Country Rankings

Hello delegates,

Here are a couple more interesting links, mainly with rankings and facts relating to our two issues that may help you with clinching your arguments:

• Statistics on pornography use.
• A summary of a conference on laws regarding online child exploitation. The best part of this site are the links to powerpoint presentations (all safe, I checked), that have very detailed information on laws and definitions regarding our child pornography issue, as well as current trends and developments in law in this area.
• Rankings of malnutrition death rates by country.
• Hunger Notes, a website with tons of information and news articles on region specific malnutrition problems.

By now you should have all the information you need about your country's position (and if you've submitted your position papers, you will have finished this at least a week ago). The best way to prepare now is to keep track of latest developments, and start thinking about how your country would like to resolve this issue - what would you your country like to see on a resolution, what would it agree to? Remember, time freezes when the conference begins, so any news until Thursday evening is fair game, after that, no world developments in either hunger or child exploitation are relevant for the conference. Have fun!

Videos & News in Malnutrition & Exploitation

Hello delegates,

In the search of alternate resources, since filtering through websites and articles on Google gets tedious for all of us, I've found a couple of interesting documentaries and voice interviews about child malnutrition and child online pornography:

• A five part CBC documentary about how police forces in Canada, USA, and England are dealing with child exploitation online (links to further parts on Youtube sidebar).
• A recent BBC debate on the world food crisis.
• A BBC interview with a World Bank spokesman about poverty and the food crisis.
• A long unaired Discovery Channel documentary about a giant child molestation ring in America (which I would only watch if you had a lot of free time; it might be disturbing for some).
• Three shorter documentaries, on on malnutrition in Niger, another on malnutrition in Nepal, and the last on malnutrition in Zambia.

And for some regular non-video news:

• Britain's CEOP releases a new film warning about the dangers of sexting.
• The EU updates its child online pornography laws to include erasing of websites/images.
• The Pakistani flood problems continue, with rising child malnutrition rates.

Hope these help, and remember that due to the seriousness of the topics we are covering, the above documentaries may be disturbing for some so do not watch if you don't think you'd be able to handle it! See you at the conference!

Because Books Still Exist...

Hello UNICEF Delegates,

With the conference less than a week away, I'm sure many of you are frantically researching your country's position on our two topics. Likely, most of your searches are happening online - which is great, since there's tons of information on the internet. But, published books still exist, and can be much better sources of quality information on important issues.

Since most delegates don't think of looking into books, here's a list of relevant books for our two topics that can be borrowed from the Edmonton Public Library (and there are literally hundreds more at the University of Alberta Libraries, which you can borrow if you have a TAL card or a CCID, the first of which you can get at the Stanley A. Milner Library).

Child Malnutrition:

• "Hunger and Health" by World Health Programme (2007)
• "A follow up study of child hunger in Canada" by Human Resources Canada (2001)
• "World Hunger" by Liza Burby (1995)
• "Solutions for the World's Biggest Problems" by Bjorn Lomborg (2007)

Child Pornography:

• "Innocence Exploited" by Canadian Police College (1998)
• "Child Exploitation and Communication Technologies" by Alisdair Gillespie (2008)
• "One Child at a Time" by Julian Sher (2007)
• "Caught in the Web" by Julian Sher (2007)
• "Sex Offenders and the Internet" by Kerry Sheldon (2007)

Especially for the pornography subject, which is hard to research through google, these books can really help for some general information (country specific info can be found through Interpol, which is linked in a previous blog post!).

Usually reading relevant extracts or chapters is enough, it's good to glance into these books even if you don't have time to read them all!

Good luck and see you Thursday!

Challenges in Identifying Perpetrators in Internet Based Crimes

A recent court decision in the United Kingdom has introduced major challenges in the identification and prosecution of internet based crimes. It was decided that the owner of an IP address cannot be charged as the perpetrator of an internet based crime as it cannot be proven that no other individual could have had access to the internet service. If the owner of the internet service allows another to use their internet, whether through giving permission or unsecured WiFi, the UK court has ruled that they are not responsible for that use.

HSMUN is so soon!!!

With that said, I hope you are all very well prepared for the conference by the time it rolls around.

Here are two links you may want to peruse:

Reducing the marketing of unhealthy foods to children

Haiti earthquake: One year report

Problems with Addressing International Cyber Crime

While this video is addressing financial cyber crime, it brings up many issues with addressing cyber crimes, such as online child pornography. If you do not wish to watch the full 11 minutes of video, I recommend starting at 00:08:38 to learn about the partnership between Jamaican and American authorities that was forged to combat the cyber crime.

