Executive Summary

Since the 2021 military coup, the State Administration Council (SAC) has intensified militarisation and violence in Southeast Burma. Children in locally-defined Karen State are particularly vulnerable, facing both the immediate threat of violent abuses and the longer-term harm caused by the destruction of services essential to their development and wellbeing.

Building on villagers’ voices, this report provides an account of the multifaceted impacts of armed violence on children during 2024 and 2025. It examines the barriers children face in accessing education, detailing how SAC attacks on schools have caused casualties, destruction, and disruptions to schooling. Children have also been forced to continue their education in displacement, without adequate shelter and materials, and under constant fear of hostilities. Conflict-related factors, such as livelihood challenges, have further contributed to school dropouts. The report also analyses how SAC-led attacks and movement restrictions have severely disrupted access to healthcare, sanitation, nutrition, and safe living environments, leading to deteriorating health outcomes. Clinics and medical personnel have been repeatedly targeted, while confiscation of aid at checkpoints has created acute shortages of medicines and equipment. High treatment costs and widespread poverty further strain children’s health.

Furthermore, it explores the impact of militarisation and ongoing violence on children’s psychosocial wellbeing. Living under the constant insecurity of attacks caused fear and distress among children, many of whom have lost family members, seen their homes destroyed, or been forced into displacement. These experiences have disrupted family and community life, depriving children of a childhood where play, learning, and hope for the future can thrive, and have led to broader social consequences such as rising drug use among youth. The report also examines how ongoing violent abuses, mostly committed by the SAC, continue to endanger children’s lives and wellbeing. KHRG documented killings, injuries, arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, ill-treatment, and sexual violence against children. It also covers the recruitment of children as soldiers within armed forces. 

Despite these grave harms, children and their communities show remarkable resilience. They continue to sustain schools, clinics, and support networks under extreme risk, while children voice aspirations for safety, education, and peaceful futures. The report also evaluates the availability of humanitarian aid and identifies critical gaps in local support systems.

The findings of this report reveal a consistent pattern of abuse against children  amounting to serious violations under the United Nations’ Six Grave Violations Framework and international human rights and humanitarian law, in many instances, rising to the level of war crimes or crimes against humanity. Immediate action is needed to stop the SAC’s actions, protect children’s lives, and restore dignity and wellbeing. Safeguarding children in Southeast Burma is not secondary to resolving the conflict: it is a necessary step toward meaningful and lasting peace.

Introduction

Children are central to peace and at the heart of the futures of their communities, yet they are disproportionately impacted by the war and armed conflict in Southeast Burma.[1] Since the 2021 military coup, the Burma Army,[2] under the command of the State Administration Council (SAC),[3] has carried out widespread attacks on villages in an effort to crush dissent, continuing a long history of repression against civilians in the region. During this period, KHRG has documented SAC abuses against villagers taking place with renewed intensity, including air strikes, indiscriminate shelling, burning of villages, torture, arbitrary arrests, disappearances, forced labour, killings, and sexual violence. These practices have created a human rights and humanitarian crisis that systematically denies children their fundamental rights. 

Direct and indiscriminate attacks on communities carried out by the SAC during 2024-2025 are heightening the exposure to violence and deprivation faced by children, already among the groups particularly vulnerable during times of armed conflict. These attacks bring harm to the communities that support children, killing and injuring parents and loved ones, destroying homes, and weakening the social fabric on which children rely. Beyond the harm inflicted to their families and villages, attacks carried out by the Burma Army also directly threaten children by killing and maiming them, destroying the education, healthcare, and humanitarian networks they depend on, and irreparably damaging their psychological wellbeing. Despite the special protections guaranteed under international law, children in locally-defined Karen State[4] continue to live under direct and constant threat to their existence, development, and dignity. Any meaningful effort to address the conflict in Burma must recognise such direct, severe, and widespread violations of children’s rights, and therefore ensure that the protection of children, and the systems that sustain their care and survival, are treated as an urgent priority.

