French photographer Elise Blanchard has gone to great lengths to document the living conditions of girls in Afghanistan. She met girls like ten-year-old Hajira, who has little time left in elementary school and tirelessly studies textbooks at home.

Eight-year-old boy Stav survived the Hamas massacre in an Israeli kibbutz on October 7, 2023. Shock and bewilderment are written all over the faces of children like him, even if they are physically unharmed.

Palestinian siblings Dareen, eleven, and Kinan, five, lost their parents in an Israeli airstrike. Pain and grief: the fate of children on all sides of a war. They are never to blame, but they always suffer.

Small escapes from the dark clouds of war. In the north-west of Ukraine, also threatened by Russian drones, Alina, accompanied by friends, practises cycling.

In a war-torn school in the Ethiopian region of Tigray, two children immerse themselves in books. The smiles on their faces: a moment of rare bliss.

A cyclone has swept away what was once the home of twelve-year-old Pallavi Paduya in the Ganges Delta. Extreme weather events are increasing globally as a result of the climate crisis.

After fleeing the war, fleeing the fire: children from Syria escape from the burning Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos.

In the harbour of Manila, the Philippines, slum children like 13-year-old Wenie fish in the flood of rubbish for bottles, for which they get some money from a plastic recycler.

In parts of West Africa, disabled children are considered a “punishment from the gods”. They are lucky if they are admitted to a care home, like this boy with prosthetic legs.

The face of a maltreated childhood: it is Zahra's face. Five years old, she fled with her parents and seven siblings from the war in Syria to a camp in Jordan.

A smile despite everything: near a makeshift tent city in Iran's Razavi province, a refugee girl seems to be able to forget all her misery for a moment.

One of many dramas on the Balkan route: distraught and crying children from a refugee route stopped at the border between Greece and Macedonia.

They don't look like the other Filipino children, and their dad has disappeared: Maybe it was true love for the mums, but only sex tourism for the dads.

Dania, eleven years old, just wanted to play. She was hit by shrapnel. Horrific devastation, incomprehensible grief. Violence against millions of children in Syria.

Children between the fronts and on the front line. In Aleppo, Syria, a frightened girl looks at weapons and blood. She is too young to know what peace could be.

“Sodom and Gomorrah” is the name given to the toxic waste dump in Accra, Ghana. Children smash up electronic waste from rich countries to get their hands on recyclable metals.

A war in the genetic material: the dioxin-containing, carcinogenic Agent Orange used by the USA in the Vietnam War is still claiming victims in peacetime. Like the girl Nguyen Thi Ly.

Safety from deadly superstition: Tanzanian albino girl Selina with a friend. Elsewhere in Africa, she would still be persecuted as a “child of the devil”.

Like a frightened angel in distress: a girl in Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the West, plagued by misery and filth, dictatorships and natural disasters.

Forced to marry: an Afghan couple, she eleven years old, he 40. Forced child marriages still exist today in poor Islamic, Buddhist and Christian cultures.

The girl Rahila, five years old, badly injured and smiling bravely. She is a lucky survivor of an earthquake in Kashmir, in which 18,000 children died.

On the streets of Odessa. 13-year-old Jana: drug addict, homeless, infected with AIDS, without parents. She lived in a hole in the wall. Completely lost until death.

Exhausted and desperate: A child with his mother in the north of the Sudanese civil war region of Darfur. 1.6 million people are hopeless because their homes are burning.

The odyssey of Enrique: A boy from Honduras tries to get to his mother, who is working in the USA. He begins a dangerous journey on the roofs of goods trains.

Children's hands reaching into the void through an opening in the wall: Fleeing the civil war in Liberia, boys beg for a pass to neighbouring Sierra Leone.

Years of pesticide use on the banana plantations of Costa Rica: Doctors suspect that severe disabilities like that of the nine-year-old boy Siviani are a consequence.

His wound is roughly stitched up, but his traumatic experiences will haunt him for the rest of his life: a war orphan on the streets of the Rwandan capital Kigali.