Our children are starving — for food, for protection, for parents, for hope.

OPINION:

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Our children are starving — for food, for protection, for parents, for hope.

There are all kinds of public service announcements, commercials and efforts urging us to help feed hungry children and their families. In all, a record 70 million are in need of one of life’s necessities — food.

We can argue and debate until the cows (don’t) come home about why we’re allowing our children to starve, but that won’t change the bottom line that we are facing the broadest and deepest global humanitarian crisis since the United Nations was established in 1945.

Indeed, an estimated 100,000 people in South Sudan are dying of starvation and 7.5 million South Sudanese need food.

Moreover, their hunger pains have spread to the lands of their neighbors, including Nigeria, Yemen and Somalia, where another 16 million people are at risk of starving in the coming months.

Closer to home, DoSomething.org says 49 million Americans struggle to put food on the table, and Central Americans say they are undernourished and starved because of the quadruple threats of civil war, violence, politics and poverty.

Children, mostly through no fault of their own, always get jammed in the crossfire, eh?

Consider, the teens who attend Rockville High School in Montgomery County.

Rockville High is a traditional school in one of the wealthiest county’s in America. Yet despite the metal detectors, electronic surveillance and other peepers in the school, a young girl was raped inside the school and another was beaten inside the school because the grownups weren’t doing what they were supposed to do — protecting their charges.

The schoolhouse violence was incomparable to the kidnapping and rape of the school girls in Nigeria.

Remember that headline grabber in 2014? About 270 girls at Chibok school in northeastern Nigeria, and while it’s certainly good news that scores of them are now accounted for, 195 have yet to return.

Missing children. Quelle horreur!

Scores of children and adults have been reported missing in America’s capital, and the kids’ disappearances are treated like a political football.

When it comes to missing children in D.C., the numbers don’t lie.

Officials spin the news, for certain, saying there is no uptick in missing kids, when statistics provided by the Metropolitan Police Department prove the exact opposite. Under the heading “Currently Open Cases,” the MPD website says there were no juvenile critical cases in 2012 and 2013, there was one in 2014, none in 2015, and three in 2016.

But in 2017, there are already 14. That is an uptick.

As for non-critical juvenile cases, there were none in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 or 2016.

So far in 2017, there are three. That is an uptick.

There was one adult critical case each year in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.

There have been six so far this year. That is an uptick.

As for adult non-critical cases, there were none in 2012 and 2013, one in 2014 and one in 2015, two in 2016, but eight so far this year. Of all those cases, 31 remain open as of Thursday — one from 2012 and 2013, three from 2014, two from 2015 and six from 2016.

That, too, is an uptick.

In its eagerness to push solutions to a growing problem, the Bowser administration patted itself on the back with a six-point missing persons initiative and a letter to members of the Congressional Black Caucus extolling its position as a national leader on preventing young people from running away from home.

If there were such a preventive measure, the late Dr. Benjamin Spock, a leading authority on children and family dynamics, would have patented and bottled it, and we’d be mandating that adolescents and teens continue to suckling at that teat.

As it is, children have become after thoughts when it comes to parenting them, protecting them and feeding them because we have turned those responsibilities over to governments and nongovernmental groups.

Shame on us.

• Deborah Simmons can be contacted at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.