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The plight of 230 million children around the world

It is an oxymoron, but it is always the innocents who suffer.  And so it with children around the world caught up in one conflict or another, famine or now the Ebola epidemic.    The latest UNICEF Report paints a bleak picture for some 230 million children worldwide - said to be the worst situation ever.

"Charging that the world has largely looked the other way, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) on Monday released a new report which concludes 2014 was one of the worst years on record for the overall welfare of children, with over 15 million young people directly harmed by the world's worst conflicts and hundreds of millions more indirectly harmed.

According to the UNICEF statement (pdf), worsening unrest throughout many parts of the world has exposed increasing numbers of children to extreme violence, with war, disease, and other crises leading many to become targets of groups in conflict with one another, often recruiting them as soldiers or selling them into slavery.

"This has been a devastating year for millions of children," said UNICEF executive director Anthony Lake. "Children have been killed while studying in the classroom and while sleeping in their beds; they have been orphaned, kidnapped, tortured, recruited, raped and even sold as slaves. Never in recent memory have so many children been subjected to such unspeakable brutality."

An estimated 230 million children currently live in areas affected by armed conflict, UNICEF reported (pdf). In places like the Central African Republic, Iraq, South Sudan, Ukraine, Syria, and Palestine, children face not only death and violence, but also displacement, malnutrition, and loss of access to education and other public services.

Meanwhile, the Ebola crises in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia have left thousands of children orphaned and roughly five million out of school.

The U.S.-led fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria has also contributed significantly to the child welfare epidemic. Ongoing conflicts in those areas have turned more than 1.7 million children into refugees, while women and girls face sex trafficking and forced marriage."

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