When International Day of Innocent Children Victims is celebrated? During the year of 1982, 4th June of every year was declared as International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression by United Nations General Assembly Why International Day of Innocent Children Victims is celebrated? It was celebrated to fulfill the purpose of providing better place for the children victimized for mental, emotional and physical abuse. It is celebrated to make people aware of the fact that right for those victimized children should be protected.
Various non-governmental and government organizations take place for this celebration such as :
Statistics describing condition of children all over the world. Commemorating the day is as relevant now as it was then. Victimized children by the act of child abuse though are not much superficial but it is looming large in the society day by day. As UNICEF states, "Violence cuts across all social, cultural, religious and ethnic lines. This kind of abuse can raise its head anywhere like in school, home, streets." Globally, there are 11 to 17 million people who are refugees. Of these, 41 per cent are believed to be children and 26 per cent women. Global estimates of internally displaced persons range between 16 million and 25 million, with an average estimate of 24.5 million internally displaced persons worldwide. Displaced children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable to violence, sexual exploitation, HIV infection, forced labor and slavery, and they risk being forcibly recruited by armed groups. Statistics of the last decade show the pathetic fact of killing over two million children due to conflict. Moreover, nearly 6 million children are being wounded along with 1million being orphaned. Near 20 millions of children have had to flee their homes due to the wars.
Children in 87 countries live among 60 million land mines. Victimized as a mine labor with annual figure of near about 10,000. Over 300,000 young boys and girls are appointed to work as child soldiers throughout the globe. Many of them are below the age of 10 years. Lots of young girls are compelled to several types of sexual harassment. Almost 30,000 children die every day from the side-effects of violence, such as the aforementioned poverty, hunger and preventable diseases etc. AIDS by itself has killed more than 3.8 million children and orphaned another 13 million. In the last five years HIV/AIDS has become the greatest threat to children, especially in countries ravaged by war. In highly affected countries, figure shows that nearly half of today's 15-year-olds is estimated to die. According to the world statistics, near about 1.2 billion human race make their survival even below one dollar per day basis. Here, in this count half of the share is children. Ten million children under the age of five die each year, the majority from preventable diseases and malnutrition. According to the world statistics, annually near about four million children are not getting the opportunity for birth registration, which is making them deprived from the legal identity and nationality. Approximately 250 million children, especially girls, from age five to fourteen, are forced to work. Awareness attempt The awareness of this reality called for urgent steps to change the current state of things for the better. One of the principal landmarks came in 1989, when the UN General Assembly adopted “the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)”. This was soon followed, in 1990, by the remarkable World Summit for Children, at which 159 Heads of State and Government and other high-level representatives proclaimed that 'there can be no task nobler than giving every child a better future'. Step towards better future Like parental care and support, the governments at the Summit promised that they would always act in the 'best interests of the child' and ensure that children would have 'first call' on all resources.
To put these promises into effect they established a Plan of Action incorporating 27 specific goals relating to children's survival, health, nutrition, education and protection. This focus on children continued. Ten years later, in 2000, the world's leaders met and signed the Millennium Declaration, pledging 'to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty'. After that incident, they had made a commitment of different targets which made its identity with the name of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These all series were meant for children welfare and rights protection for them.
To make its foundation much stronger, these series of commitments were re-established in the month of May of 2002.In this act, the General Assembly dedicated all its 27th Special Session, especially for children, which paved the way of rewinding the progress from thesummit of the year 1990. While acknowledging many achievements, they concluded that they were still falling short. They adopted a Declaration committing them to seizing 'this historic opportunity to change the world for children'. The resulting plan of action aimed to create a world fit for children, one in which all children get the best possible start in life. The plan emphasized that families, the basic units of society, have the primary responsibility, and that they and other caregivers should have the appropriate support so they can enable children to grow in a safe and stable environment. With the plan, governments committed to a time bound set of specific goals, strategies and actions in four priority areas: