Children in the Junta’s Crosshairs

Last weekend, the Myanmar military junta killed at least 35 people, including at least six children, in airstrikes across Karenni State, Chin State, and Mandalay Region. With its crosshairs fixed on the country’s youngest and most vulnerable, the junta is not only murdering children in broad daylight. It is also detaining them, forcibly conscripting them, bombing their schools and homes, and depriving them of vaccines. The international community must act urgently and decisively to end the junta’s atrocities, advance justice, and ensure that Myanmar’s children can grow up free from military tyranny.

According to the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar’s (IIMM’s) latest report, released on 12 August 2025, the junta is detaining children as young as two years old, “often as proxies for their parents,” in prisons where it inflicts systematic torture. The IIMM also reported that the junta subjects detained children “to torture, ill-treatment or sexual and gender-based crimes.”

This isn’t new. Targeting children is part and parcel of the junta’s widespread and systematic terror campaign against the people—ongoing for more than four and a half years. In September 2021, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Tom Andrews, also raised the alarm about the junta’s arbitrary detention of children as young as 20 weeks old in lieu of their family members.

It’s no surprise then that the junta is, once again, high on the UN’s 2025 “list of shame” for five grave violations against children in armed conflict—specifically, recruiting and using child soldiers, killing and maiming, sexual violence, attacks on schools and hospitals, and abduction. In June 2025, the UN Secretary-General reported that, from January to December 2024, the junta and junta-affiliated militias forcibly recruited at least 400 children and used at least 378 children in combat roles. According to Human Rights Watch, the junta is abducting children for its forced conscription campaign—sometimes taking them in lieu of their parents—deliberately falsifying or willfully ignoring their ages, and forcing them to the frontlines to fight and die.

What’s more, in the past two weeks alone, the junta has escalated its bombings on civilians, targeting schools and killing dozens of children across the country in cold blood. On 17 August, junta bombings struck a crowded neighborhood and a kindergarten in Mawchi—a tin-mining area in Pasaung Township, Karenni State—killing at least five children. A week earlier, the junta intentionally bombed another school in the same township, injuring three children who were taking an exam. On 14 August, the junta killed at least four children in airstrikes and shelling attacks on Pauk Township, Magwe Region.

The next day, the junta bombed a residential area near a monastery in Mogok Township, Mandalay Region, killing at least 21 people including three pregnant women. One week earlier, the junta intentionally bombed a monastery in Mogok’s Kyauk Na Ga Village, killing at least five people including two children.

Alongside its heinous attacks, the junta is continuing to deprive children of access to vaccines, medicines, and basic necessities. In Rakhine State, children under one year old have not received any vaccinations since November 2023 because of the junta’s blockade on vaccine deliveries and a severe lack of healthcare facilities. According to local frontline responders, the junta is also depriving children of diapers and other necessities by blocking the transportation of these supplies from major cities to resistance-controlled areas, such as Sagaing and Magwe Regions. Amid the junta’s violence, these responders are making immense efforts to support children, including in internally displaced persons camps—from providing psychosocial care to building bomb bunkers and using them as classrooms.

How long will the international community claim to care about children while failing to hold the junta accountable for its horrific atrocities against Myanmar’s youngest generation?

To protect Myanmar’s children, the international community must urgently take coordinated action to dismantle the junta’s capacity to commit such grave atrocities, ensure the release of all children from junta custody, and robustly support, through cross-border channels, locally led initiatives to protect children.

States must turn their words of condemnation into real action to stop the junta’s airstrikes and other attacks targeting children and other civilians: This means a global arms embargo including aviation fuel and dual-use goods, as well as coordinated, targeted, and sustained sanctions against the junta, its cronies, and any entity supplying it with weapons or other means of support. In tandem, all engagement with the junta must end, including diplomatic, political, military, and financial engagement.

Given Myanmar’s status as a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, we once again urge the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child to address the junta’s deliberate violence against and willful neglect of children in Myanmar. The Committee must call on the UN Security Council to act on Resolution 2601 on children and armed conflict, which underscores the need to safeguard the right to education.

At the same time, accountability for the junta’s atrocity crimes must be an urgent global priority. The international community must support and accelerate the Myanmar people’s efforts to hold the perpetrators accountable, including through universal jurisdiction cases and a State Party referral of the crisis to the International Criminal Court under Article 14 of the Rome Statute.

As children suffer the junta’s violence countrywide, the world must stop sitting on its hands and end its complicity in the junta’s crimes. Every day of global inaction further emboldens the junta to commit unspeakable atrocities against Myanmar’s children.

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[1] One year following the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, the former military junta changed the country’s name from Burma to Myanmar overnight. Progressive Voice uses the term ‘Myanmar’ in acknowledgement that most people of the country use this term. However, the deception of inclusiveness and the historical process of coercion by the former State Peace and Development Council military regime into usage of ‘Myanmar’ rather than ‘Burma’ without the consent of the people is recognized and not forgotten. Thus, under certain circumstances, ‘Burma’ is used.

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Progressive Voice is a participatory, rights-based policy research and advocacy organization that was born out of Burma Partnership. Burma Partnership officially ended its work on October 10, 2016 transitioning to a rights-based policy research and advocacy organization called Progressive Voice. For further information, please see our press release “Burma Partnership Celebrates Continuing Regional Solidarity for Burma and Embraces the Work Ahead for Progressive Voice.”