For the second consecutive year, the UN Security Council has debated how to protect 300,000 child soldiers and countless other young victims of armed conflicts around the world.
"The sheer magnitude of this problem is something new, is unprecedented," said Mr Olara Otunnu, the UN special representative for children and armed conflict. "It is a worldwide trend, it has spread across the globe."
Mr Otunnu hoped that yesterday's day-long debate would produce a binding Security Council resolution that would condemn recruiting child soldiers, pledge to include the welfare of children in any peace negotiations and give priority to the needs of youngsters at the end of a conflict.
He also wants all peacekeeping operations to feature special training for the protection of children and for the council to keep the rights of the child on its agenda, making it a condition for any assistance.
Mr Otunnu said the council had until recently considered its role "very much confined to high politics, military aggression, and perhaps less in relation to the softer humanitarian, human rights issues". "To go from there, to have an actual resolution on a thematic issue that concerns children across the board in situation in conflict, would be tremendous for us," he said.
Some 300,000 boys and girls under 18 years of age, most of them under 15 and some as young as 7, are serving as regular soldiers, guerrilla fighters, porters, cooks, sexual slaves, and suicide commandos in most of the 50 countries marked by armed conflicts.
Over the last decade, wars have killed 2 million children, left 6 million maimed, created 1 million orphans and 12 million refugees.
The heavy toll is mostly the result of civil wars that have escalated since the end of the Cold War in such places as Sierra Leone, Angola, Liberia, Sudan, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Colombia and Afghanistan.
The simplicity and proliferation of lightweight automatic weapons has made it possible for very young children to bear and use arms, Mr Otunnu said.
However, any security council resolution was expected to exclude any plea to governments to stop using children under 18 as soldiers. The US, which recruits high school graduates, opposes the 18-year-old minimum age standard Mr Otunnu advocates.
Despite a growing body of international law which governments have signed to protect children, the abuses are increasing, with children being used both as victims and perpetrators.
In many cases rebel forces have "tossed aside" any rules of warfare towards the civilian population, Mr Otunnu said.
But he insisted that in his trips around the world, from Sri Lanka to Colombia, no rebel leader had ever told him "to jump into the East River" when he quoted from the Geneva conventions on protecting civilians in warfare or the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The main points of the treaties "have become a common pool of international norms" that even the worst abusers know they are violating, Mr Otunnu said.
"Children are especially innocent, especially vulnerable. They tend to suffer disproportionately from the excesses of war. They are the least equipped to cope and adjust," he said.