As children move to the front of the world’s agenda, Christian groups and governments discuss turning rhetoric into reality.
For eight-year-old Bebe Jerry of Mozambique, life itself is a precarious proposition. His family was displaced in 1988 by the ongoing civil war, and rebel soldiers often prevent the flow of emergency food to dislocated people. Four of Bebe’s eight brothers and sisters have already died from whooping cough and diarrhea. In Mozambique, approximately 250 children of 1,000 born die by age five.
Just a few weeks ago, Mozambican President Joaquim Alberto Chissano came to the United Nations in New York with a promise to make life better for children like Bebe. “We regard the peace efforts we are making in our country as a contribution to the search of ways and means to provide the Mozambican child with family stability, peace, security, and tranquility,” he said. But Bebe is a long way from New York.
Unprecedented Attention
This year world leaders have been giving unprecedented attention to children and the problems to which they are particularly vulnerable. International agencies—including the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—have released reports and held discussions on issues threatening children worldwide.
Franklin Graham, president of the Christian relief group Samaritan’s Purse, observed that the emphasis on children is nothing new. He said Christian organizations have been involved in the effort to save and enhance children’s lives for more than 100 years.
Graham added that he is skeptical about governments’ abilities to address the problems facing children. “They will pour millions of dollars into programs, and like so many other things, it will end up lining someone’s pocket,” he said. “Missionary medicine saves more children each year than any UN agency.”
The ultimate answers lie with the church, Graham emphasized. Nevertheless, he welcomes the higher visibility being given to the world’s children and their problems.
Among the greatest of those problems are famine and war. According to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), 7 million children worldwide are refugees of famine and war, 30 million live in the streets, and 150 million suffer from malnutrition.
To address these problems, the UN convened its first World Summit for Children, held in New York in late September. More than 70 national presidents and prime ministers gathered to discuss the problems facing the world’s youngest citizens.
Grim Statistics
Death: Over 14 million children under the age of five die each year from infection and malnutrition. Two-thirds of those deaths could be prevented with inexpensive vaccines, antibiotics, and treatments.
Education: At least 100 million children of primary-school age worldwide will never enter a classroom.
Malnutrition: Almost 23 million children are classified as severely malnourished. About half live in the seven nations of South Asia.
War: Between 1980 and 1988, 925,000 infants and young children in Southern Africa died war-related deaths—nearly 500,000 in Mozambique alone.
In the U.S.: In 1988, 12.5 million U.S. children lived in poverty. Between 6.6 and 10.6 million children under 12 are hungry or vulnerable to hunger.
The leaders ratified, by consensus, a “World Declaration on the Survival, Protection, and Development of Children” and a “Plan of Action” for implementing the declaration. The declaration commits each of the participating countries to make child survival, development, health, and education a political priority. It includes a ten-point program to improve the role and status of women, eradicate hunger and malnutrition, reduce child-mortality and -morbidity rates, provide universal access to basic education, and keep children from becoming victims of war.
Beyond Rhetoric
Humanitarian groups and child advocates hailed the summit as an important step toward raising world consciousness about the grim plight of so many children, but they questioned whether the event will make a difference. “That is my biggest concern,” said Rep. Tony Hall (D-Ohio), chairman of the House Select Committee on Hunger. “If we had all those leaders come together and we miss the point of it, we’ll be letting a lot of people in the world down, mostly the children.”
The evangelical congressman has introduced a bill designed to implement the ten-point program. The proposed legislation includes substantial increases in U.S. funds for UN immunization and food-distribution programs. With the end of the current session of Congress, Hall’s bill will have to wait until next year for consideration. He acknowledges that loss of momentum will be a big problem. “We know what needs to be done,” he said. “The question is: Is there the political will to do it?”
Arthur Simon, president of the Christian antihunger group Bread for the World, is among the ardent proponents of such public-policy approaches to the problem. Simon maintains that while private efforts are “essential,” they alone are not enough. He noted that while direct private assistance to both the Third World and the poor in the U.S. increased substantially during the 1980s, so did hunger and poverty (see “Hunger: The Daily Disaster,” left). “The private response is not a triumph of volunteerism, but an abdication of public responsibility,” Simon said. He urges a two-pronged approach, with both private aid and public-policy changes that attack “root causes” of the problems.
