UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Nearly 25,000 children caught in conflict were victims of a record number of violations last year, including killings, rape and recruitment to fight, and for the first time, government forces — not armed groups — were the main perpetrators, a new United Nations report says.Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ annual report, released this week, has a blacklist of violators against children: government forces from eight nations and 67 armed groups from 16 countries and territories.The number of violations — which also include abductions, attacks on schools and hospitals, and denial of humanitarian access to help them — rose for a fourth straight year to 38,558, according to the report that is based on verified U.N. data. It said 24,174 children, a third of them girls, were affected, with several thousand subjected to multiple violations.
“The scale and persistence of these violations demand more than acknowledgment — they demand resolve,” the U.N. special representative for children in armed conflict, Vanessa Frazier, said in an analysis of the report.She urged the 193 U.N. member nations to confront the findings and “recognize that protecting children is not an aspiration but an obligation, and that the decisions taken today will shape the futures they may or may not live to claim.”
