Submitted by ssaliba on
[11 June 2014] - Halima was three years old when she was raped in a camp in Mogadishu. Now five, she is traumatised, incontinent and probably infertile.
Roha, a Syrian teenager, witnessed the rape of a 12-year-old neighbour who was being "punished" for her father fighting with rebel forces. "I saw this with my own eyes, and I can never stop seeing it now," she said later.
Martine was 14 when she was abducted by armed men in the Democratic Republic of Congo. "They would choose the youngest to take to their chiefs. The chiefs would rape us," she recalled. She was later dumped, bleeding and pregnant.
Children are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence in conflict, experiencing rape, gang-rape, sexual slavery and forced marriage, according the UN's special representative on children and armed conflict, Leila Zerrougui.
"They are easier to abduct, manipulate and abuse," she told the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in London. Often their families were absent, or were living in camps with precarious security. "Families are also sometimes helpless to protect children; parents can be coerced into handing them over."
Rape and other forms of sexual violence against children was often unreported because they felt guilty, ashamed or feared stigmatisation or rejection, Zerrougui added. Children were "soft targets".
According to the UN agency for children, Unicef, more than 150 million girls and 73 million boys experience sexual violence every year, with children in conflict zones being the most vulnerable. The recentabduction of more than 200 schoolgirls in northern Nigeria had highlighted the dangers that many children face every day in countries such as Central African Republic, South Sudan, Somalia, Congo and Syria.
"Sexual violence against children can cause life-altering and long-term physical, emotional, psychological and social damage. These devastating consequences for children and their communities lead to ongoing cycles of abuse and poverty, putting future generations of children at further risk of sexual violence," Unicef said.
It added: "During conflict, sexual violence can become the norm and remain ingrained in culture long after the war is over."
Unicef's child protection chief in Somalia, Sheema Sen Gupta, said that the majority of cases the agency was dealing with there related to sexual violence against children. Young women and girls living in camps were particularly vulnerable, with some being raped repeatedly. On top of the trauma of rape, stigma meant the marriage prospects for young women and girls was damaged, she said – and older women were often divorced by their husbands.
Unicef and Save the Children called for children to be at the centre of international efforts to end impunity for sexual violence in conflict.