There are two million newly displaced children trapped in conflict zones, in Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Central African Republic and South Sudan. In fact at 25 million boys and girls the largest number in any of the 70 years since the end of the second world war the world s displaced children are now akin to the population of a medium sized state. The sight of children exiled from their homes, often for years on end, is now so common and their suffering so profound that the world seems frozen into inaction by the sheer enormity of their plight. Vulnerable children, whose right to be shielded from war is supposedly guaranteed in successive UN charters and resolutions, are being systematically violated, exploited, injured, raped and killed, in a succession of theatres of war. The summer of 2014 will go down in the history books as the summer of the child refugee.