Director-General/Executive Director
SRSG Najat,
Excellencies,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Dear friends,
I am pleased to welcome you all today to the launch of our new joint strategy to end violence against children.
I would like to begin by extending my thanks and gratitude to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence against Children whose dedication to this cause is truly admirable.
As a mother and grandmother, I’m intimately familiar with the instinct to protect children.
The emotional connection we share with them is profound, and witnessing a child fall victim to harm is an anguish like no other.
No child should suffer violence in any way, and no parent should suffer the loss of a child.
As we discuss violence against children today, I am compelled to mention Gaza, where health officials have reported that over 5,000 children have lost their lives in the past month, their dreams buried under rubble, their hopes turned to ash.
The UN Secretary-General described it as a “graveyard for children,” and UNICEF has labelled it “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.”
We have also seen – in that same conflict – innocent children suffering the horrors of being taken as hostages.
My thoughts extend to all children affected by this tragedy and by all crises raging around the world today, from Ukraine, to Sudan, Haiti, Afghanistan, and beyond.
Children must be free to be just that – children – free to learn, play, and grow in a safe environment.
Yet, violence around the world is robbing them of these opportunities, leaving them defenceless to act.
Defenceless in the face of an accelerating climate crisis forcing them from their homes.
Defenceless against the recruitment and exploitation of organized criminal networks and armed groups, including terrorist organizations.
And defenceless against online abuse in the lawless corners of the internet.
Our latest Global Report on Trafficking in Persons reveals that one in three trafficking victims identified globally is a child, experiencing physical or extreme violence at twice the rate of adult victims.
Children are being increasingly deprived of their liberty by being coerced into hard labour or performing criminal activities.
In 2022, over 85,000 children were recruited as child soldiers, forced to commit atrocious acts on behalf of their captors, and countless more have been kidnapped or recruited by gangs and organized criminal networks.
Many are also being stripped of their dignity as they suffer horrifying sexual abuse and exploitation both offline and online.
New advances in technology and artificial intelligence are amplifying the speed at which child sexual abuse material is proliferating on the internet.
According to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, over 32 million reports of suspected child sexual abuse material were registered by internet service providers in 2022.
Such violence is not an isolated incident, it is a cycle that has a lasting impact on children, marked not just by physical scars but mental and psychological ones, too.
Every time a child is violated, the trauma could stay with them for years and affect their development into adulthood, making them more likely to become aggressive themselves.
Today, we are taking a step towards breaking this cycle.
Together with the SRSG, we are launching a comprehensive new strategy which focuses on four priority areas:
First, the strategy will seek to address the conditions that drive contexts of insecurity where children’s lives are marked by the prevalence of conflict, organized crime, and terrorism.
To effectively tackle these threats, we must ensure the protection of children, even those who have been recruited by these groups to commit acts of violence.
The circumstances for these children’s actions should not define them, and States should not choose between security interests at the expense of child rights, otherwise we are only creating the conditions for the resurgence of conflict, terrorism, and crime in the future.
Second, we will commit to strengthen justice systems that have a key role to play in tackling violence against children.
Our goal will be to embrace restorative justice over traditional punitive measures, to ensure that children can be safely rehabilitated back into their communities.
Protection must also be extended to children in cyberspace. Our third priority will focus on building more effective mechanisms to detect, target, and remove child sexual abuse material from the internet, including to prevent such material from being reuploaded.
In doing so, I plan to partner with sister UN entities such as ITU, and with governments, civil society, internet service providers, and telecommunication companies to enhance protection and accountability through a survivor-centered approach.
Last but not least, our fourth priority will be the protection of children on the move, especially the unaccompanied and those separated from their parents, who face higher risks of crime and exploitation.
Our goal should not simply be to stop violence when it occurs, but to build the mechanisms to prevent children’s involvement in crime and violence; create mechanisms to hold perpetrators accountable; and foster responses that support the recovery and reintegration of child victims back into their communities.
Excellencies,
Protecting children from violence is a cross-cutting priority of the Sustainable Development Goals.
According to the Overseas Development Institute, the overall cost of violence against children is estimated to be as high as $7 trillion, or 8 percent of world GDP, with an economic burden on education, healthcare, and criminal justice systems.
There cannot be sustainable development without addressing this epidemic of violence.
Our new strategy will direct our work to end violence against children for the coming years as we approach the deadline of Agenda 2030.
It will be guided by our Action Plan for 2023-2024, which will build into the respective mandates of the Office of the SRSG and UNODC.
It will also leverage our collaboration with other UN entities, such as UNICEF, through the Inter-Agency Working Group to End Violence Against Children led by the SRSG, as well as the Inter-Agency Coordination Group Against Trafficking in Persons, which earlier this month adopted an important call to action to end child trafficking.
UNODC has a key role to play and is actively involved in bringing together legal experts, researchers, and psychosocial support specialists, to ensure that child rights are mainstreamed across development, rule of law, humanitarian, and security efforts.
Since 2015, UNODC’s Global Programme to End Violence Against Children has been active in 66 countries across the globe, and has provided training and technical assistance to more than 10,000 professionals from the justice sector, child protection and social services, and healthcare institutions.
We have also conducted research on children’s association with terrorist and violent extremist groups, including case studies from Indonesia, Iraq, and Nigeria, to strengthen policy responses to child recruitment and to support rehabilitation and reintegration efforts.
I’m pleased that we have representatives from those countries present here today who can give us their perspectives on these issues.
We will also hear the voice of young people, whose participation will play an important role in the implementation of this strategy.
Their voices must be involved at all stages of policy-making, to guide our efforts and to empower them as agents of change in their protection.
Ladies and gentlemen,
This strategy represents a promise to today and tomorrow’s children that a world without violence is possible.
We now have a responsibility to live up to that promise in the years ahead.
Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan once said: “There is no duty more important than ensuring that children’s rights are respected, that their welfare is protected, that their lives are free from fear and want, and that they grow up in peace.”
Today, we are taking up that duty, to ensure children can live in a world free from violence.
Thank you.