Violence and exploitation remain a harsh reality in the lives of many children around the word. 

Millions of boys and girls around the world are subject to violence, exploitation and abuse. Some are forced to work under harmful conditions. Others face violence or abuse in their homes, their schools, their communities or in institutional care. In some places children are targets for illegal recruitment by armed groups and armed forces or are forced to flee their homes due to conflict or natural disaster. And millions, especially girls, are subject to sexual violence and abuse as well as harmful traditional practices.

This edition of Progress for Children, the eighth in the series that monitors progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), is a compendium of data that serves as a report card on global and national efforts to protect the rights of children.

The report gathers together for the first time data on a range of issues that impact on children, including sexual abuse and trafficking, child marriage, physical punishment of children, child labour, birth registration, the harmful traditional practice of female genital cutting, and attitudes toward violence against women inside marriage.

The report finds:

• More than half of the children in detention worldwide have not been tried or sentenced
• More than 150 million children between 5 and 14 years of age are engaged in child labour.
• More than half of woman and girls in developing countries think that wife-beating is acceptable.
• During the past decade, the number of children in conflict with the law has increased in nearly all countries in East Asia and the Pacific.

The report also offers a strategy to improve child protection, identifying five areas of activity that are needed to improve protective environments for children: 1) Improving child protection systems; 2) Promoting social change; 3) Enhancing child protection in emergencies; 4) Strengthening partnerships for greater impact; 5) Collecting reliable data and using such data to achieve concrete results for children.

Video footage and further information is available at the UNICEF website (63).