The year 2025 will be remembered as a tragic failure for children worldwide. Wars, conflicts, and humanitarian crises didn’t just expose young ones to trauma; they systematically dismantled childhood itself. For millions, especially those forced from their homes, 2025 was a year of prolonged abandonment, revealing a stark truth: international child protection exists largely as a legal promise, not a lived reality. Our systems designed to protect children didn’t just malfunction; they collapsed selectively.
Across regions, children paid the ultimate price, yet their deaths were often reduced to statistics or “collateral damage,” rarely framed as rights violations. In Gaza, over 20,000 children were killed since October 2023, with thousands more dying from starvation and disease. Their deaths were visible, yet accountability remained absent.
Meanwhile, in Sudan, countless children succumbed to famine and collapsed healthcare, their suffering largely unseen and unmourned, disappearing into “global indifference.” The response in Ukraine, where legal mechanisms quickly mobilized to document violations and seek justice for child deaths, painfully highlights this inequality. Syria’s children, after 14 years of conflict, now die from poverty, neglect, and explosive remnants of war, their losses becoming a normalized tragedy.
Refugee children, across all these contexts, face the most precarious existence. Often missing from official counts, their lives are governed by temporary protection and border policies, not by universal child rights. In 2025, their suffering was normalized rather than recognized as an urgent violation.
This selective application of law creates a disturbing “hierarchy of suffering.” When a child’s right to life depends on their nationality or location, rights cease to be universal. As we move into 2026, we must reject the notion that some children are more worthy of mourning than others. Our global moral record for 2025 demands better; children’s rights must be a universal guarantee, not a political privilege.
