Halting the slaughter of innocence

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Summer Wildcat Mary fan

Children are the world's cheapest commodity these days.

And in the big business of war there is a hungry, bottomless market.

Experts estimate that 300,000 children across 50 nations are being tossed into war as soldiers, as porters and often as "all-purpose slaves," according to a recent New York Times article.

The sharp rise in the number of children taking up arms is testimony to the global "culture of violence and indiscriminate killing at end of the 20th century," UNICEF Director Stephen Lewis said at a United Nations meeting this month.

The exploitation should have slowed rather than risen following the 1989 Convention on the rights of the child, which the United Nations still points weakly toward as a show of global solidarity against the exploitation of children and murder of innocence.

But global solidarity is lacking for the children's rights document. Two nations have refused to ratify and sign the document even today, as the United Nations is mulling over ways to curb the alarming rise in the number of child soldiers.

You'd think the holdouts are the troubled, "savage" nations that have no qualms about sending kids off to an early horror of bullet-busted heads erupting in blood and splintered bone (hey, in some nations it's not just the movies) and the hell of dodging bullets, mass graves and land mines.

You'd think.

But the United States is one of the two.

The champion of human rights, the land of the free, the light to all nations has joined war-ravaged Somalia in refusing to support the measure.

And why? Well, it's a simple thing really. You see, you only have to be 17 here to be recruited. The proposal the United Nations is considering would set the minimum age at 18. Which means if the United States were to ratify the convention, we must reset minimum age for recruitment at 18, the same age at which someone can join combat. That would take some tinkering with current law. You know, change. And rather than disturb the status quo, the United States stubbornly refuses to recognize the children rights convention.

Hey, signing the treaty would not involve national disarmament here, nor disruption of all our armed forces. It just calls for a slight modification of law, of recruitment policy.

And in return we strike for a return for innocence. We stand for human rights in action as well as word.

And we join the nations lined across the rushing flood toward self-destruction through destruction of youth.

Make no mistake, our strength is great. And the destruction wrought by our refusal to support human rights measures is equally great. There are always those crouched in the shadows, waiting to stretch the boundaries of decency as far as they will go. Testing their limits, testing the commitment of those arrayed against them.

And they are pushing the limits for all they are worth right now. They are feeding children to the twin demons of sex and war virtually unchecked.

We see it in Thailand, where girls as young as 11 or 12 are forced into prostitution - the nation's greatest industry.

We see it in the 2 million children killed and 6 million seriously injured or permanently disabled by warfare in the last decade.

America may think that because the exploitation are in foreign nations, we should not care. But the attitudes and violence spill over.

We are seeing it in the waves of schoolyard killings, in the proliferation of horrific tales of child abuse and death. We are seeing it in the hunger for increasingly violent media. We are feeling it at every funeral, in the crushed face of every parent asking, "Why?"

We can no longer stand apart and say we are immune. We can no longer afford not to ratify a worldwide agreement that promises a global solidarity against the creeping plague of exploitation and murder of innocence.

Signing the treaty is a simple act that carries heavy weight. The act says that even the bold, brash ingenue America is fearing and feeling the global death of innocence and it's time for a call to a different kind of arms.

Mary Fan is a molecular and cellular biology and journalism junior. Her column appears weekly in the Arizona Summer Wildcat.