Extermination and Abuse of Children

My depressing daily reading of what happens in the world confronts me, among other things, with an increasingly horrifying reality. There is a frightening rise in violence committed agains children. I mean children: those little bodies that crawl or toddle about like drunkards, with their tiny hands, their big eyes, their Donald Duck voices, drawing pictures of their parents together. These little ones, while playing in the park with their mothers, have someone come along and try to strangle them; or at the zoo, a man grabs a three-year-old and throws him into the jaws of crocodiles; elsewhere, a father adopts a newborn and then sexually abuses and kills him; and in one house, a father murders all seven of his children as well as a nephew. Then I read about a woman who wants to kill herself but strangles her 13-year-old daughter first, and about a man who repeatedly abuses a minor and puts him on a diet to weaken his resistance, while seven minors are abused by a religion teacher, and a 30-year-old man impregnates a 10-year-old girl. Priests, educators, teachers, youth-group leaders, parents, grandparents, uncles — and then there are the sick, the disturbed, who are arrested for sexual abuse.
In 2024, the United Nations verified more than 41,000 grave violations against children, the highest number ever recorded. Killings, maimings, abuse, abductions, torture. In 2025, cases of online grooming of children rose by 15.7 percent compared with 2024. Around the world, about 473 million minors live in war zones: Sudan, Lebanon, Yemen, Congo. And then there are the killings of children carried out in broad daylight, openly and shamelessly, before the eyes of the world. According to a thorough and serious report by a United Nations commission of inquiry, in Gaza and the West Bank one child is killed every day. They are taken aim at and shot in the forehead or the heart. A genocide, the Israelis say, to be one, must crush the coming generations.
“If this is a man” — the question posed by Primo Levi’s book — still has no answer.