifty Million Children Have Been Uprooted Worldwide: What Will the West Do
About It?
By Vijay Prashad [1] / AlterNet [2]
September 20, 2016
'no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won't let you stay.'
Warshan Shire (2015).
Reading the new UNICEF report [3] - Uprooted: the growing crisis for refugee
and migrant children (September 2016) - on child refugees is a sobering
experience. The main statistic that informs the report should be on the lips
of everyone on the planet: there are fifty million children who have been
uprooted worldwide. Fifty million.
Children make up a third of humanity. Yet, half of the refugees on the
planet are children. When we hear politicians talk of 'refugees' with venom,
keep in mind that one in two of those whom they pillory are children who
have been thrust out of their lives of relative stability to lives of total
uncertainty. Life on the run and in refugee camps will leave these children
without the elements of human development - decent nutrition, shelter,
education and leisure. They live lives at the edge, bare lives, lives of
great distress and trauma. The world that is being produce is a world with
large numbers of displaced people who have been denied social goods.
UNICEF's report shows that an increasing number of uprooted children cross
borders on their own. In 2015, over a hundred thousand unaccompanied minors
applied for asylum in seventy-eight countries. This is triple the number of
unaccompanied minors who were in the same position in 2014. European
governments report that there are at least ten thousand children lost in
Europe. They were logged at the border, but then they disappeared from any
monitoring. It has been found that half the unaccompanied children that
arrive at European border posts vanish from the refugee centers. Europol
reports that there is 'tremendous amount of crossover' between those who
smuggle people into Europe and the gangs of traffickers for forced sexual
and labor exploitation. Brian Donald of Europol said that 'modern,
enterprising, organized criminal gangs go where the opportunity is high and
the risk is low.' Child sexual and labor trafficking is one such area.
Flight.
What are these children fleeing? From Central America, the children flee
gang violence and extreme poverty. Parents who fear that doing nothing to
protect their children sometimes actively send them along the transit
routes, hoping against hope that they will somehow make it to a better
place. These journeys are dangerous, as another UNICEF report [4] - Broken
Dreams: Central American children's dangerous journey to the United States
(August 2016) - makes plain. Most of these children are from El Salvador,
Guatemala and Honduras - countries with very high murder rates and with
serious gang problems. Many children - as many as sixteen thousand in the
first six months of 2016 - were stopped at the Mexican border. Perhaps as
many as these children vanished into the nets of kidnappers or have been
murdered. UNICEF found evidence that drug cartels threaten the children to
carry drugs for them across borders. This puts the children in an even more
vulnerable situation. Six out of ten girls, Amnesty International reports
[5], are raped during the journey. If the children make it to the United
States, there is a good chance that they will be apprehended and deported.
Half of the child refugees come from Afghanistan and Syria. Many of these
children are under thirteen years old. They flee the worst of the violence.
War has beset Afghanistan for at least the past sixteen years, if not over
the course of the past two generations. Stability is not in the foreseeable
future. To flee is a human response. The first route is to flee the
countryside for the expanding slums of Kabul. With no electricity or water
in these slums and few opportunities for the adults and children, flight for
a second time is the normal course of things. Syria has only been at war for
five years, but its devastation is perhaps greater than in Afghanistan. Half
the population is displaced, with all social indicators in free-fall. The
population there also does not see any light at the end of the tunnel. No
wonder that here too the displaced keep on the move till they find
themselves either in UN camps in Jordan or along the pathway from Turkey to
Europe.
In fact, the very language we have is limited. The term 'refugee' denudes
the people of their humanity. They are human beings who have seen cruel,
human intentions break apart their possibility of survival and reduce them
to the condition of refugee. No-one wants to be a refugee. It is not an
identity of pride. It is a mark of inhumanity. It is not the refugee who
should be ashamed. It is those who have allowed the production of such
historical levels of displaced people who should consider what their
policies have wrought.
Responsibility.
Why is it that the most powerful (and richest) countries are least willing
to accept refugees? Turkey hosts the largest number of recent refugees,
while Lebanon has the largest percentage of refugees in relation to its
population. If you look at income-level, the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Ethiopia and Pakistan have the highest concentration of refugees.
These are countries with scare resources that - because of geography - have
had to absorb large numbers of displaced people. They simply have no choice.
One in five people who live in Lebanon are refugees. In the United States,
one in twelve hundred people are refugees. The disparity is stark. One
cannot expect the US to take as many refugees as Lebanon. It is simply not
going to happen. On the other hand, the animosity against refugees -
sharpened by lone wolf terror attacks - is painful. Is that rhetoric against
refugees targeted at those children, who make up half of the displaced
people on the planet?
Zones of conflict and zones of poverty are not habitable by anyone. Survival
is made hard here. Serious attention to these issues should be at the top of
the table for the world's leaders who gather at the UN this week. But they
will not tackle these with the kind of attention required. The powerful
states will give lip-service to the problem, but turn away from them. They
have an outsized role in the production of crisis and take an undersized
role in the relief for the detritus of crisis. This is the scandal of the
present period.
Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in
Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books, including Arab Spring,
Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of
the Global South (Verso, 2013) and The Death of a Nation and the Future of
the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016). His columns
appear at AlterNet every Wednesday.
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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/world/refugee-crisis
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/vijay-prashad
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://www.unicef.org/emergencies/childrenonthemove/
[4]
http://www.unicef.org/media/files/UNICEF_Child_Alert_Central_America_2016_re
port_final(1).pdf
[5]
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2013/10/migrants-mexico-invisible-jou
rneys/
[6] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Fifty Million Children
Have Been Uprooted Worldwide: What Will the West Do About It?
[7] http://www.alternet.org/
[8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Fifty Million Children Have Been Uprooted Worldwide: What Will the
West Do About It?
