Author Talk – Susan Bissell in conversation with Jim Brooke

“Every week, thousands of migrant children arrive at the U.S. border fleeing violence, poverty, or climate devastation. In 2024 alone, more than 98,000 unaccompanied children were referred to federal custody — many detained, separated from their families, or left in legal limbo. These abuses are not accidents of a broken immigration system; they are symptoms of a larger epidemic: violence against children. Like malaria or tuberculosis, this violence is widespread, predictable, and preventable. We can diagnose it, document it, treat it, and ultimately eradicate it — but only if we stop seeing children’s suffering as inevitable and recognize it as a systemic disease.

This is the central argument of Protecting the World’s Children, a new book co-edited by Susan Bissell and A.K. Shiva Kumar. Its publication coincides with a moment when we are once again confronting our treatment of migrant children, and when global crises are forcing millions of young people from their homes.

We have to shift the conversation from sympathy to strategy. Migrant children at the border are not just victims in need of compassion; they are rights-holders entitled to dignity, safety, a future and a voice in the policies that affect them. Unless we confront violence against children as a systemic disease, it will continue to metastasize — at our borders and around the world.”

Susan Bissell’s career has focused on the rights of children. In January 2016, she was named director a.i. of UNICEF’s Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children. Bissell has spent more than twenty-five years working in various capacities for UNICEF.

Jim Brooke is a Berkshires native and lifelong foreign correspondent. He worked as a journalist for eight years in Moscow, first as Bloomberg Bureau Chief, then as the Voice of America correspondent for the former Soviet Union.

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