Thirty years ago, over two summers, my job was updating the index to the rules of procedure in committees of the House of Commons. What a pleasure to be back here. I know from that exercise that I'm not supposed to use any profanity. That was under “P”.
Thank you very much for inviting UNICEF to be with you today. I can't think of a more important reason to come home to Canada than to be with you for this critical conversation at a distinct moment in human history.
Think back to December 2012. Malala of Pakistan had been shot. We were all witness, mostly via the media, to the gang rapes in India. The Russian government sentenced children to life in institutions, preventing their adoption to the United States. The war raged in Syria. And children in a small school in Newtown, Connecticut, not far from where I currently live, were gunned down.
I could go on and on. The picture is violent and graphic, and plays out even today in northern Nigeria, where a mass kidnapping is now potentially a scene of rape, child marriage, trafficking, and even sale.
The time has come to say enough is enough and to centre the protection of children on the global stage. It is true that more children than ever before are being saved from preventable diseases. They are in schools, have access to potable water, and sanitary facilities have improved dramatically. As countries develop economically, the basics are being addressed, at least in part. What remains is a long list of child protection issues, from child labour to trafficking, female genital mutilation and cutting, child marriage, the sale of children, online bullying, and more. Sadly, no country is immune to violence, and to abuse, neglect, and exploitation of children.
Getting the world to wake up to the protection of children from all of this has been my life's work. From my current vantage point in UNICEF's headquarters, I want to share with you in the next few minutes some data on protecting children, and from there a vision that we have for the future of child protection and that I hope is also potentially a vision for the Government of Canada.
Equity is integral to this vision. Programmatic work in child protection is all about reaching and achieving results for marginalized and excluded children. Many children who suffer violence suffer in poverty, but not all. Poverty does not explain harmful practices, violence against children, and the systematic discrimination of certain segments of society. There will indeed be equity in human society when all children are protected all the time.
A little later this month—I'm not supposed to have this, but they snuck me a copy—we're actually going to be putting out a report on violence with some updated data. I'm going to draw from that a little.
We also put out a data-driven report on female genital mutilation and cutting last June, which we launched in Washington, and another report on birth registration in December of last year. This upcoming report on violence will be our next major publication; this year there will also be another one on child marriage. I'll be very happy to share with the committee links to all of this data—this one—at the end of the month.
I want to begin with what Elly very wisely brought up, the subject of birth registration. We refer to it in UNICEF as a child's passport to protection for life. Without proper registration, the risks of being bought and sold, trafficked without legal documentation, and other potential harms are great. In many instances, a missing birth certificate can mean that a child is refused a leaving certificate from school, or worse, she or he may not even be allowed to enrol.
Pause on this statistic for a moment: 230 million children under the age of five in the south are without a birth certificate today.
Every year, 1.2 million children are trafficked. This is an old statistic, and we expect it's a gross underestimation of the situation. For every 800 victims of trafficking, there is one conviction of a trafficker.
Add to this the millions of children Elly already mentioned who are in exploitative, numbing, and soul-destroying work and we begin to get a picture that lingers, not because it's interesting but because it simply should not be.
I've seen and worked with children for whom so-called work is picking through heaps of garbage for usable debris, and others who are sent down diamond mines daily, for whom daylight is an unknown. This is 2014, not 1768, and this is wrong.
The report on violence that we will bring out shortly tells us that spousal violence is common among married adolescent girls. Uganda had reported rates of 67%. These are girls between the ages of 15 and 19. In the Democratic Republic of Congo the figure is 70%.
What the data tells us about bullying is that, in many countries, students between the ages of 13 and 15 fear for their lives daily. In the Solomon Islands, for instance, 64% of boys and 68% of girls say they have been bullied in the last month, and likewise for children in Ghana, Uganda, and Sri Lanka, to name but a few.
Let me leap from what is most definitely a bleary picture to some visionary ideas and thoughts that we're trying to put into action.
