Bangladesh won its hard-fought independence after a brutal nine-month liberation war in 1971. The war tore families apart, left cities in ruins, and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
Amid the statistics and commemorations, however, a generation of children who survived that conflict was orphaned, dispossessed, and psychologically scared. Those children, our war orphans, became living testaments to war’s enduring human cost.
After 54 years, today we can realise that the war doesn’t end by signing peace treaties and organising victory parades. Their actual consequences are often revealed in the lives of the child survivors.
While we are observing World Orphan Day today, we should go beyond counting the death toll and try to confront the long-term socio-psychological consequences on children in war-affected areas all over the world, spanning from Ukraine and Gaza to Sudan, Myanmar and beyond.
The Liberation War of 1971 caused the death of parents to a significant group of Bangladeshi children. Many of these children have been brought up in extended families, where psychosocial bereavement was compounded by material deprivation, disruption of formal education and the breakdown of social networks.
Yet in the years that followed, these children were rarely seen as a distinct policy concern; they were simply called orphans, which was a euphemism disguising the real needs provoked by war trauma, displacement and bereavement.
This pattern persists globally. As defined by UNICEF, an orphan is “a child under 18 years of age who has lost one or both parents to any cause of death,” including war. According to CAFO and Humanium, there were an estimated 140 million orphans worldwide, with the largest numbers in Asia and Africa. Conflict-related orphanhood compounds various vulnerabilities, often driving long-term deprivation and exclusion.
In today’s war, children are not peripheral victims; rather, they are at the center of modern war casualties. War in Ukraine created intense and extensive suffering for children since its beginning in 2022. Various estimates presented that, more than 2,500 children were killed or injured in the first three years of the Russia-Ukraine conflict where the system of health and education have been shattered.
Millions of children have been displaced and disconnected from their families and education which creates long-term negative impact on their mental state. According to UNICEF, one in five children are living in conflict prone areas in today’s world which is about 143 million in number and double since the 1990s. These children are under a great threat of trauma, malnutrition, mental illness and education disruption.
Prolonged animosities in the Gaza Strip have caused astronomical costs to the people. Tens of thousands of children killed or wounded or hundreds of thousands lost parents or caregivers according to the United Nations agencies.
Now a significant percentage of these children experience chronic malnutrition and acute psychological stress. Beneath the quantitative representation and headline coverage lies a more profound human tragedy: war disrupts identity, belonging, and future opportunity, particularly for children whose mental and social skills remain in the developmental phase.
We often measure the cost of war by the number of dead or the number of people displaced. But for children, the deep wounds are invisible and permanent. Studies have repeatedly found the alarming rates of psychological distraction of children in conflict zones.
The case of Gaza is no exception: many children mention widespread fear, anxiety, and post-traumatic symptoms which do not allow them to perform daily activities and social interactions. According to UNICEF, in Ukraine, the children are deprived of stability, safety, and future well-being, and these elements have been proven to trigger long-term psychosocial damages.
When families are displaced, too often children are not covered in documentation, legal aid or state recognition. This statelessness can lead to revocation of their right to education, health care and citizenship, thus trapping them in perpetual marginalisation.
Conflict destroys livelihoods. UNICEF reports that the rate of households with children living in poverty rose significantly in Ukraine, following the outbreak of hostilities. Poverty reduces access to healthy foods to nourishing diets and quality schooling and housing, with entire families being subject to long-term depravity.
Furthermore, the disruptions from schools, displacement and chronic stresses do more than delay learning; they alter children’s developmental trajectories. Without consistent education, social interaction and safe environments, children are at risk of losing out on a global scale to their peers.
Global responses to war-affected children have thus been characterised mainly by charity, food assistance, temporary shelter and emergency relief. While these measures are lifesaving, they do not address the structural injustices that create the vulnerability of war orphans in the first place. Children whose parents have been killed in war need formal legal protection, not only temporary shelter.
This includes birth registration, guardianship rights, recognition of citizenship and access to public services. Without these protections they are still de facto second-class citizens in systems that no longer consider them full members of society.
Immediate humanitarian assistance often ignores the mental health needs of affected populations. Children who suffer from war-related fear need sustained psychological interventions to deal with that fear from trauma-focused counselling through community reintegration schemes. In many conflict-affected areas, such services either do not exist or lack adequate funding.
Warfare regularly results in the destruction of educational infrastructure and the displacement of teaching personnel, and thus the destruction of formal learning opportunities. While emergency schooling dispensed in makeshift tents or temporary facilities may be a short-term solution to ensure that instruction is sustained, sustainable and high-quality education must be an integral part of post conflict reconstruction efforts.
Educational provision provides children with hope, increased resilience and greater future economic opportunities. Where possible, children should be reunited with family members and should be provided with a full range of social services to ensure their safety and well-being.
The celebration of the world war orphans day is not just the utterances of solidarity; it acts as a catalyst to the quest for justice, enactment of effective policy changes, and fostering shared accountability.
Orphaned children should not be seen as mere recipients to charity by the policymakers and agents of implementation like states, international organisations, and civil society in the event of armed conflict.
This paradigm shift implies the integration of the orphaned children into the framework of peacebuilding and ceasefire agreements; their legal status and rights to citizenship; long-term provision of psychosocial assistance and educational programs; and state-based care systems, but not institutional ones, where the sense of belonging and inclusion are the most important.
The children left orphaned by war should not be statistical. They are individuals who have hopes, fears, aspirations and futures. If peace is to mean more than the hush that follows the explosion of bombs, we must stop listing the dead and start lamenting the living, breathing fruit of war – the children whose lives were cut short before they had a chance to start living.
Jannatul Ferdous Ety is a MSS Student in the Department of Sociology, Bangladesh University of Professionals (BUP), Dhaka.