This report examines the many ways in which armed conflict and SAC abuses are undermining children’s safety, integrity, and development. Bombings of schools, clinics, and community spaces have deprived children of education, healthcare, and safe environments to learn and play, while the destruction of livelihoods, movement restrictions, and repeated displacement have left families struggling to secure food, medicine, and shelter. As a result, children grow up without stability or safety: some drop out of school to avoid further attacks, while others face preventable diseases and acute hunger that puts their lives at risk, with little access to the support they urgently need. These conditions have undermined family and community life, leaving children fearful, traumatised, and uncertain about their future. At the same time, children are also being subjected to direct forms of violence by the Burma Army, including killings, torture, sexual violence, and injuries from shelling, air strikes, and landmines. Forced underage recruitment by SAC forces continues to militarise children further and expose them to grave danger. Other armed groups, including the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA),[5] which operates under the Karen National Union (KNU),[6] and the People’s Defence Forces (PDF),[7] have been reported to perpetrate some abuses, including carrying out arrests, deploying landmines, and recruiting teenagers, albeit on a far smaller scale. 

Adding to these hardships, SAC restrictions on the transportation of humanitarian aid in rural Southeast Burma have deprived children of essential support for their education, health, and basic survival, particularly food, medicine, and school materials. As a result, children are left more exposed to harm and barriers to their development. Local community-based organisations, who remain the main providers of assistance, face severe challenges at the hands of the SAC armed forces including harassment at checkpoints and the constant threat of air strikes. They require greater support from international stakeholders to sustain their work.

In the face of these attacks, children and their communities continue to demonstrate remarkable resilience: villagers organise hidden schools and mobile clinics, share scarce resources, and provide mutual support. Children themselves continue to dream of a future free from violence,  in which they can learn, play, and grow in safety. By documenting these realities, this report highlights both the devastating impact of the SAC's continued abuses and the armed conflict on children in Southeast Burma and the determination of communities to protect them despite overwhelming odds. Together, these testimonies provide a grassroots perspective on how children experience (and understand) the abuses and deprivations of the armed conflict in Burma. 

This report serves as an entry point to understanding these perspectives across a wide range of issues concerning children and their experiences during 2024 and the first half of 2025 and should help inform stakeholders on the steps necessary to ensure access to fundamental rights for children in Southeast Burma. By amplifying the voices of children and their communities, this report not only documents the harms they endure but also highlights their demands and aspirations for a safer future. Ensuring the protection of children in Southeast Burma is not secondary to resolving the conflict but is a necessary step toward any meaningful and lasting peace.

Key Findings

The Burma Army’s military offensives in rural Southeast Burma have turned children into one of the groups most impacted by the conflict. SAC’s direct and indiscriminate attacks on villages frequently resulted in the death and injury of children, and the destruction or damage of the education, healthcare, and welfare systems that children rely on for their survival. 

Between January 2024 and June 2025, KHRG documented repeated acts that fall within all six grave violations against children identified by the UN Security Council, mainly perpetrated by the Burma Army. The SAC’s repeated abuses also violate international human rights and humanitarian law and may constitute war crimes or amount to crimes against humanity.

In particular, the SAC carried out air strikes and shelling on schools that severely limited students’ access to education. These attacks killed and injured children, destroyed school buildings and facilities, and increased rates of school dropouts. Schools that faced SAC attacks are mainly those locally run by villagers or by the Karen administration. Attacks and conflict also prevented children from accessing schooling by increasing displacement and poverty. 

Similarly, SAC offensives severely undermined children’s access to healthcare and basic survival needs. SAC attacks on villages and on healthcare facilities; checkpoints and travel restrictions; and the high costs of SAC-run healthcare facilities increased rates of preventable disease and death amongst children in Southeast Burma in 2024-2025. Together, these attacks drove up food insecurity, left children in unsafe and unsanitary living conditions, cut access to crucial clinics, medicine, and vaccinations, and limited access to reproductive health protection.

The psychosocial health of children has also been severely affected by SAC attacks on villages and the armed conflict. Children witnessed violence, including the death and injury of loved ones, and experienced the erosion of their family life, including losing their homes and access to care. The risk of attacks also prevented children from playing, accessing education, and attending social gatherings as they had done before the 2021 coup. Attacks also led to increased poverty, displacement, and drug use amongst children. These experiences have left many children experiencing extreme fear, worry, sleep deprivation, anger, or despair.

