417 Maria Concepción Pérez Villalobos Military advisers for gender and for the protection of children in armed conflicts CONCLUSIONS Over the past decade, the United Nations has been pushing for more effective commitments from the International Community as regards the protection of women and children in situations of armed conflict. Through Security Council Resolutions and other provisions, we have seen the development of a complementary regulatory framework to existing international humanitarian law, such as the Geneva Conven-tions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977, the Statutes of the International Criminal Court, and other binding legal regulations. The priority given to women and children is justified by the new face of armed conflicts, characterised by the particularly cruel and intense impact they have on them. They become victims of all types of attacks which make them the groups with the highest level of deaths, injuries, displaced persons, refugees and violations of all basic human rights. Another characteristic of recent conflicts, due to the fact that most are internal conflicts, has been the use of attacks on women and children as true “weapons of war”, applied extensively and deliberately as offensive tactics with the aim of threatening, demoralising and causing as much psychological harm as possible to the opponent – often a different ethnic or social group. Alongside these humanitarian reasons, the United Nations has included in its work the new conceptual and legal approaches from the conventions on women and children that have had an important impact in all areas (cultural, social, labour, welfare, etc.) linked with the Millennium Goals, proposed at the start of this century. As well as calling for an integrated and cross-cutting approach to all issues affecting women and children, this movement calls for real involvement of both groups in the construction of societies, and particularly societies affected by armed conflict. This new approach with differentiated treatment for the issues that affect women and those that affect children can be seen in the groups of Security Council Resolutions referred to in this article: the series that starts with Resolution 1325 (2000) on women, peace and security, and the series that opens with Resolution 1261 (1999) on children and armed conflict. What is significant is that, when examining them together, there are very few cross references between the two subject areas. Differentiation between the two areas of protection is also very clear when looking at the measures, structures and procedures outlined. This translates into the need to ensure that personnel participating in peacekeeping operations, and particularly military personnel, are given specific training on each area, without trying to find “shortcuts” in training programmes. The training of gender advisers and child protection advisers for deployment should be given special attention. These two roles have recently been incorporated into UN missions and have proven to be of fundamental importance for the on-the-ground implementation of the general
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