According to a report titled “Displaced Childhoods”released by Free Burma Rangers (FBR) and Partners, in 2009 alone there were about 112,000 villages in eastern Burma displaced due to direct or indirect actions by the Burmese regime. Children are particularly at risk in displacement, according to the report. From 2002 to the end of 2009, the report said that more than 580,000 civilians including more than 190,000 children have been forcibly displaced from their homes in eastern Burma. An estimated one to three million people live as internally displaced persons (IDPs) throughout Burma. A third of these are children.
Childhood is disrupted by violence, insecurity and poverty. Children are witnesses of and subject to arbitrary and extrajudicial killings, torture and mistreatment, arbitrary arrest and detention, rape and sexual violence, forced labor and conscription as porters, recruitment as child soldiers and restrictions on basic and fundamental freedoms
The Partners and FBR teams collected information from 200 people affected by displacement in Burma through community-based surveys and border interviews and conducted 82 in-depth interviews along the Thai-Burmese border between June and December 2009.