Asia's Economic Boom Dooms Many Children

BANGKOK -- More than half a million Asian children working in sweatshops, brothels and on the streets are silent victims of the region's economic boom, a U N report said Thursday.


The rapid pace of economic growth in the countries of East Asia and the Pacific region, the fastest in the world, has left large groups of society in poverty, hastening the collapse of traditional standards and safety nets, the UN children's fund, UNICEF, said in its annual State of the World's Children report.


"We are seeing the erosion of family values, and that includes the exploitation of children," Daniel Brooks, the agency's regional director, told a news conference.


"We say children are the future, but we don't make provision for the future," said Ambassador Sandra Mason, deputy chairperson of the Geneva-based UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.


The report also highlighted some positive developments.


James Grant, the executive director of UNICEF, said progress had been made in reducing the child death rate and forecast that by the end of 1995 there will be a 2.5 million drop in annual deaths of children, which at the beginning of the decade ran at the rate of 14 million a year.


He cited advances in the developing nations in treating iodine and Vitamin A deficiency, eradication of polio in more than 40 nations by next year and a reduction in deaths from measles and diarrhea.


But the exploitation of children continues to cause grave concern. UNICEF said its statistics showed that in Thailand there were 10,000 street children and around 100,000 child prostitutes.


"Childre should be looked on as a resource," said UNICEF representative Anthony Hewett, and countries should recognize that.


In Cambodia, 20 percent of all beggars are children, and China has 200,000 street children; Indonesia has 50,000 working children. There are 15,000 street-working children and 100,000 child prostitutes in the Philippines, and 50,000 homeless children in Vietnam.


The plight of youngsters in East Asia and the Pacific was linked to rapid industrialization, the report said.


"When the destitute and the desperate are increasingly young, uprooted, urbanized, knowing far more about the world than their parents did and expecting far more from it," the report said, the result is "social disintegration, rise of crime, violence, alcoholism and drug abuse."