However, World Vision president Bob Seiple asserted, “At the point of implementation, [relief work] is best done by private, voluntary organizations, because they can provide accountability, both to the work that they do and to those who give the resources.” Christian groups such as World Vision and World Relief routinely are partners with government agencies on specific relief-and-development projects.
Hunger: The Daily Disaster
If 100 jumbo jets, each loaded with 400 infants and children, crashed every day, the world would be horrified. Yet, according to the Christian antihunger lobbying group Bread for the World (BFW) and its president, Arthur Simon, 40,000 children die daily from malnutrition and infection, with virtually no press attention or political discussion.
In a report released last month, the BFW Institute on Hunger and Development documents that hunger is on the rise worldwide, and children are at the greatest risk. The report, Hunger 1990, says more than a half-billion of the world’s people are “chronically hungry,” while up to another half-billion are “vulnerable to periods of hunger each year.”
A major conclusion of the report is that international military spending, currently estimated at $1 trillion per year, is a major cause of continued hunger and poverty. “Wars have caused extensive hunger, disrupted food production and distribution, led to environmental degradation, and created refugees” in many nations, according to the report, which provides a country-by-country analysis of hunger around the world. “Military spending competes with domestic human needs even in countries as well-off as the United States,” the report continues.
Children are particularly vulnerable, according to the report, because “hungry children are often unable to withstand childhood diseases and the diseases caused by unclean drinking water.” At extreme poverty levels, infant and child mortality is “quite high,” and lack of prenatal care and low birth weights cause severe developmental problems.
Despite the grim picture, not all the news was bad. In its own words, Hunger 1990 “documents cases of progress against hunger—countrywide progress against poverty in some countries, various grassroots efforts to solve local problems, and aid-assisted programs that are working.”
Political Complexities
Issues associated with the problems faced by children have at times generated related political controversies. The Children’s Summit emerged as a result of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child adopted by the general assembly. The charter provides for international standards addressing treatment of children. More than 20 countries have ratified the convention, but at press time, the U.S. was not among them. The White House refuses to elaborate on its reasons for not forwarding the document to the Senate for ratification other than to say administration attorneys are still studying it.
Some prolife groups are concerned that the plank in the document requiring governments to develop “family planning education and services” may be used to promote abortion.
Also, profamily groups, including the Family Research Council (FRC), have expressed concern about the implications some planks may have for “family prerogatives.” As an example, a recent FRC publication highlighted the convention’s guarantees of children’s “freedom of expression,” “freedom of thought, conscience, and religion,” “privacy,” and “right to benefit from child care facilities” as being potentially intrusive for families.
But both World Vision and World Relief are supporting the convention and urging the U.S. to ratify the document. Seiple said he is “embarrassed and discomfited” that this country is holding out. World Relief associate executive director Don Bjork admitted that “there are some problems” with the convention, but he said his group analyzed the entire document and “on the whole, came down for it.”
According to Bjork, during negotiations for the final convention, there was “tremendous pressure” from both prochoice and prolife groups to express within the statement a position on abortion. For the most part, that effort failed, Bjork said, although he noted the preamble does include acknowledgment of protection “before and after birth.” Said Bjork, “We felt it was the best that anyone could achieve at this time.”
Both Bjork and Seiple said the charter is important, but that Christian work on behalf of children will go on regardless of the political scenario. In fact, despite the generally grim picture, there have been pockets of success. According to UNICEF, 80 percent of the world’s children today are immunized against six killer diseases, compared to only 30 percent in 1980. Simple oral rehydration therapy, now routinely provided by relief groups, saves the lives of more than one million children annually. “The progress has not been the result of headline-making summitry but has been the work of literally thousands of dedicated workers of all nations striving together on behalf of the world’s children,” said Seiple.
Yet the number of children who die needlessly remains staggering. And those who are trying to do something about it hope that progress will soon come to be realized more in substance than in nice-sounding words.
