Today, about 250 million children’s homes are affected by conflict.
A quarter of the world’s children – around 535 million – live in countries and communities blighted by conflict, disaster and epidemics.
In these places, many are forced to flee their homes and communities, leaving their schools and too often separated from family and friends. Without these usual protections, these children are some of the most vulnerable in the world – and are particularly vulnerable to violence.
Violence can take many forms:
We know what works to keep children safe from violence in emergencies. We support those who have survived it by investing in programmes, creating protective environments, and empowering communities, parents and children themselves.
Active in more than 80 countries to date, the It takes a world campaign aims to:
Overall, the campaign aims to impact on the lives of millions of girls and boys under 18 globally, by contributing to the end of all forms of violence against them (in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child).
All children deserve to be safe
In the United Kingdom, the campaign was launched in November 2018, asking the UK Government to make ending violence against children a priority for the UK’s humanitarian policies, programmes, and international aid.
Independent research shows that only 2.5% of all humanitarian aid given by the UK Government is spent on ending violence against children.
That’s why we called on the UK Government to invest in safer futures for the world’s children.
Our Government can make a real difference by investing in ending violence against children – making it a priority for its humanitarian aid – and by influencing other governments to do the same.
We have told the Secretary of State for International Development that keeping children safe from violence – particularly in emergencies – is important to you.
In 2019, more than 34,000 of us called on the UK Government to invest in safer futures for the world’s children. And hundreds of World Vision supporters wrote to their local MP letting them know that keeping children safe from violence must be a priority and that it takes a world to break the cycle.
Through this petition, we had meetings with the government Minister responsible for this area of policy and the calls were debated in the House of Commons.
If you added your name – thank you.
As part of the campaign, we’ve spoken with young people in the UK and other countries in which we work, to discover their views on the issues that can affect – and end – childhoods. This research has come together to form reports, reflecting the impact of violence on young people:
Child soldiers: Their fight, our future
Child marriage: No happily ever after
Here are a couple of the cases the young people discussed.
In the Kasai Region of DRC, the majority of militia members are under 18 -and more than half of these under 15). Ngala, a 10-year-old boy in Kasai tells his story:
“I was playing with friends when soldiers came and our father was killed.” Fearing for their lives, Ngala, his mother, brother and a sister, fled his grandparents, some 50km away. But he was not safe there.
“Friends asked me to go with them to Tshota (‘place of sacrifice’). They told me that I was going to get some powers to protect myself and my family, but they had planned it to initiate me into the militia.
“I stayed in the bush and I was given a machete to use as a weapon. A lot of bad things were happening. One day, a friend died after being shot by a bullet. I was very scared and I decided to escape.”
Now, Ngala is one of more than 7,000 children participating in the six Child Friendly Spaces (CFS) World Vision has set up in partnership with Cooperative Reveil de Kananga and communities in the Kasais. He says that participating in the CFS has helped him to get rid of bad memories about war.
Last year, when Karima* was 10 years old, her parents arranged her wedding ceremony. She was going to get married off to her cousin.
Karima wasn’t told it was her wedding day. Her parents just told her to go and live with her husband straight away.
She said: “I was crying. I wasn’t eating. I was very angry.”
“I told them I didn’t agree with the decision and I did not like this man. All I wanted was to go to school and get my education.”
But then Karima’s teacher spoke to a child protection committee about the marriage. They talked to her parents and the marriage was cancelled.
Karima is now back at primary school and so happy to be learning again because that’s her future. Getting married at 11 was going to would have destroyed her dreams.
But every day, she worries that she still might be forced to marry early.
*Name changed to protect her identity
