If Children’s Lives Are Precious, Which Children?

If Children’s Lives Are Precious, Which Children?



Homeless street children are regularly murdered and tortured in Brazil, Guatemala, Columbia, and elsewhere. In one notorious case in July, 1993, off-duty policemen opened fire on 50 children huddled together near Candelaria church in central Rio de Janeiro; six died immediately and two others were taken to a beach and executed. When these events were reported on the radio, most listeners voiced their approval, as did 15% of respondents in a community survey a week later. Many ordinary decent people in Brazil, who love their own children, do not refer to street children as “children”, and when they die they are not called “angels” like other children, but presunto (ham).1
Such events and attitudes symbolise much wider issues. In 1991, about 1000 street children were murdered in Brazil, 150 000 died before their first birthday through poverty, poor sanitation, and lack of health care, and a further 2 million were malnourished. Income disparities between rich and poor in Brazil are now greater even than in Bangladesh. On other continents too, Western-led economic orthodoxies put pressure on the ways of life of the least protected, and health and education standards continue to deteriorate.2 WHO says that by 2000, a third of the world’s children will be undernourished.3

Since 1989, 2 million children have died in conflicts, the underlying causes of which were frequently linked to the geopolitical and business alliances made by the West with elites entrenched in unstable and inequitable societies.4 The moral tone is set by the UN Security Council, whose members are the world’s major arms manufacturers and who must know that these weapons are mostly for internal oppression. Leaders come and go, some with Nobel Peace Prizes, but the underlying thrust of Western policy has been consistent for centuries: what evidence is there that the lives of non-Western children weigh any more than they did in the eras of slavery and Empire? 30 years of corruption and vicious misrule at home and in East Timor did not dent Western perceptions of Indonesia’s Suharto as a reliable ally and good capitalist, as was Mobutu in Zaire. Western governments started to talk about human rights and democracy only in the last weeks of his rule, probably when they saw that his fall was inevitable. With a successor in place, this talk subsided as quickly as it arose. The same calculations shape relations with Netanyahu in Israel or Zeroual in Algeria. Why does the link between rising infant mortality rates and World Bank prescriptions not haunt the reputation of Western economics and of the officials who carry it out? Who is shamed by the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children since 1991 as a result of the Western embargo?

Yet those responsible are unremarkable individuals who come home to the embraces of their children uncontaminated by thoughts of what their day’s work might do to children in Turkey, Algeria, or El Salvador; children whom they perceive as “other”. Health professionals too practise moral relativism. An Israeli psychologist, a child-trauma expert, told me that she could not bring herself to treat a Palestinian child because “I would always be thinking that his or her father was a terrorist”. Polarised attitudes may be inevitable in societies with endemic conflict, but the result is a kind of blindness with consequences of its own. Language, for example, is used to distance and debase those to whom we do not extend our notions of humanity and fraternity. To call street children in Brazil or Guatemala “vermin” is to prepare the way for atrocity, but is it so very different to use “collateral damage” for the shredding of Iraqi children and their mothers by Allied bombing during the Gulf War?
It is an aphoristic truth that both individuals and whole societies run the moral economy they can afford, or want to afford. The evils of slavery, and of children working 15-hour shifts in coal mines, were only “discovered” when evolving patterns of industrialisation rendered these forms of labour unprofitable. The question is whether we are willing to pay the price of extending to all the world’s children the sensibilities we apply to our own. For if not, and if those who are not “our” children are expendable, let us dispense with false sentimentality and say so. Over the body of one street child in Brazil was daubed, the more grotesque for its kernel of truth: “I killed you because you had no future”.


By Derek Summerfield