A/69/264 consolidation of the policy agenda and accelerate progress in violence prevention and response. 2. Addressing persisting and emerging challenges 30. Despite these important developments, progress has been too slow and too fragmented to make a genuine breakthrough in the protection of children from violence. The risk of violence remains present in every setting, including where children should be safe — in schools, in care and justice institutions, and within the home. 31. The urgency of safeguarding children’s freedom from violence has certainly not diminished and the magnitude of this phenomenon remains h igh and deeply distressing. Significant United Nations reports illustrate this well: (a) As highlighted in the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Global Study on Homicide 2013, children and young people are highly represented among global homicide rates. Children below the age of 15 represent 8 per cent of the victims and more than half of all violent deaths are young people between 15 and 30 years of age. Clearly, the victims of homicide have a very young face . (b) In the past few years there has been a marked increase in trafficking in children. From 2007 to 2010, numbers rose from 20 to 27 per cent; in some regions more than 60 per cent of detected victims are children, as indicated in the UNODC 2012 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons and girls are particularly affected. Child trafficking is a serious form of violence; but it is also a source of incidents of abuse, as children are enslaved into prostitution, sold into marriage, coerced to work in plantations or deep-sea fishing, forced to beg on the street, or recruited by criminal networks. (c) Exploitation through labour remains particularly worrying. As stressed by the International Labour Organization in the 2013 report Marking progress against child labour — Global estimates and trends 2000-2012, 168 million children worldwide are involved in exploitative work; almost half of them are of primary school age and more than 11 million are girls involved in domestic work, often exposed to excessive working hours and hazardous tasks, as well as to violence, abuse and exploitation. (d) Early and forced marriage affects countless children around the world. Girls are particularly at risk. According to the 2014 UNICEF publication Ending Child Marriage: Progress and Prospects, more than 700 million women worldwide were married before their eighteenth birthday; and more than one third entered into union before the age of 15. Girls living in rural areas or belonging to the most impoverished families face the highest risk. (e) Violence is present in all regions. According to World Health Organization (WHO) in the 2013 European report on preventing child maltreatment, every year, across the European region, child maltreatment leads to the premature death of more than 850 children under 15 years; 18 millio n children suffer from sexual abuse, 44 million from physical abuse and 55 million from mental abuse. Shocking as these figures may be, it is believed that 90 per cent of child maltreatment may go unnoticed. The impact of violence has been aggravated by th e recent economic crisis. Indeed, high levels of unemployment and cuts in child benefits, and in health and welfare services have led to increasing levels of stress, 14-58801 7/23