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 Times of conflict or emergency leave children particularly vulnerable through their relative weakness and immaturity. It is vital at these times that their basic rights, as detailed in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, are protected and promoted.

Important work includes:

• ensuring the survival of the most vulnerable children and women; protecting them against malnutrition and disease by providing essential life-saving and other emergency health services
• protecting children against violence, exploitation, abuse, rape and any attempts to recruit them into the armed forces
• helping children, their families and communities to recover and move on with their lives by ensuring the continuation of basic services, such as mother and child health care, education, water supplies and sanitation
• giving families and communities the means to help themselves in the long-term and ensuring the active involvement of women in any plans
• As part of this, Save the Children has focussed on four specific areas to support and protect children caught up in conflict or emergency situations:
• supporting children exposed to violence
• working to prevent the recruitment of children into the armed forces and, equally, to help those who already have direct experience of fighting
• raising awareness of the short and long-term dangers of using landmines, which kill indiscriminately often for years after a conflict has ended
• caring for children separated from their families and working to reunite them whenever and as quickly as possible

In this work, Save the Children addresses four main issues:

Putting children first: While the international community has well-established means of effectively providing health, shelter and sanitation services to people caught up in conflict, the needs of children, in terms of care and protection, are not yet high enough on the agenda.

Save the Children believes that children's needs and the protection of their basic rights, such as to education, must be an equal priority at times of conflict.

Child Rights training: The access of children to their basic rights at times of build-up to conflict, during complex emergencies and in the aftermath of conflict lies at the heart of ensuring their care and protection.

Save the Children believes that its comprehensive experience of responding to the needs of children in times of conflict makes an ideal basis both for training communities and increasing their own ability to care for and protect their children. As such, we have incorporated our learning in dealing with child soldiers, separated children, landmine awareness and other care and protection work into the training scheme, Action for the Rights of the Child. This is aimed primarily at UN agencies and non-governmental organisations working with refugee children.

Promoting continued learning: There remain several key areas where more needs to be understood and plans put in place to address the issues. These include child soldiers, separated children, emergency education, HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence and exploitation.

Save the Children believes that, to be truly effective, all organisations involved in working with children at times of conflict must be prepared to continually learn and adapt their work to ensure that the real needs of children are being met.

Advocating the needs of children: Attitudes and approaches will only change if continual pressure is applied at all levels of emergency response. Particularly important areas that must become more of a priority in emergency response include developmental or psychological damage to children exposed to violence; gender-based violence; child soldiers and separated children.

Save the Children believes that such continual pressure is vital if these concerns are to become a priority as soon as an emergency situation emerges. Our aim is to ensure increased UN attention to these concerns, build the ability of non-governmental organisations to deal with them and encourage national and international donors to incorporate the need to address these concerns in their budgets