18% of world’s population are between 10 and 19 years old*

The targets set by the UN Millennium Development Goals in 2000 focused on young children; however UNICEF’s annual State of the World’s Children report highlights the more pressing need that is currently being experienced by adolescents worldwide.

This comes as new figures show that almost 20% of all young people today suffer from mental health problems like depression. Other problems commonly experienced by adolescents include increasingly low educational attainment, unemployment, and substance abuse.

Adolescents are an important focus as:

  • it is their right, under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to receive resources equally, and with no discrimination, as do younger children
  • investing in adolescents also ensures that the progress made for children since 1990 will be sustained
  • adolescents represent an opportunity to fight poverty because they occupy a pivotal age group that can potentially pass the burden of poverty and inequity to the next generation if it is not addressed
  • adolescents are subject to increasing unemployment rates, as they are disproportionately represented in many developing countries where economic and political challenges are pressing, and
  • adolescents tend to have the greatest needs, but little attention is paid to them.

On average, children in Australia are among the most privileged in the world but a report, by the National Child Rights Taskforce, into Australia’s compliance with an earlier UN report on child welfare has found large disparities remain.

The two key areas of concern are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and children in out-of-home care and in immigration detention centres.

UNICEF Australia’s chief executive, Norman Gillespie says the average child in Australia is doing well but worries for children in the bottom 20%.

“I think it is that disparity that we really have to care about and our fear is that that bottom 20% is getting further away, left behind and certainly not listened to,” he said.

“Aboriginal children under 5 are 3 times more liable to die before the age of 5. Homelessness is up 51% and a great majority of that are Aboriginal people again.”

“Aboriginal youths in custody … twenty-eight times more than their non-Aboriginal peers.”

The director of the National Children’s and Youth Law Centre, Matthew Keeley says “There’s an inexplicable increase in the numbers of young people in out-of-home care. So it is the case that the lucky country is not so lucky for a great too many children and young people in Australia.”

The taskforce is recommending the establishment of a national commissioner for children.

* UNICEF’s annual State of the World’s Children report

Writer Helen Splarn. Editor Dr Ramesh Manocha.
Source: ABC News