Fifty Million Children Have Been Uprooted Worldwide: What Will the West Do
About It?
By Vijay Prashad [1] / AlterNet [2]
September 20, 2016
AddThis Sharing Buttons
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'no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won't let you stay.'
Warshan Shire (2015).
Reading the new UNICEF report [3] - Uprooted: the growing crisis for refugee
and migrant children (September 2016) - on child refugees is a sobering
experience. The main statistic that informs the report should be on the lips
of everyone on the planet: there are fifty million children who have been
uprooted worldwide. Fifty million.
Children make up a third of humanity. Yet, half of the refugees on the
planet are children. When we hear politicians talk of 'refugees' with venom,
keep in mind that one in two of those whom they pillory are children who
have been thrust out of their lives of relative stability to lives of total
uncertainty. Life on the run and in refugee camps will leave these children
without the elements of human development - decent nutrition, shelter,
education and leisure. They live lives at the edge, bare lives, lives of
great distress and trauma. The world that is being produce is a world with
large numbers of displaced people who have been denied social goods.
UNICEF's report shows that an increasing number of uprooted children cross
borders on their own. In 2015, over a hundred thousand unaccompanied minors
applied for asylum in seventy-eight countries. This is triple the number of
unaccompanied minors who were in the same position in 2014. European
governments report that there are at least ten thousand children lost in
Europe. They were logged at the border, but then they disappeared from any
monitoring. It has been found that half the unaccompanied children that
arrive at European border posts vanish from the refugee centers. Europol
reports that there is 'tremendous amount of crossover' between those who
smuggle people into Europe and the gangs of traffickers for forced sexual
and labor exploitation. Brian Donald of Europol said that 'modern,
enterprising, organized criminal gangs go where the opportunity is high and
the risk is low.' Child sexual and labor trafficking is one such area.
Flight.
What are these children fleeing? From Central America, the children flee
gang violence and extreme poverty. Parents who fear that doing nothing to
protect their children sometimes actively send them along the transit
routes, hoping against hope that they will somehow make it to a better
place. These journeys are dangerous, as another UNICEF report [4] - Broken
Dreams: Central American children's dangerous journey to the United States
(August 2016) - makes plain. Most of these children are from El Salvador,
Guatemala and Honduras - countries with very high murder rates and with
serious gang problems. Many children - as many as sixteen thousand in the
first six months of 2016 - were stopped at the Mexican border. Perhaps as
many as these children vanished into the nets of kidnappers or have been
murdered. UNICEF found evidence that drug cartels threaten the children to
carry drugs for them across borders. This puts the children in an even more
vulnerable situation. Six out of ten girls, Amnesty International reports
[5], are raped during the journey. If the children make it to the United
States, there is a good chance that they will be apprehended and deported.
Half of the child refugees come from Afghanistan and Syria. Many of these
children are under thirteen years old. They flee the worst of the violence.
War has beset Afghanistan for at least the past sixteen years, if not over
the course of the past two generations. Stability is not in the foreseeable
future. To flee is a human response. The first route is to flee the
countryside for the expanding slums of Kabul. With no electricity or water
in these slums and few opportunities for the adults and children, flight for
a second time is the normal course of things. Syria has only been at war for
five years, but its devastation is perhaps greater than in Afghanistan. Half
the population is displaced, with all social indicators in free-fall. The
population there also does not see any light at the end of the tunnel. No
wonder that here too the displaced keep on the move till they find
themselves either in UN camps in Jordan or along the pathway from Turkey to
Europe.
In fact, the very language we have is limited. The term 'refugee' denudes
the people of their humanity. They are human beings who have seen cruel,
human intentions break apart their possibility of survival and reduce them
to the condition of refugee. No-one wants to be a refugee. It is not an
identity of pride. It is a mark of inhumanity. It is not the refugee who
should be ashamed. It is those who have allowed the production of such
historical levels of displaced people who should consider what their
policies have wrought.
Responsibility.
Why is it that the most powerful (and richest) countries are least willing
to accept refugees? Turkey hosts the largest number of recent refugees,
while Lebanon has the largest percentage of refugees in relation to its
population. If you look at income-level, the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Ethiopia and Pakistan have the highest concentration of refugees.
These are countries with scare resources that - because of geography - have
had to absorb large numbers of displaced people. They simply have no choice.
One in five people who live in Lebanon are refugees. In the United States,
one in twelve hundred people are refugees. The disparity is stark. One
cannot expect the US to take as many refugees as Lebanon. It is simply not
going to happen. On the other hand, the animosity against refugees -
sharpened by lone wolf terror attacks - is painful. Is that rhetoric against
refugees targeted at those children, who make up half of the displaced
people on the planet?
Zones of conflict and zones of poverty are not habitable by anyone. Survival
is made hard here. Serious attention to these issues should be at the top of
the table for the world's leaders who gather at the UN this week. But they
will not tackle these with the kind of attention required. The powerful
states will give lip-service to the problem, but turn away from them. They
have an outsized role in the production of crisis and take an undersized
role in the relief for the detritus of crisis. This is the scandal of the
present period.
Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in
Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books, including Arab Spring,
Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of
the Global South (Verso, 2013) and The Death of a Nation and the Future of
the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016). His columns
appear at AlterNet every Wednesday.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [6]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[7]
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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/world/refugee-crisis ;
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/vijay-prashad
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://www.unicef.org/emergencies/childrenonthemove/
[4]
http://www.unicef.org/media/files/UNICEF_Child_Alert_Central_America_2016_re
port_final(1).pdf
[5]
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2013/10/migrants-mexico-invisible-jou
rneys/
[6] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Fifty Million Children
Have Been Uprooted Worldwide: What Will the West Do About It?
[7] http://www.alternet.org/
[8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
