Save the Children Makes Injustice Thing of the Past

Save the Children in Australia is running an online exhibition, a print and outdoor advertising campaign, along with a national exhibition, to make injustice for children a thing of the past. It’s 2009, yet things like child prostitution, child soldiers and child deaths from unclean water is still happening. Save the Children Australia want to make these practices obsolete.

The national exhibition, debuting at Melbourne’s Southern Cross Station in early July, is designed to raise awareness of child abuse, slavery and neglect, issues that are often overlooked. The national exhibition will travel to South Australia, Western Australia, Queensland and New South Wales over the next three months.

“In an ideal world, children once forced into slavery, conflict and trafficking would be living enriching lives with the support of families and schools,” said Suzanne Dvorak, chief executive of Save the Children in Australia. “Children deprived of a playful, stimulating and happy childhood would be a thing of the past.”

Save the Children’s Make it a Thing of the Past exhibition includes confronting images of a child soldier, a plaster cast used to symbolise child abuse in Australia and 308 vials of blood to represent the number of people infected with HIV every hour.

“Currently, about 250,000 children are used in front-line conflict across the globe, there is a 12-year gap in life expectancy between indigenous and non-indigenous children, more than 218 million children worldwide work as child labourers, more than nine million children under five die each year, including 2.4 million from preventable diseases, and 75 million children worldwide don’t go to school,” Ms Dvorak said.

Credits

M&C Saatchi, Melbourne, by creative director Steve Crawford, art director Murray Bransgrove, copywriters Sandra Galiazzo and Doogie Chapman, account team Chantelle Warren and Bree Woodhouse, with photography by Paul Torcello and retouching by Ed Croll and Julia Cornelius.