At the same time, SAC attacks and violent abuses during the reporting period have caused injury to hundreds of children, including permanent disabilities, trauma, and death. Attacks included air strikes, shelling, shootings, and landmine explosions in homes, schools, villages, farms, and places of worship. The SAC also carried out arbitrary arrests and detention, enforced disappearances, torture, sexual violence, and forcibly recruited children. Other armed groups, including the KNLA, also recruited underage children during the reporting period.

While local community-based organisations work tirelessly to meet children’s basic needs, the constant threat of SAC attacks and limited funding have left nursing mothers and children without the support needed to survive. Moreover, the SAC also threatened humanitarian workers, causing great difficulty in reaching vulnerable populations in remote areas.

Overall, villagers continue to adopt various strategies to protect children in their communities and maintain their access to healthcare and education. They do this by relocating schools and clinics, building bunkers, finding ways to support teachers, transporting injured children to access services at the border, encouraging children, and holding gatherings in secure locations.

Recommendations

To the United Nations, Donor States, ASEAN Member States, and the International Community:

• Ensure that all engagement with Burma prioritises child-centred protection and humanitarian support, while explicitly avoiding any legitimisation of the military junta or its political processes and institutions.
• Implement a comprehensive arms and aviation fuel embargo and coordinated targeted sanctions against the military junta and its affiliates to weaken their capacity to attack civilians, especially children.
• Publicly and collectively condemn the non-democratic elections in December 2025, stressing that they are designed to entrench the junta’s illegitimate rule and do not reflect the will of the people, while reaffirming support for genuine democratic aspirations in Burma.
• Maintain and urgently increase flexible funding for Burma, given the dire humanitarian crisis, ensuring that conflict-affected and displaced populations, especially children, have sustained access to essential protection, services, and life-saving assistance.
• Prioritise sustained funding for cross-border and community-led social services, including education, health, nutrition, shelter, and mental health programs, delivered by local community-based organisations (CBOs) to displaced and conflict-affected children. 
• Condition all aid and diplomatic engagement on measurable benefits for children and ensure it is not diverted to the junta, guaranteeing accountability and protection from exploitation and harm.
• Collaborate with local civil society organisations to monitor and publicly report grave violations against children, including attacks on schools and clinics, child recruitment, and denial of aid.
• Strictly uphold the principle of non-refoulement in light of mass displacement and forced recruitment by the military junta and ensure protection for children and families fleeing conflict. 
• Guarantee access to education, healthcare, and birth registration for refugee and displaced children to prevent statelessness and exclusion. 
• Support accountability efforts through international justice mechanisms, universal jurisdiction, and child-sensitive investigations.
• Urgently refer the situation in Southeast Burma to the International Criminal Court (ICC) under Article 13(a), exert diplomatic pressure for a UN Security Council referral under Article 13(b), and provide political and financial support for child-sensitive investigations, evidence collection, witness protection, and meaningful victim participation.

To Humanitarian Actors, including INGOs:

• Expand support available for organisations doing cross-border and mobile delivery of essential health, nutrition, and psychosocial services to reach all areas of Southeast Burma.
• Increase support for education in emergencies by focusing on rebuilding school facilities, providing essential learning materials, and offering bursaries for children to continue their education despite conflict and displacement.
• Urgently address adolescent health, mental health, and substance use prevention through trauma-informed approaches, and significantly increase funding to build the capacity of local humanitarian actors and first responders to better prevent and respond to children’s experiences of human rights violations and trauma.
• Provide support to Thai-based actors, especially border schools and clinics, recognising that many displaced children and communities from Southeast Burma rely on these services.

