Charli
I listened to your interview. A good discussion of the issue.
What other factors explain this or other such cases?
A thought.
Child Soldiers are part of a military force that can present a threat to various international interests of hegemonic/imperial/global governance. But the sponsors of a force that uses child soldiers are war criminals and can be marginalized or prosecuted with out much attention to the question of whether they have a just cause.
The Children of Rape are just children who need a stable accepting and loving home and community. They are not a threat. Some one has to speak for them. Good going.
"How many other issues or populations are out there that get missed b/c they don't fit the ideational or organizational turf of the NGO sector?"
Not sure of the answer to that, but some "missed" issues may eventually attract new NGOs to them, i.e. spur the creation of new NGOs. The example that comes to mind is the relatively new (i.e., last 5 or 6 years or so, I think) ONE Campaign, which focuses on extreme or what used to be called "absolute" poverty, a human rights issue that a lot of the mainstream human rights organizations (Amnesty, Human Rights Watch etc) had downplayed for years, on grounds that economic rights were supposedly less important or valid than political ones. (This still seems to be the case for Human Rights Watch, whose Asia director, Brad Adams, is quoted in the news recently criticizing continued detention of political prisoners and failure to reinstate independent judges in Pakistan. These are human rights issues for HRW, but the fact that X thousand children a day are dying in Pakistan from poverty-related causes is, apparently, not a human rts issue for HRW.)
Clarification: While various groups (Oxfam, CARE, Catholic Relief Services, etc) have been working on poverty-related issues for decades, and while there have been intermittent relief campaigns in the wake of, e.g., particular famines or natural disasters, these issues arguably had not received until fairly recently the same mass attention as traditional human rights issues.
Commenting by HaloScan.com
