More than half a million Asian children working in sweatshops, brothels and on the streets are silent victims of the region's economic boom, a United Nations report said on December 15, 1995.
The world's fastest pace of economic growth, enjoyed by countries of the East Asia and Pacific region, has left large groups of society in poverty, hastening the collapse of traditional standards and safety-nets, the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said.
"We are seeing the erosion of family values and that includes the exploitation of children," the agency's regional director Daniel Brooks told a news conference.
"We take them for granted, we say children are the future, but we don't make provision for the future," said Ambassador Sandra Mason, deputy chairperson of the Geneva-based U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child.
Mason, from Barbados, said however that governments had responded well to a Convention on the Rights of the Child, which had been ratified by 17 countries in the region.
UNICEF said its statistics showed that in Thailand, there were 10,000 street children and 100,000 child prostitutes.
"Children should be looked on as a resource. Thailand is one of the countries which is going to have to come to grips with the protection of its natural resources," said UNICEF representative Anthony Hewett.
In Cambodia, 20 percent of all beggars are children, and China has 200,000 street children; Indonesia has 50,000 working children, 75,000 in Malaysia, 15,000 street working children and 100,000 child prostitutes in the Philippines, and 50,000 homeless children in Vietnam.
"One problem is that families lose their land and come to Hanoi. They have no money, the girls become prostitutes and get arrested," a Vietnamese woman attending a UNICEF seminar on legal protection for children, told a reporter.
The plight of youngsters in East Asia and the Pacific, contained in UNICEF's State of the World's Children report, was linked to rapid industrialization, the report, published on Thursday said.
"When the destitute and the desperate are increasingly young, uprooted, urbanized, knowing far more about the world than their parents did and expecting far more from it," the report said, the result was "social disintegration, rise of crime, violence, alcoholism and drug abuse."
Violence against women was named as one main factor.
"About a quarter of the world's women are violently abused in their own homes. Community-based surveys have yielded higher figures - up to 60 percent in Papua New Guinea and the Republic of Korea and 80 percent in Pakistan," it said.
The scourge of AIDS, which has fallen disproportionately on women and children and isolated communities, was another result of the region's rapid social change.
The growing threat of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome to women and children "will not diminish until women have more power to say no to sex, to choose their own partners and to influence sexual behaviour," the report said. (Reuter).
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