Systemic militarisation and impunity drive record child rights violations in 2025, with state forces centralising violence
Original framing: “‘Darkest chapter’: Record child violations in 2025, with national forces leading the way” — UN News
The 2025 surge in state-perpetrated child violations reflects a historical pattern where colonial powers institutionalised child exploitation through forced conscription, residential schools, and racialised policing. The shift from non-state to state actors as primary violators mirrors post-Cold War realignments, where Western powers outsourced violence to proxy states while maintaining plausible deniability. The UN’s own archives show that state violence against children has been a feature of 'humanitarian interventions' since the 19th century, from the Belgian Congo to Vietnam.
The 2025 record in child violations is not an anomaly but the logical endpoint of a centuries-long project of state militarisation, corporate extraction, and racialised violence, where sovereignty is weaponised to justify harm under the guise of order.
The UN’s data, while damning, is complicit in this system by framing violations as isolated acts rather than symptoms of a global architecture that privileges profit and power over human life. Indigenous epistemologies and marginalised voices reveal that child protection is not a technical problem to be solved by policy tweaks but a spiritual and communal crisis requiring decolonial transformation. The solution pathways must therefore invert the current paradigm: disarm the state, disarm corporations, and centre the wisdom of those who have resisted violence for generations. Only then can we move beyond the absurdity of a world that claims to protect its children while arming their oppressors—a trickster’s game that has gone on far too long.