Target: Khaled Ahmed El-Enany Ali Ezz, Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
Goal: Restore schools as safe spaces for learning and education.
Planet Earth is hosting more military conflicts than at any other time since World War II. Increasingly, the youngest and most vulnerable are becoming collateral damage in the very spaces they should feel most safe. In just 15 years, militarized attacks on children and on children’s education have skyrocketed by a staggering 300 percent.
At times, the destruction is supposedly accidental, as when a girls’ school was struck by a missile during the early days of the military conflict in Iran. Other times, the lines between accident and intent are blurred, including a detonation in the midst of the bombing campaign in Lebanon that obliterated a school focused on the education of special needs children. And many times, the attacks are undeniably deliberate and deeply personal. School children have become frequent targets for abductions by terrorist groups, militias, and bandits across African nations like Nigeria.
Advocates have called for a comprehensive plan of action to protect places of learning, namely with enhanced warning systems, stronger legal safeguards, and true accountability for reported war crimes and regional crimes involving children and their schools. Sign the petition below to support these measures.
PETITION LETTER:
Dear Director-General El-Enany Ali Ezz,
School days should be marked by learning, growth, and cherished memories, not terror, intimidation, and death. Children should not have to enter educational institutions worried that they will be abducted or that this school day will be their last. But for too many kids around the world – especially kids born in regions of conflict – the dreams of education have morphed into living nightmares.
No more should schools be treated as convenient and devastating collateral damage for authorized military campaigns. No more should thieves have the unchecked and uncontested ability to snatch children from cradles of learning and use them as bargaining chips. And no more should the United Nations stand by and watch the atrocities unfold with little more than a warning and a wagging finger.
Please fight for children and their right to learn and to thrive. Support and place your resources behind efforts to protect and warn schools globally of imminent threats, to enact strong safeguards against these threats, and to ensure anyone or any collective entity that violates educational safe spaces faces powerful and lasting repercussions. Protecting the children is protecting the future.
Sincerely,
[Your Name Here]
Photo Credit: Kenneth Gardner
