This is part 1 of a series of blog posts which will together form 1 very large article.
I worked long on the full article and it ended up being over 10 thousand words of content.
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[All video content in this post has been supplied by UNICEF.]
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If you have recently read any news website, you will have noticed the trend of today. There’s a lot of attention regarding climate change. While at the same time, people don’t seem to truly care about the increasing problems at children’s rights. Yes, take attention of it, the increasing problems at children’s rights.
When I started this blog 3 years ago, my primary focus was the rights of children. And like is happening everywhere around the world, the subject has slowly moved towards the shadows. Overlooked. Forgotten. Ignored.
In case of this blog, it happened because of me getting hired by the French company Vivendi and starting a job as a translator, as well as moving from just school to actually studying, and by that lacking the time to truly write articles here on my blog to begin with. Hence I only share translations recently. Although, I have to admit that my translations often still indirectly voiced the problems I previously wrote about.
Still, when we move back to the start of my blog, you will see several posts targetting the United Nations, most often specifically UNICEF.
(Yes, if you follow me on social media, I do actually support UNICEF now. However, that was not always the case. Same goes for Plan International, Save The Children, Lumos, and some other organizations, nowadays among my supports, but that hasn’t always been the case.)
Among those posts is a post I titled “We Forget To Notice“. The writing is rather a mess, to be honest, so let me instead just name the reason why I wrote that post.
At that time organizations like UNICEF and Save The Children released commercials that were very clear about their intention. However, they had a big problem about them, they were psychologically hurtful for the children they were trying to help. Including to me during that time, which was the spark to write previously named post.
An example of one of those commercials can be found below. It is the unedited video which became the commercial used for the British “World Upside Down” campaign of UNICEF.
2016 was a year of hard-hitting commercial by children’s rights organizations, like UNICEF, Save The Children, and World Vision. However, as time moved forward, it all suddenly stopped.
As 2016 came to an end, we saw the last hard-hitting international commercial of the Save The Children organization, which until the day of today hasn’t launched an international campaign again. The same applies to the World Vision organization and most other major organizations. The only 2 noteworthy remaining active were UNICEF and SOS Children’s Villages.
Which might not seem like a problem, but that is until I note that as the commercials stopped, also the respect for children’s rights has started to diminish. Often children are used to make political statements, but the true care about the children’s wellbeing tends to be gone.
And that’s not even all, as when we look at those which still release commercials, the number of viewers has drastically decreased as well. Take UNICEF as an example. 3 years ago, they easily reached the 10 thousand views mark on YouTube with their videos. However, these days, they struggle to get to a thousand.
The reason behind why the commercials nowadays aren’t doing well isn’t actually hard to name. As it’s something I have seen happening upclose myself.
When it comes to all children’s rights organizations 3 years ago, they took attention of children themselves. It’s like how people of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the European Union, and even several governments reached out to me, just for simply writing this blog. However, these days, that is completely gone.
While talking with those I know that are younger than myself and active at children’s rights, they feel left out and forgotten. As they note, there is only notice of celebrities, like BTS and such. And while they have huge fanbases, and are influential, they aren’t the ones organizations like UNICEF should be reaching. After all, those they reach through them are fanboys and fangirls, but not those who are actually willing to speak up in name of the organization, to reach the adults who should’ve been listening to the problems children are experiencing all along.
Actually, it’s quite disturbing that one of those I spoke with noted the recently released campaign video of UNICEF “Just a kid”. As she told me, the video voices the exact problem regarding children’s rights today, a problem which according to her UNICEF clearly shows to be facing itself. Which is that children are speaking out, are demanding their rights, and want to do everything for a better tomorrow, but are not actually heard by adults, which includes UNICEF. As she said, “there is too much attention of influential people, but none for children themselves”. She added, “the difficulties I experience as a child are often not taken seriously, apparently because I don’t live in a country such as Syria or Yemen”.
Below is the “Just a kid” campaign video of UNICEF.
[This is the end of part 1. The continuation of this article will be published soon!]
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