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Heartbreaking video shows how lost poor kids are treated differently to rich children
Do people treat lost rich kids differently to poor children?
A heartbreaking video filmed for Unicef found the answer is most definitely yes.
In a social experiment carried out in Tbilisi for the United Nations children's charity, a six-year-old child actress named Anano is dressed in cute children's clothes and left on a street in the Georgia capital.
Strangers soon stop to see if she ok, with one man getting his phone out to get help.
When Anano is then dressed in dirty old clothes, with a little soot on her face, everyone walks on by, not even giving her a second glance.
The experiment is then repeated in a restaurant, where again patrons shower the well-dressed girl with attention. One woman strokes her cheek while a man offers her money.
When left to wander around, dirty and dishevelled, customers shun her or tell her to go away. One asks a member of staff: "Can you take her out please?"
The experiment is stopped when Anano gets too upset because of the way she is being treated.
"Because my face was covered in soot and my clothes were all dirty [they told me to go away]," Anano said. "This made me sad. I don't know. They were all telling me to go away."
At the end of the video, viewers are asked to "imagine what it's like for millions of children who are pushed aside every day".
The film was released this week as part of a Unicef report, which found poor children were twice as likely as rich children to die before age five.
Noting some progress in halving global mortality rates for children under 5 since 1990 and boys and girls attending primary school in equal numbers in 129 countries, the report said such developments have been neither even nor fair, with repercussions for global turmoil.
"Some of the big challenges that we now face, like refugees and migrants, are connected with inequality and poverty," Justin Forsyth, Undine's deputy executive director, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Narrowing that inequity "is good for those children, but it's also good to stop future crises," he said.
The report called for stronger efforts to educate the world's children, noting that on average each additional year of education a child receives increases her or his adult earnings by about 10 percent.
Also it said for each additional year of schooling completed on average by young adults, a nation's poverty rate drops 9 percent.
About 124 million children do not go to primary and lower-secondary school, a number that has increased about 2 million since 2011, it said.