The Crisis of Disposable Children: How Conflict Reinforces Child Exploitation

by Allen Mantilla

Photo from Unicef

During the adoption of the UDHR on December 10, 1948, the international community affirmed the human rights of all people, yet the specific rights and protections of children were still left out. Children continued to endure the same oppressive conditions that governments had long failed to address. This was not the first time children had been excluded from international treaties and conventions.

It wasn’t until November 20th, 1989, that world leaders at the United Nations signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Although 196 countries have since signed and ratified the treaty, the United States has signed it but has not yet ratified it.

The persistence of child exploitation in conflict zones is not caused by a lack of international awareness but by the failure of governments, humanitarian organizations, and global economic systems to prioritize enforcement for the political and financial interests of the elites while children continue to suffer in exploitive conditions.

Children are often recruited to fight wars, sold into sexual slavery, forced into child marriages, or forced into exploitive labor. The children of war are disposable to the elites and politicians who make money off the practices of modern-day slavery. Well-known organizations such as the International Labour Organization (ILO), UNICEF, Child Labour Coalition (CLC), and Human Rights Watch have constantly spoken out against the brutality children face in conflict-ridden countries. Yet progress has been limited in helping these children and their families in beneficial ways.

Humanitarian aid is often directed toward other crises such as famines, genocides, and water shortages. Although children do receive aid through these efforts, budget cuts and shifting resource allocations are limiting the number of children who can actually be helped. Humanitarian aid for children is largely funded by three major countries: the United States, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates. However, cuts to foreign aid under the current U.S. president, Donald Trump, have tightened humanitarian aid budgets globally and redirected funding toward political priorities that do not directly address child exploitation.

In an article titled “The Human Cost of U.S. Aid Cuts: What’s at Stake for the World’s Children,” published by UNICEF and written by Michael J. Nyenhuis, the organization explains how the loss of funding could seriously damage progress toward child labor reform. One paragraph states, “The reduction of this kind of flexible money can have life and death consequences for children. For instance, UNICEF estimates that nearly 13 million children in West and Central Africa risk losing access to health services because of the loss of flexible funding, including the cut last week.”

Since then, in multiple countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Palestine, child exploitation has continued to thrive where states have collapsed, and protections for children are weak or nonexistent. Yet, this issue is not limited to conflict zones; it exists worldwide. Children are especially vulnerable because they are more easily influenced and shaped. When they grow up surrounded purely by violence against their communities, generational poverty, and the devastation of war, they are often coerced into the same exploitative systems that failed to protect them in the first place.

According to the International Labour Organization, “Child labour statistical profile: Arab States”, many children are forced into hazardous workplace environments. It states, “A very high share of child labour is hazardous in nature. Nearly two-thirds of all 5 to 11-year-olds in child labour, and over three-quarters of all 12–14 year-olds in child labour, are in hazardous work that directly endangers their health, safety, and moral development.” They speak on how children are often forced to work in agricultural sites, especially boys. Girls have the highest forced labor rates in domestic labor.

The International Labour Organization is not the only institution documenting these conditions. Research done by the National Library of Medicine reinforces the fact that South Asian countries have the highest rate of child labour. “South Asia accounts for some of the highest rates of child labour globally, with over 41 million children aged 5–14 engaged in work, many of them in hazardous conditions and excluded from education. Within the SAARC region, countries such as Nepal and Afghanistan record particularly severe prevalence rates. The persistence of child labour in these nations is driven by entrenched poverty, limited access to quality education, weak enforcement of labour regulations, and systemic social inequalities.”

The persistence of child labour extends beyond the Middle East and reflects broader structural inequalities across developing regions. These countries are aware of the harm these conflicts cause to children. We have yet to see political and policy reform to strengthen and protect the rights of all children.

When countries that are stricken by wars and genocides are trying to rebuild, there are often no community programs targeting children who have been displaced, unhoused, underfed, and denied access to education. There is not “enough” funding to help build schools or other beneficial programs for children.

Wealthier countries whose ideological systems are rooted in neoliberalism often benefit from the exploitation of children. Large corporations outsource labor to countries in the Middle East and Latin America because the labor is cheaper. At the same time, many of the countries with the highest rates of child labor are also some of the richest in minerals and other valuable resources. Because of this, many leaders are incentivized to turn a blind eye or maintain systems that allow child labor to continue.

The dependency theory reinforces the idea that developing countries rely on core countries as their primary source of wealth and economic stability. In these systems, children are often exploited through forced labour, sexual violence, recruitment into militias, domestic labour, and other forms of abuse.

Although international organizations repeatedly document these human rights violations, enforcement mechanisms remain weak because major powers are often unwilling to impose political or economic consequences on allied states and armed groups. In many cases, the same countries that publicly condemn child exploitation continue to support or fund the groups keeping it in power.

As a result, children continue to be failed by the international community. Budget cuts have further slowed child rights reform and weakened programs designed to protect children living in conflict zones and poverty-stricken countries. Political incentives to ignore child exploitation continue to undermine reform efforts to tackle the exploitation of children in countries where there is political instability, poverty, and conflict.

Works Cited

• Convention on the Rights of the Child — UNICEF
• Humanitarian aid’s extreme donor dependency problem in five charts — thenewhumanitarian.org
• Foreign Aid Funding Cuts Harm the World’s Children — UNICEF
• Child labour statistical profile: Arab States — www.ilo.org
• Breaking the cycle: long-term socio-economic determinants of child labour in SAARC countries — pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• A Comprehensive and Critical Literature Review of Dependency Theory from 2005 to 2025 in the Context of the Digital Age — www.preprints.org