Unicef Child Quotes

Adolescence is a period of life when the brain is malleable, and it represents a good opportunity for learning and social development. However, according to UNICEF, 40 percent of the world’s teenagers have no access to secondary-school education. The percentage of teenage girls who lack this access is much higher, yet there is strong evidence that the education of girls in developing countries has many significant benefits for family health, population growth rates, child mortality rates, and HIV rates, as well as for women’s self-esteem and quality of life. Adolescence represents a time of brain development when teaching and training should be particularly beneficial. I worry about the lost opportunity of denying the world’s teenagers access to education.

Nigeria is not alone, either in the prevalence of child marriage or in attempts to end the practice. In September 2008, Moroccan officials closed sixty Koranic schools operated by Sheikh Mohamed Ben Abderrahman Al-Maghraoui, because he issued a decree justifying marriage to girls as young as nine. “The sheikh,” according to Agence France-Presse, “said his decree was based on the fact that the Prophet Mohammed consummated his marriage to his favourite wife when she was that age.”23 It should come as no surprise, then, given the words of the Koran about divorcing prepubescent women and Muhammad’s example in marrying Aisha, that in some areas of the Islamic world the practice of child marriage enjoys the blessing of the law. Time magazine reported in 2001 that “in Iran the legal age for marriage is nine for girls, fourteen for boys,” and notes that “the law has occasionally been exploited by pedophiles, who marry poor young girls from the provinces, use and then abandon them. In 2000 the Iranian Parliament voted to raise the minimum age for girls to fourteen, but this year, a legislative oversight body dominated by traditional clerics vetoed the move.”24 Likewise, the New York Times reported in 2008 that in Yemen, “despite a rising tide of outrage, the fight against the practice is not easy. Hard-line Islamic conservatives, whose influence has grown enormously in the past two decades, defend it, pointing to the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a 9-year-old.”25 (The characterization of proponents of Islamic law as “conservatives” is notable—the Times doesn’t seem fazed by the fact that “conservatives” in the U.S. are not typically advocates of child marriage.) And so child marriage remains prevalent in many areas of the Islamic world. In 2007, photographer Stephanie Sinclair won the UNICEF Photo of the Year competition for a wedding photograph of an Afghani couple: the groom was said to be forty years old but looked older; the bride was eleven. UNICEF Patroness Eva Luise Köhler explained, “The UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007 raises awareness about a worldwide problem. Millions of girls are married while they are still under age. Most of theses child brides are forever denied a self-determined life.”26 According to UNICEF, about half the women in Afghanistan are married before they reach the age of eighteen.27

partnership with UNICEF, IKEA requires all its suppliers to recognize the Convention on the Rights of the Child and makes regular spot-checks to ensure that no children are working. The UNICEF-IKEA project also helps set up women’s self-help groups in the communities in which they operate, and works to ensure that every child is immunized and in school.

Each year millions of children die from easy to beat disease, from malnutrition, and from bad drinking water. Among these children, about 3 million die from dehydrating diarrhea. As UNICEF has made clear to millions of us well-off American adults at one time or another, with a packet of oral rehydration salts that costs about 15 cents, a child can be saved from dying soon. By sending checks earmarked for Oral Rehydration Therapy, or ORT, to the U.S. Committee for UNICEF, we Americans can help save many of these children. Here's the full mailing address: U.S. Fund for UNICEF 125 Maiden Lane New York, NY 10038 Now, you can write that address on an envelope well prepared for mailing. And, in it, you can place a $100 check made out to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF along with a note that's easy to write: WHERE IT WILL HELP THE MOST, USE THE ENCLOSED FUNDS FOR ORT. So, as is reasonable to believe, you can easily make a big difference for vulnerable children. [...] With our $3 figure in mind, we do well to entertain this proposition: If you'd contributed $100 to one of UNICEF's most efficient lifesaving programs a couple of months ago, this month there'd be over thirty fewer children who, instead of painfully dying soon, would live reasonably long lives. Nothing here's special to the months just mentioned; similar thoughts hold for most of what's been your adult life, and most of mine, too. And, more important, unless we change our behavior, similar thoughts will hold for our future. That nonmoral fact moved me to do the work in moral philosophy filling this volume.

And, despite the Republican Party’s attempt to link migrants with child sex trafficking and a fentanyl crisis, those claims are unsubstantiated. According to UNICEF, most U.S. domestic trafficking victims are in fact U.S. citizens rather than undocumented immigrants, and according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the majority of fentanyl that is crossing the southern border is being smuggled through official ports of entry by U.S. citizens, not by asylum seekers.