A senior United Nations official said Protection for children caught up in war must be at the heart of the international agenda, including COVID-19 response,
The Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Virginia Gamba, made the appeal while presenting her annual report to the UN General Assembly for August 2020 to July 2021.
The report outlines large scales of grave violations against children, with the most prevalent being recruitment and use in hostilities, killing, maiming, and denial of humanitarian access.
In 2020, the UN verified some 26,425 grave violations against more than 19,370 children.
Most of them were boys, who accounted for 14,097 of the victims or survivors, while 4,993 were girls. In 289 cases the sex was unknown.
Overall, 8,521 children were recruited or used by parties to conflict, mainly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Syria and Myanmar.
Meanwhile, some 8,400 youngsters were killed or maimed, with Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Somalia remaining the deadliest conflict zones for children.