There is also an excellent video on malnutrition in Chad.

Is Walmart making people fat?

A study from the "Journal of Urban Economics" to be released to the public in March claims that, on average, people living around a Walmart supercentre gets fatter once the store moves into the area.

Like other Walmarts, Walmart supercentres sell basically anything and everything you could possibly think of, but also sells groceries as well. In the United States, there are 2899 supercentres. In Canada, 119 of the 323 Walmarts are supercentres.

Over a 10 year period, it was found that there was an increase of pounds per person of 1.5 pounds, and the obesity rate was said to increase by 2.3%.

It is believed that this weight increase may occur because of the increased access to low-cost, processed foods from these supercentres.

Some questions you should think of include what other factors may be contributing to this weight gain? Could it be that other items, such as DVDs, TVs and video games may also be less expensive at these supercentres? How are the lower prices of Walmart affecting how other stores price their goods?

You can read the full article here.

Background Papers are Now Available for UNICEF!

The UNICEF Background Papers are now available:
The Question of Preventing and Controlling Child Malnutrition
The Question of Coordinating International Efforts Against Child Pornography on the Internet
Now is also the time to begin the researching and writing for positions papers, as they must be submitted to hsmun.unicef[at]gmail.com before midnight on February 11th, 2011 to be considered for an award.

Recent Developments in Cases of Child Pornography

Hello UNICEF delegates,

While researching malnutrition probably won't create too many difficulties, reading about online child pornography may be quite problematic. However, there have been many recent developments, ranging from Austrian operations uncovering an international ring of criminals, to smaller scale discoveries in Britain, which deserve your notice.

These news stories can serve as great background information on various countries' actions and policies regarding these illegal acts, and news websites such as the BBC often have helpful links at the bottom of each article which can lead to more specific information. Recent news includes:

• Two small-scale stories (here and here) from Britain which emerged today.
• A story from April estimating the amount of child pornography currently circulating online.
• Two stories (here and here) from Austria detailing a record seizure and the discovery of an international porn ring.

In addition to news websites, many countries have governmental organizations which deal specifically with online child exploitation, and outline that particular country's current policies:

• UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre
• An international cooperation entitled the Virtual Global Taskforce.
• Canada's NCECC.
• The international police agency Interpol.
• European Union's CIRCAMP.
• Australia's federal police.
• UAE police.

By far the best database on national laws regarding child exploitation can be found on Interpol, here.

Remember that virtually all countries are against online child pornography, and that national laws are already in place to deal with offenders. However, due to the global nature of the internet, police efforts across countries must be coordinated to effectively uncover international porn rings.

Good luck with further research; remember, knowing what your country's policies are, and what it is likely to agree to in a proposed resolution is key!

Two points of view

Hey all you cool HSMUN-UNICEF kids.

Will rising food prices perhaps cause a global crisis? This article believes it will.

(Do you guys know what is causing food prices to rise? RESEARCH IT. Briefly, it is a drought in Russia that is causing the price of grain to rise)

To contrast, this article explores how although food prices have been rising for quite a while, we have seen no world crisis.

Hopefully these two articles help you in figuring out what your country's foreign policy is in regards to our malnutrition topic!

UNICEF info by country: Somalia

Community mobilizers help to fight childhood malnutrition in Somalia

HARGEISA, Somalia, 22 December 2010 – Halima Awali, 60, shushes the crowd of boisterous children gathered around her and proclaims, “I was there to bring almost all of these babies into the world.” Squinting into the fierce noon Somaliland sun, the smiling grandmother adds, “Now I am here to make sure all of them stay here.”

Continue reading the article here.

Because debating definitions suck....

...we are going to define terms for you!

We don't want the focus of the limited committee time you have to be spent debating terms such as malnutrition and child pornography. This time should be used for debating the topic itself, and not small details such as this.

The following are the definitions we would like you to use:

Malnutrition: Malnutrition is a broad term commonly used as an alternative to undernutrition but technically it also refers to overnutrition. People are malnourished if their diet does not provide adequate calories and protein for growth and maintenance or they are unable to fully utilize the food they eat due to illness (undernutrition). They are also malnourished if they consume too many calories (overnutrition). [Source: Progress for Children - A Report Card on Nutrition, UNICEF, 2006]

Note: In the background paper, we defined malnutrition to only include "undernutrition". However, "overnutrition" should also be included in your definition of malnutrition. Since there are obviously clear differences between these two terms, it is important that you are clear on what kind of "malnutrition" you are speaking of.