To Accountability Actors, including International Justice Mechanisms and National Prosecutors:

• Bolster accountability mechanisms by supporting local partners to gather and safeguard evidence of child rights abuses in Southeast Burma.
• Facilitate independent monitoring and capacity-building for the KNU to implement international humanitarian law (IHL) and child-protection standards, while investigating and holding all armed groups in Burma accountable for any violations to prevent impunity.
• Broaden the scope of international investigations to include crimes committed in Southeast Burma and pursue accountability through universal jurisdiction and all other available legal avenues, with explicit recognition and inclusion of all affected ethnic communities.
• Ensure investigations and prosecutions are child-sensitive, protecting survivors’ safety, dignity, and participation.
• Develop reparations frameworks, in collaboration with local civil society, addressing education, healthcare, psychosocial support, and livelihoods for affected children and families.

To local Community-based Organisations (CBOs) and Ethnic Service Providers:

• Strengthen community-based child protection networks through technical support, awareness raising, training, clear referral pathways, and robust monitoring and accountability.
• Continue to enhance the coordination between different service providers in Southeast Burma to ensure affected children across all districts in locally-defined Karen State are protected.

To the Karen National Union (KNU) and the National Unity Government (NUG) Leaders:

• Uphold and enforce existing policies to end the recruitment and use of child soldiers, and strengthen transparent, accountable processes for their demobilisation and reintegration. 
• Provide safe, unimpeded humanitarian access for local actors, ensuring aid reaches affected populations, and prioritise child-focused medical, nutritional, and educational services.
• Place the best interests of the child above all political, military, or other interests.
• Ensure that all armed wings strictly refrain from using schools, health facilities, religious sites, and other civilian infrastructure for military purposes.
• Protect and bolster children’s rights to play, rest, education, and a safe social life, and ensure these rights are prioritised in policy, funding, and programming.

Methodology

To better understand the challenges faced by children in rural Southeast Burma amidst the conflict, KHRG conducted 93 interviews with parents, children, and other community members during May and June 2025. These interviews examined the situation of children’s rights in education, healthcare, welfare, and protection between January 2024 and June 2025 in locally-defined Karen State. In total, interviews were carried out with 54 adults (35 women and 19 men) and 39 children (21 girls and 18 boys). Interviews were semi-structured and followed a preliminary questionnaire prepared for KHRG staff. These interviews were conducted by KHRG field researchers: local community members trained to document issues affecting children in their communities.[8] All participants were informed of the purpose of the research and provided consent for their interviews to be used. Additionally, KHRG conducted five focus group discussions with children in Mu Traw and Dooplaya Districts in May 2025. 

The interviews cover all seven districts of KHRG’s operational area. Due to security risks faced while documenting abuses in the region, all districts were not equally represented in the interviews conducted for this report. KHRG carried out 11 interviews in Doo Tha Htoo (Thaton) District, 14 in Taw Oo (Toungoo) District, seven in Kler Lwee Htoo (Nyaunglebin) District, six in Mergui-Tavoy District, 32 in Mu Traw (Hpapun) District, 17 in Dooplaya District, and six in Hpa-an District.[9] These district designations are names used by local villagers, as well as many local Karen organisations. KHRG’s use of these names represents no political affiliation.

To supplement the analysis, KHRG also reviewed an additional 157 previously documented interviews with local villagers, which covered issues affecting children in 2024-2025. KHRG also reviewed 76 field reports (including incident reports, short updates, and situation updates) produced by community members in 2024 and 2025 on abuses in their communities. 

Finally, in September 2025, four additional interviews were conducted with local organisations and service providers operating in the region, including with the Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People (CIDKP), the Karen Women’s Organisation (KWO), the Karen Education and Culture Department (KECD), and the Karen Department of Health and Welfare (KDHW). One more interview was conducted with a representative from the Karen National Union (KNU).

This thematic report is subject to some research limitations. KHRG documentation focuses on the situation of villagers in rural Southeast Burma, and therefore issues affecting children in SAC-controlled towns and cities were not extensively documented. In addition, this report does not cover child trafficking or drug trade and trafficking. Likewise, the actual numbers of attacks on communities and conflict-related violations against children are vastly undervalued in this report, due to challenges faced by community members in both reporting and documenting. 

To ensure the security of interviewees and villagers, their personal names and locations have been replaced by single- and double-digit letter codes, where appropriate. These codes apply only to this report and have no link with the actual names of the villagers or past published reports. All names and locations censored correspond to actual names and locations on file with KHRG.