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What makes a child vulnerable?
Many kinds of circumstances make children vulnerable. Often poor living conditions threaten their normal, healthy development or stand in the way of them becoming productive, self-sustaining adults. These can be risks to children’s safety and health, such as exposure to disease, poor nutrition, and abuse. They can also be risks to the children’s social and emotional development such as long working hours and separation from caring adults, as well as risks to the children’s intellectual development, such as lack of opportunities to attend school to learn basic skills that will help them secure a job in the future.
Many of these children fall into more than one category. For instance, many homeless children in Africa are orphans, and many child victims of trafficking are HIV-positive. One label does not reflect all the risks these children are exposed to and minimizes the many challenges that stand between them and a healthy, empowered future. For these reasons we prefer the catch-all term ‘vulnerable children’.
Specific categories of vulnerability include:
The AIDS Orphan Crisis
One of the most difficult challenges of the HIV epidemic is supporting
the growing number of children orphaned and made vulnerable by
AIDS.
Between 2001 and 2003, the number of children orphaned due to
AIDS increased from 11.5 million to 15 million. While nearly
80 percent of these orphans are in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe
are quickly catching up. By 2010, researchers predict that up
to 25 million children will lose their parents to AIDS. Millions
of other children will be made vulnerable by the epidemic—including
those whose survival, well-being, and development are threatened
by AIDS.
Voices for Vulnerable Children is helping AIDS orphans by strengthening programs that work with and care for these children.
To learn more about the AIDS Orphan Crisis, click the following links:
The Bantwana Initiative (an initiative of World Education to support AIDS orphans)
AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa: a looming threat to future generations
Child Labor
Poverty and lack of educational opportunities force children to work. While no one knows the real numbers of child laborers, some groups estimate that around 73 million kids under the age of 10 are engaged in child labor.
Much of the work that children are forced to do is destructive or exploitive. The most common forms of exploitative child labor worldwide include domestic service, commercial sex work, industrial work, plantation work, and street work. Children must often leave school to start working.
Children who are forced to work face many dangers. There are physical risks (for example exposure to pesticides and diseases, unsupervised use of machinery, long hours, poor working conditions), social and emotional risks (including lack of age-appropriate activities, limited contact with peers, damage to self-esteem), and other long-term costs such as the fact that not being able to attend school leaves a child without the skills and knowledge necessary to find less hazardous work in the future.
To learn more about child labor, click the following links:
UNICEF Report on Child Labor and tips on what you can do to help
International Labor Organization Program on Child Labor, including helpful statistics
Child Trafficking
Child trafficking can be another way of talking about child labor, but emphasizes the way that children are moved. Trafficked children are taken from their homes, are typically held captive either by force or psychological coercion, and are forced to work or participate in other exploitative situations.
Child trafficking worldwide is big business. The most recent statistics note that over 1.2 million children worldwide have been trafficked.
Trafficking is traditionally associated with the commercial sex trade or with domestic servants, but actually involves both boys and girls working in a variety of other hazardous situations as well. Begging, bonded labor (when the child is sold to traffickers for a time to pay off a family debt), and other illicit activities like burglaries are a few of the dangerous ways children are trafficked. Other children are trafficked not for labor but as resources, as in illegal adoptions, forced marriages, or as involuntary organ donors.
Sadly, the people who traffic children are most often family friends, relatives, or community members. In many parts of the world traffickers are not seen as criminals, but as people skilled in helping others find work. It is not until the transportation is complete and the children are without any other support or recourse that the exploitation begins.
As with child labor, poverty and lack of opportunities are driving factors contributing to the trafficking of children, with corruption and lack of reliable information helping to facilitate the process.
To learn more about child trafficking, click the following links:
Report on child trafficking and details on what you can do to help stop it
Frequently asked questions on child trafficking