Child pornography: Any means of depicting or promoting sexual abuse of a child, including print and/or audio, centered on sex acts or the genital organs of children. (This is the same definition as in the background paper)

Here are some documents that may be useful in your research:

Progress for Children: Achieving the MDGs with Equity

Progress for Children: A Report Card on Maternal Mortality

Progress for Children: A Report Card on Child Protection

The Progress for Children reports are excellent research opportunities for these two topics. We encourage you to read other reports that we did not link you to here, as well as past editions for the reports.

Happy holidays! We look forward to seeing you all in less than 2 months!!

The Children Left Behind

UNICEF recently released a report called "The Children Left Behind". This is the latest report in the Innocenti Research Centre's Report Card series, exploring the depth of inequalities in child well-being in the world's richest countries. It is the first report to ever compare the gap between children at the bottom of their societies and the average child living a "normal' life.

You can read the report here.

Hey UNICEFers...

Remember how a couple of days ago I told you about the beautiful website that is Twitter?

Guess what just showed up on my homepage!

Two beautiful articles on www.unicef.org, that's what!

Two case studies regarding our malnutrition topic for you to mull over on this chilly December evening: Myanmar and Haiti.

Remember, you can search for stories on the UNICEF website by country. That may be useful when researching your country's policies on the two topics for this year's committee.

Social media can help you research!

*This post may be useful to not only to UNICEF delegates, but delegates from other HSMUN committees as well.

Is anyone on Twitter?

It's a great way to quickly find out what's going on in the world.

Today, @SpeakerPelosi linked me to this article informing me that the House of Representatives in the USA passed a child nutrition bill to promote better eating habits by giving the federal government more authority to decide what is sold at schools across the United States.

For more information on the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, here are two articles which provide a little more information on this new bill.

First article, second article.

Here are some other tweets I have found useful in the past few weeks and a brief description of what each is about...

@UNICEF - "Founded in 1946, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) is the driving force that helps build a world where the rights of every child are realized."

@UN - "Official twitter account of United Nations. Get the latest information on the UN."

@Refugees - "The official account of UNHCR. Follow us as we provide vital aid and protection to the forcibly displaced around the world."

@cnnbrk - "CNN.com is among the world's leaders in online news and information delivery."

@ONECampaign - "ONE is a grassroots campaign of 2 million people committed to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable diseases."

@savethechildren - "Save the Children is the leading independent organization creating lasting change for children in need in the United States and around the world."

@hrw - "Human Rights Watch’s goal is to provide the most timely information about human rights crises and developments in some 90 countries around the world."

That's right! Twitter isn't just for following your favorite celebrities and pro athletes. It can be a quick way to jump start your research for HSMUN 2011!

Child Pornography: Does it Include Computer-Generated Images?

Good morning delegates!

As you may know from the coverage it received in the press, there is a Japanese video game called "RapeLay". The objective of this game is to earn points by assaulting schoolgirl characters and even forcing them to have abortions.

According to Wikipedia... (NB: WE WILL NOT CONDONE RESEARCH FROM WIKIPEDIA IN OUR COMMITTEE. However I'm going to take their word on this JUST THIS ONCE and you will understand after reading the following quote why I do not want to research any more about this video game...):

The player can choose from a variety of sexual positions, and controls the action by making movements with the mouse or by scrolling the mouse wheel. It features a realistic sexual simulator which allows the player to grope and undress the characters on a crowded train....

(The whole quote summarizing this game was not posted due to it's inappropriate nature. Read at your own discretion. HSMUN 2011 and the UNICEF Dais are in no way endorsing this video game.)

Yes, this game actually exists. In fact, it belongs to an entire genre of Japanese media, called "hentai" by the West, that features various sexualities that are generally viewed as perversions, including depictions of child-like figures involved in sex acts.  Also included in this genre, and produced by the same company are other sexually violent video games called "Battle Raper" and "Artificial Girl". According to this article:

A spokesman for the company said: "We believe there is no problem with the software, which has cleared the domestic ratings of an ethics watchdog body."

.....
Ethics watchdog body??

