‘Two million children die in violence every year’

LUCKNOW - At least two million children die every year on account of violence in the world, while nearly 40 million suffer disabilities, an orthopaedic surgeon said at an event organised by the Unicef here Friday.

Bhasker Banerji, an orthopeadic surgeon and director of Allahabad-based Viklang Kendra, said that around 520,000 people die each year as a result of interpersonal violence alone, of which 40 percent are children.

Banerji, who has devoted 30 years towards rehabilitating people suffering from physical disabilities, was delivering a talk on ‘Disability: Protection and Prevention’ organised jointly by Unicef and Media Nest, a social activist group engaged in studying problems of children.

“More than 3,000 people die on the world’s roads every day,” he pointed out while adding that “tens of millions of people are injured or disabled every year”.

He said: “children, pedestrians, cyclists and the elderly are among the most vulnerable of road users. Every day more than 2,000 children die from an injury which could have been prevented. And 10 times as many are rendered disabled.”

According to WHO Global Burden of Disease data, in 2002 over 700,000 children under the age of 15 were killed due to injuries suffered in violence. There is also high morbidity associated with childhood injuries: for every injured child who dies, there are several thousand children who live on with varying degrees of disability. A large proportion of these injuries (for example, falls, burns, drowning) occur either at home or in leisure environments.

The study has suggested community policing, improving emergency response and trauma care, capturing illegal arms market, establishing jobs for chronically unemployed, reducing income inequality, change cultural norms that support violence as some ways of turning around the situation.

Appropriate services for victims of non-fatal injuries can prevent future fatalities, reduce the amount of short-term and long-term disability, and help those affected to cope with the impact of the injury event on their lives, it further points out.