CHILDREN-ASIA-PACIFIC: Paying a High Price for Success (1)

BANGKOK, Dic 15 (IPS) - Most countries in the Asia-Pacific have made substantial progress in ensuring the rights of children, but the region's young continue to pay a high price for the Asia- Pacific's economic success.

According to a new report released here Thursday by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the region is on track of achieving the mid-decade goals set by the 1990 World Summit for Children in the fields of health, nutrition, basic education, safe water and sanitation.

Child death rates have also fallen in the region, which also boasts of a positive trend in under-five mortality rates.

But the Asia-Pacific, which has the fastest rising economic growth rate in the world, is also home to hundreds of thousands of children who are being abused, exploited, economically deprived and forced to live under difficult circumstances, says UNICEF in its 'State of the World's Children 1995' report.

Indeed, there are more than half a million children working in sweatshops, brothels and on streets across the region. There are 10,000 streetchildren and 100,000 child prostitutes in Thailand alone, 300,000 drug users, 500,000 slum children and 200,000 abandoned children.

Twenty percent of beggars in Cambodia are children. There are 8.2 million disabled children and 200,000 street children in China, 50,000 street working children and 100,000 child prostitutes in the Philippines and 50,000 homeless children in Vietnam.

Worse, AIDS has not spared the young, with Thailand's Mahidol University suggesting in a recent study that the country's under- five mortality rate will rise by 10 percent before the end of the century because of the onslaught of the dreaded disease.

Rapid social changes in the Asia-Pacific have also led to the breakdown of community values and the fraying of social safety nets.

As a result, the UNICEF report says, a growing number of the region's countries are now struggling to protect children, especially those in urban slums and poor communities, against victimisation.

"When the destitute and the desperate are increasingly young, uprooted, urbanised, knowing far more about the world than their parents did and expecting far more from it, the almost inevitable result is an increase in social disintegration, rise of crime violence, alcoholism and drug abuse," it warns.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service