Today the Republi-fascists are all in a frenzy about how “we have to protect children from predators.” And the Democrats paint themselves as “defenders” of children by, for example, promoting things like child tax credits for lower-income families.

Yet these same Republican fascists and Democrats both represent, uphold, and defend the system of capitalism-imperialism that ROUTINELY exploits, abuses, and brutalizes children all over the world, including in the United States. So let’s look at the reality of the lives this system provides for children.

Here are just a few examples.

Incarceration and Poverty 

• The U.S., which leads the world in the rate of people being imprisoned, incarcerates children and even puts juveniles in solitary confinement, a form of torture. On any given day, nearly 60,000 youth under age 18 are behind bars in juvenile jails and prisons in the United States.
• In September 2023, the Guardian reported that up to 80 children—almost all Black boys, some as young as 15—had been jailed with adults at the infamous Angola Prison (officially called Louisiana State Penitentiary) since October 2022. They were put in cells where death row prisoners used to await execution.

• A 2021 report found that among the 74 million children living in the United States—the richest and most powerful country in the world—11 million lived in poverty and nine million faced hunger and food insecurity.
• According to a September 2023 UNICEF-World Bank analysis, an estimated 333 million children globally live in extreme poverty. Think about that: out of every six children on the planet, one out of six, lives in extreme poverty. That means they struggle to live on less than $2.15 a day. They have little or none of even the most basic necessities to live and thrive: food, shelter, sanitation, health care, schooling.

Child Labor: Capitalism-Imperialism Forces 160 Million Children to Work In Dangerous and Cruelly Exploitative Conditions

• In 2020, 63 million girls and 97 million boys aged 5 to 17 years old were in child labor, accounting for about one in 10 kids worldwide. At least half were involved in hazardous work, forced to work in dangerous conditions, exposed to toxic substances like pesticides that can cause death or ruin their health. Read the recent New York Times story (see the editors’ note on the revcom.us article here) about a 14-year-old from Guatemala who was seriously injured while working in a chicken factory in Virginia. Now think about the fact that tens of millions of children face dangers like this!

• One in three children in child labor are out of school.
• 86.6 million children are engaged in child labor in sub-Saharan Africa, followed by central and southern Asia with 26.3 million.
• In the Democratic Republic of Congo, hundreds of thousands of people—including 40,000 children as young as six years, along with pregnant women and women carrying infants—work in mines digging out cobalt, essential for manufacture of cell phones, tablets, and electric cars that bring billions in profits annually to capitalists in the U.S. and worldwide. They work in extremely dangerous conditions, with children getting paid one dollar a day—but they have no choice, because not working means they and their families don’t eat.

• The numbers of children working are rising, particularly in the five- to 11-year-old group, and the coronavirus pandemic has driven even more capitalists to use child labor.
• About 70 percent of youth in child labor worldwide—112 million—work in agriculture, mostly farming and livestock herding. In the U.S., Department of Labor statistics suggest there are approximately 500,000 child farmworkers in the United States. Many start working as young as age eight and work as much as 72 hours a week (more than 10 hours per day). They are regularly exposed to pesticides, greatly increasing their risk for cancer. The Government Accountability Office reports that 100,000 child farmworkers are injured on the job every year and that children account for 20 percent of farming fatalities.

It must be confronted: if you live in the imperialist countries, the flesh and bones of millions of children are ground up in your iPhones, your clothes, and the food on your table!

Horrific Sexual Trafficking in Children: Capitalism-Imperialism Profits Off the Sexual Degradation of Children

• In today’s world, at any given moment, an estimated 50 million people are being victimized in situations of human trafficking and sexual exploitation (including forced marriage). Twenty-five percent of these victims of human trafficking are children. And 99 percent of those trafficked for sexual exploitation are women and girls. 

• In brothels in the United States, trafficked children may see 25-48 “customers” a day, while their pimps could reap between $150,000 and $200,000 profit per child per year.
• Children from oppressed nationalities are more than two times as likely to experience sex trafficking as children who are white.

Decades and Centuries of Crimes Against Children

What we laid out above are, again, just a few examples of the horrors heaped on children routinely today under the system of capitalism-imperialism we live in. And if you were to look at the history of the crimes that this system, in particular the U.S., has committed against children, that would literally fill many shelves of books. To name just a handful of these outrages from that sordid history:

• U.S. sanctions against Iraq that began in 1990 were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in that country—including 500,000 children—because of shortages of food, medicine, and other necessities. In a 1996 interview on the 60 Minutes TV show, then U.S. ambassador to the UN (and soon-to-be Secretary of State under Bill Clinton), Madeleine Albright, was asked about the deaths of those half-million Iraqi children: “[T]hat is more children than died in Hiroshima… is the price worth it?” Albright’s answer: “We think, the price is worth it.”

By the time the U.S. ended its war for empire (waged in the name of the so-called “war on terror”) in Afghanistan, which lasted for 20 years from 2001 to 2021, nearly 33,000 children had been killed or maimed.

• As Bob Avakian sharply points out, “There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth.” (BAsics 1:1) And one of the defining features of the American slave system was how untold numbers of children were made to work on the plantations under the threat of the whip, and often ripped away from their parents, and tortured and often mutilated if they dared to try to learn to read.
• As part of the cultural genocide of Native American people in the U.S., tens of thousands of children were separated from their families and put in “boarding schools” where they were forced to abandon their own language and adopt Christianity and often brutalized. At least 500 Native American children were killed in these “boarding schools.”

What Will You Do?

Now that you’ve read this article, you need to ask yourself: "What the hell am I doing about this intolerable suffering children are going through all over the world?” If your answer is "I'm donating to end world hunger" or other such reformist nonsense, then you have to confront the living meaning of these statistics. You have to confront the fact that you are putting band-aids on a terminal cancer. If your answer is "I'm voting for Democrats," then you're just helping this monstrous system continue. You have to confront the fact that it would be possible, with a different system not chained to the sick compulsion to accumulate ever more profit that marks this system, to provide decent lives to ALL the world’s children.

Then you have to honestly ask yourself:

What will really put an end to this horror for millions of children? 

The answer to that is concentrated in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian. Read that Constitution. And then get with the revcoms, who are working with determination and urgency to make the promise of that Constitution a reality through an actual revolution that will overthrow this system and begin to end these real-life nightmares, for the children of the world and for all of humanity.

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Sources:

“Louisiana ordered to remove teens from ‘intolerable’ conditions at state prison,” Guardian, September 11, 2023

Press Release, “UNICEF, Children bearing brunt of stalled progress on extreme poverty reduction worldwide,” UNICEF, September 11, 2023

The State of America’s Children 2023, Poverty, Children’s Defense Fund

“Child labor violations are on the rise as some states look to loosen their rules,” NPR, February 26, 2023

Check It Out: Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, revcom.us

The DRC Mining Industry: Child Labor and Formalization of Small-Scale Mining, Wilson Center, September 1, 2021

American Federation of Teachers website

“Demographic and Psychosocial Factors Associated With Child Sexual Exploitation,” JAMA Open Network, September 22, 2020

American’s Addiction to Juvenile Incarceration: States by State, ACLU website

American Crime Case #40: Native American Boarding Schools: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” revcom.us