LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - \"In almost all recorded cases, children were among the victims of military operations by government forces, including the Syrian armed forces, the intelligence forces and the shabiha militia, in their ongoing conflict with the opposition, including the Free Syrian Army,\" the report said.

The report for the year 2011 lists 32 \"persistent perpetrators\" that have been on the list for at least five years, double the number in 2010. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon\'s expressed deep concern at \"the unacceptably high, and growing, number\" of the long-term abuse and mistreatment of children in Syria.

U.N. Special Representative for Children and Armed conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy says that while new crises erupted in 2011 \"with a heavy toll on children such as in Syria, and also in Libya, violations against girls and boys have come to an end in other parts of the world.\"

Coomaraswamy says that the \"list of shame\" with 52 names, which include four new parties in Syria, Yemen and Sudan, is far too long.

The U.N. Security Council voted in 2009 to name and shame countries and insurgent groups engaged in conflicts that lead to children being killed, maimed and raped.

The United Nations has since received reports of \"grave violations\" against children in Syria since March 2011, when protests against President Bashar Assad\'s government first began.

Among a seemingly unending list of atrocities in the report was a former member of the Syrian armed forces who said that during protests in Tall Kalakh, his commander gave an order to shoot during the break-up of the demonstrations and he saw three girls, who appeared to be between 10 and 13 years old, killed.

In addition, a former member of the intelligence forces was quoted as saying he witnessed the killing of five children in a secondary school during demonstrations in Aleppo in the last quarter of 2011.

In another incident, an attack on the village of Ayn l\'Arouz in Idlib province on March 9, 2012, a witness said several dozen boys and girls between the ages of 8 and 13 were forcibly taken from their homes and \"used by soldiers and militia members as human shields, placing them in front of the windows of buses carrying military personnel into the raid on the village.\"

The report also say that child victims of torture described being beaten, blindfolded, subjected to stress positions, whipped with heavy electrical cables, scarred by cigarette burns and in one case subjected to electrical shock to the genitals.

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