Somehow, this game has slipped through Japanese laws and can be sold in the country. Not surprisingly, it cannot be sold anywhere else in the world. While Japanese law bans the production and sale of sexually expicit images of children under 18, it does not prohibit animated or computer-generated images. Has the rapid industrilization and economic development of countries like Japan allowed children to slip through the cracks?

According to this article from 2008, Japan and Russia were the only G8 countries that do not ban possession of child pornography. In addition, magazines and DVDs featuring small children in bikinis are available for sale. According to human rights activists, pedophiles use these obscene photographs to convince their underage victims that sexual exploitation is normal.


The flip side - How about in a developing country ravaged by natural disasters?
This article briefly outlines the way in which children are exploited during times of vulnerability.
According to this article:

...about 250 million children under age 5 in developing countries do not have a birth certificate and about 150 million in the world are engaged in child labor. Children without birth certificates "risk being trafficked, not getting access to health care, eventually not getting inheritance rights," Bissell said. They face "a massive series of potential protection violations because you don't have identities."

---

The current UN Millennium Development Goals on reducing poverty do not cover violations of children's rights, and no country in the world is immune to issues of child exploitation. Delegates, we hope you can come up with some solutions to these problems.

Some more UNICEF links

Cruising www.un.org for less than 5 minutes resulted in these 3 interesting links:

After the 2008 financial crisis, funding for social programs decreased dramatically as countries tried to save their own economies. In addition, unemployment increased and in poor countries, people's purchasing power deceased. Since those in developing countries were already spending the majority of their income on food, this is an issue. Read more *here*.

The introduction of social programs can play a huge role in preventing and controlling malnutrition. These links highlight two contrasting examples: *this article* features an innovative program that is actively decreasing malnutrition in Iraq. Conversely, *this article* highlights how ignoring current problems regarding hunger will lead to chronic hunger deficits in the future.

Be sure to also check out the United Nations World Food Program website for more information on preventing and controlling malnutrition.

Hunger? Unacceptable!

When we think of poverty and hunger, we often think of drought-stricken African nations or the slums of East Asia.

What most people don't realize is that this issue also exists a little closer to home...

This article shows us that even developed countries have this problem. According to the article, "between 500,000 and 1 million of the people affected in the homes were children."

Remember, hunger exists all over the world.

Saving children is cool... So is UNICEF!!

Hello UNICEF delegates!
Welcome to another year of HSMUN! We hope you find our UNICEF posts both informative and entertaining! Check out the posts tagged UNICEF for posts relating to this committee!

My nAme is Natalie Pon and I am the ChaiR for UNICEF this year. I'm in my second year at the University of Alberta. This is my second delightful year as dais (last year I was Director for WHO), and my third with HSMUN. I enJoy playing Madden, rib-eye steaks, StarbUcks coffee (hiNt hint), the MIami DolphinS, and generAlly just being aWesome. In addition, I am an executivE with CampuS UNICEF at the U of A. I lOve everything about UNICEF, so if you have any questions, I will be More than willing to hElp you out and share my passion for this organization! I also love coffee. Did I mention that? So if you're looking for a way to impress me, there is a Starbucks in Cameron Library. Bernard Callebaut chocolate will do as well (hint hint).

What Up Beautiful Delegates!

My name is Muhammed Patel and I am the Director of UNICEF this year. I am in my second awesome year of Science and my 4th year with HSMUN (3 years as a delegate) and I love it more then i love donairs, and i love donairs more then I love soccer, football, and hockey and best of all UFC. I am in a long term relationship with my XBOX (gamertags?). I am also an executive with Campus UNICEF because Natalie is almost as awesome as she claims (I'm way more awesome). I just started drinking coffee and i don't drink Starbucks because i am cheap, so Tim Hortons always wins (hint hint?). We're going to make this year more awesome than this kid:

My name is Elzbieta Tymon, and I am your Intervention Attache this year. I'm currently in my second year of Business at the University of Alberta, and have been involved with HSMUN for the past 3 years: as a delegate in 2008 and 2009, and as News Staff last year.

The two resolutions in our amazing commitee this year are:

1. The question of coordinating international efforts against child pornography on the internet; and
2. The question of preventing and controlling child malnutrition.

For now, we will leave you with some words of wisdom:

In the words of Randy Moss, "[Delegates], I salute you! I'm out!"

"HIGH SIX!" - Barney Stinson