Children are not the enemy. When did we decide they were?

Earlier this year in Haiti, I met a 17-year-old boy who had joined a gang when he was 14. When I asked him how he had left, he corrected me.
"You don't leave gangs. You escape them."

It stopped me in my tracks. The crisis in Haiti is immense. Much of Port-au-Prince remains under the control of armed gangs. Families have been displaced again and again. Children are growing up surrounded by violence and impossible choices. An estimated 30–50% of gang members are children.

But it also triggered another thought. How many children never get the chance to escape? Not because they lack courage. Not because they lack hope. But because the protection and support they need never reaches them.

As the world marks World Humanitarian Day on 19 August, more than 200 million children depend on humanitarian assistance - four times as many as a decade ago. Yet, just as needs are reaching unprecedented levels, humanitarian access is collapsing. Across conflict zones, entire cities are under siege. Children are trapped behind frontlines. Aid convoys are blocked. Hospitals, schools and water systems are deliberately attacked. Humanitarian workers are killed. Bureaucratic restrictions delay life-saving assistance until it is too late.
The most alarming part is that this is increasingly accepted as normal. It is not.

Between 2023 and 2025, more than 1,000 aid workers were killed; almost three times as many as during the previous three years. Recent evidence also points to a disturbing shift: states have overtaken non-state armed groups as the primary perpetrators of attacks on humanitarian workers. At the same time, hundreds of aid workers have been arrested, detained or intimidated simply for trying to reach civilians. In more than 25 years working in humanitarian crises, I have never sensed such fear among humanitarian workers.

This did not happen by accident. It happened because the world has stopped defending the rules that were designed to preserve our common humanity.

International Humanitarian Law is remarkably clear. When civilians cannot meet their basic needs, parties to conflict must allow and facilitate rapid and unimpeded humanitarian assistance. Aid workers must be protected.

Humanitarian assistance is not a political concession. It is not a bargaining chip. It is not something governments or armed groups are free to grant one day and deny the next. It is a legal obligation.

Yet today humanitarian access is increasingly being weaponised. Not as an unintended consequence of war. As a method of war. That should terrify us all.

Because once we accept that starving civilians, blocking medical care or preventing children from receiving protection has become a legitimate military or political tool, we are not simply failing humanitarian action. We are dismantling one of civilisation's most important achievements: the idea that even in war there are limits.

That is not a humanitarian failure. It is a political failure. A diplomatic failure. A leadership failure. Our collective failure.

The greatest threat to humanitarian access is no longer war itself. It is the political choice by governments to selectively apply the laws they wrote after 1945. The leaders who repeatedly declare their commitment to the rules-based order cannot continue to choose when those rules apply. Every time violations go unanswered, every government that stays silent, every veto cast to shield an ally, every instance of selective outrage sends exactly the same message: Some children's lives matter less than others. History will – should - judge us harshly for that.

More than a century ago, Save the Children's founder, Eglantyne Jebb, wrote:

We have to make it our own business to care for our enemies' children as we do our own.

It is difficult to imagine a statement that feels more radical today than it did in 1924. Somewhere along the way we have begun treating children not as children but as future threats - terrorists in waiting, collateral damage, acceptable losses.

How did we allow ourselves to reach that point? Once a child is denied food, medicine or protection because of where it was born, something much bigger has already broken.

Our humanity.

I saw it in Haiti this year. Young people growing up where joining a gang was the only visible path to survival.

I also saw it in Ukraine this year. Children living under relentless bombardment, never knowing whether the next explosion would find them.
And of course, we see it in the occupied Palestinian territory, where basics for survival are turned on and off at will.

The circumstances are different. The lesson is the same. When humanitarian access disappears, childhood disappears with it.

This World Humanitarian Day, governments and parties to conflict must recommit to the obligations thy are bound by International Humanitarian Law. They must protect humanitarian workers. They must stop attacking civilian infrastructure. They must remove political and administrative barriers that prevent aid from reaching civilians.

But governments rarely act unless citizens demand it. So this year – in honour of our colleagues who have paid the ultimate price - I am asking something important of all of you.

Write to your elected representative. Ask them where they stand. Ask them what they are doing to defend international law. Tell them this is not acceptable. Tell them: Not in my name. Tell them #NotATarget.

Because the moment we stop insisting that every child deserves protection, we begin losing something far greater than humanitarian access. We begin losing our humanity.