Source: UNICEF
During ten years of civil war, from 1991 to 2002, the children of Sierra Leone were deliberately and routinely targeted, and witnessed widespread and systematic acts of violence and abuse. The Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimated that more than ten thousand children were abducted as child soldiers. Thousands more were victims of rape, mutilation, forced prostitution and sexual exploitation. Among the thirty thousand people who were disappeared in Argentina between 1976 and 1983 were an estimated five hundred pregnant women and young children. The military kept pregnant women captive and subjected them to torture until the birth of their babies. The infants were then taken from their mothers, and many were placed in the homes of military or police officers. The mothers were never seen again. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel force fighting the Government of Uganda, has abducted over sixty thousand Ugandan children and youth over the past two decades. Among the war-affected population of northern Uganda, one in six female adolescents has been abducted by the LRA. They have been forced to perform domestic labor and subjected to slavery-like conditions, used for fighting and for sexual purposes.
Children were among the primary victims of South Africa’s apartheid regime. In just the two years between 1984 and 1986, three hundred children were killed by the police, one thousand wounded, eleven thousand detained without trial, eighteen thousand arrested on charges arising out of protest and 173,000 held awaiting
trial in police cells. Children constituted between 25 percent and 46 percent of detainees at any one time during this period. During the armed conflict in El Salvador from 1980 to 1992, the military raided villages suspected of being rebel support bases. Families were separated; the parents were often killed and the children taken to orphanages. Some of these children were adopted by military or police households and others were put up for international adoption. It is believed that the military were responsible for the disappearance of hundreds of infants and children.
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