Publications

This Report looks at the changes in risks facing the 100 million children in the 18 countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Eight types of risk are considered in turn: poverty; war and dislocation; environmental degradation; health and health service deterioration; changes in family formation including rising family-breakdown rates; falling access to education and rising truancy; youth lifestyle and health including an increase in drug abuse and the occurrence of sexually transmitted diseases; juvenile crime. The Report also indicates that institutional care, fostering and adoption remain in need of sweeping reform, examines the failure of substitute care and emphasizes the preventive role of family support policies.

The seventh Innocenti Global Seminar, held in Florence in October 1996, brought together participants with a wide range of experiences and perspectives to discuss discrimination against ethnic minorities, immigrants and indigenous peoples and to suggest how their needs can be better accommodated in programming and advocacy. The Report emphasizes participation, education and empowerment and calls for systematic attention to be paid to minority populations in all situation analyses. While it recognizes that the political climate in many countries can make advocacy on behalf of minority groups difficult, it also stresses that the near-universal ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child brings with it an obligation to speak out for the rights of all children, and particularly the most disadvantaged.

Le rapport prend en considération un éventail d'indicateurs non économiques parmi lesquels diverses mesures de transformations démographiques, telles que les tendances de la mortalité, de la fécondité, du mariage et du divorce. Ces changements peuvent présenter de l'intérêt par eux-mêmes, mais aussi être un indicateur de tendances économiques et sociales sous-jacentes difficiles à mesurer directement.

Questa pubblicazione è una sintesi del quarto Regional Monitoring Report che copre 18 paesi dell'Europa Centrale ed Orientale e dell'ex Unione Sovietica. Il quarto rapporto contiene: un aggiornamento sui cambiamenti nelle condizioni di vita delle famiglie e dell'infanzia; un indagine sui fattori di rischio per l'infanzia durante la transizione; un'analisi speciale sui bambini affidati alle cure pubbliche.

This Report looks at the changes in risks facing the 100 million children in the 18 countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Eight types of risk are considered in turn: poverty; war and dislocation; environmental degradation; health and health service deterioration; changes in family formation including rising family-breakdown rates; falling access to education and rising truancy; youth lifestyle and health including an increase in drug abuse and the occurrence of sexually transmitted diseases; juvenile crime. The Report also indicates that institutional care, fostering and adoption remain in need of sweeping reform, examines the failure of substitute care and emphasizes the preventive role of family support policies.

The children of an ethnic group, race or religious denomination represent its continuity - they embody a potential for future diversity. This has resulted throughout history in their extreme vulnerability in times of conflict among or involving such groups: they are perceived as the enemies of the future and made prime targets of genocide. Children are also the main victims of less obvious manifestations of ‘everyday’, peacetime discrimination, as infant mortality, infant morbidity and educational attainment data from every part of the world has shown. To investigate ways in which to address these issues, the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre organised a meeting on ‘Discrimination Against Children of Minority Groups and Indigenous Peoples’ in 1994. This publication brings together abridged versions of its main discussion papers.

In India, as in other countries, the rise in the number of street and working children is associated with the phenomenon of rapid urban growth, especially of sprawling slums and shanty towns. The predicament of the urban child "in difficult circumstances" is inextricable from these conditions of urban poverty in which he and she is brought up. The first point of any enquiry into childhood in India's slums and squatter settlements, therefore, has to be the entire living context of poor urban children: physical, environmental, socio-economic, and familial. Unless the child's family is made the target of understanding and improvement, there is not likely to be sustained amelioration of the children's current plight or future prospects.