The annual UNICEF Photo of the Year Contest once again in 2007 left millions speechless, inspired, shocked, and enticed into action.
This years winning image looks harmless at first, a man and a young girl sitting side by side, that is until you realize this is not a photo of a father and daughter, but an engagement photograph. The image by photographer Stephanie Sinclair, is of a 40-year-old groom sitting beside his 11-year-old future bride, taken last year in Afghanistan. The legal age to wed for a girl in Afghanistan is 16, however child marriages are still common in many areas. Sinclare, asked the child bride what show she felt, she responded, “Nothing, I do not know this man. What am I supposed to feel?”. According to UNICEF some 60 million children are forced to enter into marriages before they are of legal age, half of which are in South Asia. The problem of child brides is the greatest in Rajasthan, India, where 15% of girls are under 10 years old when they married. Child marriages lead to higher instances of domestic violence and early pregnancies, which leave girls at high risk for death in childbirth, complications, and low birth weights.
The second place photograph was of a a 12 year-old boy working in a Bangladeshi brickyard, taken by photographer GMB Akash, of Bangladesh. UNICEF estimates that 4.7 million children between five and 14 years of age are involved in child labor in Bangladesh alone, and some 246 million children aged 5-17 worldwide are involved in full-time labor. Children involved in child labor have little to no access to an education, and therefore their escape from the factories, fields, etc becomes very limited, in addition many children are malnourished and ripe for additional exploitation.
The third-place photograph by German photographer Hartmut Schwarzbach, shows a 9 year old girl jumping in on a junked chair in the middle of a landfill outside of Manila, the day happens to be the young girls birthday. The girl is one of the children who live in the nearby charcoal burners’ camp with her family, and like the other children she spends her days in search of wood among the rubbish in th dump. The children in camps such as this are malnourished and lack education, leaving them to continue in the cycle of poverty, with little chance of escape from dumps that consume their days.
Eight other photos where chosen to receive honorable mention by the contest judges, each one is as powerful as the next…do I put photos in or link with a see here? My personal favorite of the eight is ‘Chechnya’s Forgotten Children’ by photographer Musa Sadulayew. The photo captures the double edged sword or the war and recovery, the struggle for a normal life for the children of war, and the undeniable scars that war imprints on society.