The vision shares the following characteristics: a world focused on the protection of the millions of children it has helped save from preventable deaths; a professional workforce; a social service workforce that is funded and supported; a world where leaders, public sector and private, are passionate advocates for, and supporters of, child protection; a world engaged in a global movement to prevent violence against children; a world in which young people—they're called the millennials, apparently, I have one at home—care about, and are engaged in, the protection of children; and a world in which the rights of all children are realized.
Against all that negative data, I want to quickly say, in true UNICEF fashion, that we're making a lot of progress. I have the good fortune to have accompanied UNICEF through these last 25 years in this process of evolving work in child protection. I want to humbly suggest that our organization is uniquely placed to leverage our own presence and our leadership, but that needs to be done in partnership with governments, including that of Canada. Leadership and partnership is how I like to characterize things.
Two decades of hard work and solid advocacy from many agencies—World Vision being but one of them—are a big part of the reason we've arrived at this point. The “we” I refer to is UNICEF and the many other UN and civil society organizations. Starting from the Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNICEF and others evolved from more issue-based, response-driven programming to one that focuses on systemic, holistic approaches that address the multiple underlying vulnerabilities of children and their families.
We heard in the earlier Q and A session that the sector is guided by Security Council resolutions, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed alternative care guidelines, and other standards that previously we didn't have. Child protection is visible and a necessity, but with this advocacy victory comes great expectations.
Importantly, we as a child protection sector have a strategy. That strategy comprises...and it's really encouraging to hear everyone who's been here this afternoon talking about strengthening systems that prevent harm, helping those who are violated and, at the same time, addressing social norms to strengthen those things that are helpful, and changing those that aren't good for children.
Together, we're part of a child protection community that's growing both in number and in its effectiveness. The community speaks a similar, if not always the same, language. That wasn't the case two decades ago.
Nevertheless, there remains a dearth of examples across the sector where there are scalable programs to achieve results for children. I want to highlight a couple of them, and one of them you should all be very proud of. Your recent support to UNICEF in Ghana holds great promise. It is a substantive grant that will allow the team and its partners to take child protection efforts to scale. Such investments are rare. They need to be encouraged. We're often taking a small-project approach, hampering the delivery of results that are truly systemic and sustainable. So all eyes are on Ghana.
The second example is Ethiopia, where the government and its partners are strengthening the child protection and social welfare system with significant financial support, in this case from the U.S. government. A degree of political will and the collaboration of child protection actors are expected to deliver evidence-based results in five years. These comprise an increase in the numbers of children in stable families, a decrease in the number of children living in institutions, a stronger judiciary, and a social welfare workforce.
Regionally, work in eastern Europe is preventing the institutionalization of children. Mildly disabled children were being institutionalized for a range of reasons. By tackling those reasons, and strengthening and supporting families, we're seeing a sustainable change for the good. These efforts already show evidence of scalable programming, with great results.
As one more example, by the end of next year, 17 countries will have completed high-quality household surveys of violence against children. A growing number of government-led comprehensive action plans to prevent and respond to violence are being developed. Importantly, the leadership of these governments brings to the table actors in education, justice, social welfare, and others. They take a systemic approach.
There are enormous advocacy challenges internal to the sector, and child protection advocates call for the kinds of investments that child health, nutrition, and education sectors have benefited from. Scholars Shiffman and Smith examined why some global health initiatives were prioritized by political leaders, whereas others received little attention. They told us there were four major factors that appear to influence an issue, and why it would become a priority. Those four factors are actor power, ideas, political context, and issue characteristics. All four of these exist for child protection today. What the sector needs is voice, political will, and financial resources.
So if I may be so bold, I have two big asks of Canada, a nation recognized as a leader in caring for women, children, and human rights. Please continue to bring your clout and commitment to this crucial work stream. What you have already done for child protection in Ghana, for protecting children affected by armed conflict and children in armed conflict, is enormous.
Second, please add your voice to the post-2015 discussions. Preventing violence against children must be a clearly articulated goal in whatever the goals are that the world sets for itself. We have a saying in my team that if you're not at the table, you're on the menu, and we've been on the menu throughout the MDGs.
Thank you again for this invitation, and I look forward to your questions and our discussion today.