Are one in six children living through war?

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Hello, and thank you for downloading the More Or Less podcast.

We're the programme that looks at the numbers in the news and in life.

And I'm Lizzie McNeil.

Loyal listener Isla got in touch to ask about a number she heard during a broadcast of Soccer Aid, a British charity event where celebrities and ex-professional players engage in something that kind of resembles football to raise money for UNICEF, the United Nations children's agency.

During one of the promotional films demonstrating UNICEF's mission, actor Daniel Mays described the hardships facing children living in war zones around the world, using this statistic to make his point.

One in six children around the world is currently living through war.

One

in six.

Now, that is a shocking figure, but is the number really that high?

Are one in six children currently living through war?

Let's start with the source.

UNICEF told us they were quoting figures from a report by the Peace Research Institute Oslo, PRIO, which studies conflict around the world.

Siri Az-Ristad is the PRIO's research director.

We started by asking if she recognised the claim.

Absolutely.

That is a number that some colleagues and me have calculated at Prio.

Maybe it's more correct to say that they are experiencing violence or conflict.

We use war as more of a larger conflict term.

So maybe it's more correct to say that one in six children live in conflict.

So we have two terms here: conflict and war.

These are not quite the same thing.

The PRIO analysis uses information from a data set produced by Uppsala University in Sweden.

The Uppsala Conflict Data Programme records conflict events around the world.

Events where someone, adult or child, it isn't recorded, dies as a result of violence by groups defined as organised actors, be it bomb blasts or bullet wounds.

Then we look at how many people and children in specific live within 50 kilometres of that.

And why 50 kilometres?

That's a very good good question because it's of course very arbitrary and it's kind of think of a number.

We have thought that 50 kilometers is a distance that you can actually walk within a day.

So if you live within that, you will probably hear about it.

You will maybe see some of the consequences.

So that's the basic method.

50 kilometers from a violent event.

But to understand the claim, you need to understand just how broad the definition of a violent event is.

What we include as conflict events are events related to what we call state-based conflict, which are conflict between states such as Russia and Ukraine, or civil wars.

So, the kind of conflict you'd normally describe as a war.

But we also include something we call non-state conflicts, which are violence between groups that are non-state or non-governmental, for example, to Islamic groups or to drug cuttles in Mexico.

19 million children in Brazil and 32 million children in Mexico are part of this count because they live within 50 kilometers of violent acts between gangs.

Often these are individual killings.

However, Jamaica, the country with the world's highest murder rate, is not counted because the perpetrators are not identified as organized groups in this data set.

And finally, we also include what is called one-sided violence, which is violence against civilians conducted either by states or by non-governmental actors.

This means that in 2019, every child in London was put on the list when two people were stabbed to death by a terrorist in central London.

But those children in London are still far safer than children in many cities across the developing world, and for that matter, America.

I can understand that that might seem strange.

So we do this together with Save the Children, and we have concluded that children also living in, for example, European countries experiencing this type of events are affected maybe not in the way we think

consequences of conflict, but also psychological, so feeling unsafe.

Unsurprisingly, if an event happens in a densely populated area, more children will be counted, potentially skewing the numbers.

A couple of years ago, we had police brutality, which is coded as one-sided violence by the state.

We had that in Mumbai in India one person wasn't killed and if you draw 50 kilometers around Mumbai you're going to have a lot of children.

The main thing to know about the one-in-six stat is that the definition of conflict includes a massive range of events, some of which will be utterly horrific to live through as a child within 50 kilometers, and some which those children might not even be aware of.

You get a much clearer sense of this when you break down the figures by the scale of the conflicts involved.

If you break down the numbers for 2023, where we had approximately 470 million children living in conflict, about two-thirds of these live close to events where between 1 to 25 people were killed.

So, one-third of these children are living within 50 kilometers of violent events in which more than 25 people have died.

That's around 1 in 15 children.

Then, when we look at what we call more medium-sized conflicts, about 20% of those 470 million, so approximately 96 million children, lived in conflicts with

between 25 and 100 people killed within a year.

Then 13%

live close to

1,000 and

2% with more than 1,000 people killed.

So there are maybe 9 million children living within 50 kilometres of the most extreme conflicts, close to violence in which more than a thousand people died in 2023.

That's around 1 in 250 children.

But which of these numbers should you choose for children living near conflict?

Well that's really a matter of opinion, and it's a very difficult judgment.

In the war in Ukraine, for example, there were thirty-four deaths in the capital Kyiv in 2023.

So, children in Kyiv wouldn't count in the most extreme conflict group, but they are living with the daily threat of attack.

Zooming out to the whole globe, though, it's clear that by counting all low-casualty conflicts in the stat, including terrorism, gang violence, and war, there is a definite risk that you're significantly inflating the number.

No, I think that's a very fair and valid point.

We discuss and think about every time we do this, every year, and that's why we also have this breakdown.

Of course,

for

organizations like, say, the children, they would like to include all children that could possibly be affected by conflict.

But I think, in general, that children living close to something that is conflict is much worse than children living in peace.

So, I think that sort of even if it's a very few people killed,

the fear and the tension that it creates is

bad.

If you want to be accurate, and we do, then it's fair to say that, according to this research, one in six children live within fifty kilometres of a violent event in which one or more participants is an organised actor, be it army, terrorist group, or criminal gang.

It is not fair to say that this many children are living specifically through war.

And Siri doesn't particularly enjoy seeing her research described like that.

I get annoyed by

the easy use of statistics, to put it that way.

And this is just one of many examples of how organizations would use numbers to promote their cause, which often is a very good cause, but it's unnuanced.

It's not much we can do other than talk to people like you about it, yes.

Thanks to Siri Azrostad from the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

If you've seen a number in the news that you want us to take a look at, email the programme on moreorless at bbc.co.uk.

Until next time, goodbye.

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