The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is asking nations to provide some 136 million dollars to help it cope with what it claims is a growing state of emergency for millions of women and children worldwide.

UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy told the agency’s executive board Tuesday that it needed 136 million dollars in emergency assistance to aid some 48 million women and children facing wars, natural disasters or other crises in 20 countries.

“Only four years ago, UNICEF was working with its partners in some 15 countries gripped by such crises,” Bellamy said. “Today, that number has risen to more than 55 countries, most gripped by civil conflict – and all involving situations that profoundly threaten the lives and welfare of children and women.”

In particular, UNICEF officials are arguing that the rules of war have changed in recent decades, placing more women and children in harm’s way than ever.

Nils Kastberg, director of UNICEF’s emergency operations, said the deliberate targeting of women and children was “almost unprecedented”, since they made up only about five percent of all victims of war at the beginning of the century.

“There is an increasing disrespect for the sanctity of hospitals, of schools” and other areas previously off-limits to combatants, Kastberg argued. Now, many groups use such sites as staging areas for attacks, he said.

Before, “wars were between countries”, noted Urban Jonsson, UNICEF regional director for eastern and southern Africa. Now that many of the major conflicts are waged within states, he said, “the rules of the game … don’t seem to be respected by groups within countries”.

Bellamy told the executive board Tuesday that several recent conflicts, including many in Africa, have placed special burdens that threaten the survival of millions of women and children.

“I think of the conflict in Sierra Leone, where an estimated 10,000 children have been wrenched from their families, many of them forcibly recruited as soldiers or mutilated and sexually exploited,” she said. “I think of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where an ongoing conflict has already displaced more than half a million people, 300,000 of them children.”

Bellamy also pointed to the dislocation caused by conflicts in Rwanda, Sudan and Afghanistan; the economic crises in Russia, Indonesia and East Asia; U.N. sanctions against Iraq; and natural disasters, from flooding in China and Bangladesh to ‘Hurricane Mitch’ in Central America.

So as to deal better with such emergencies, Jonsson said, UNICEF is already putting into place programmes to use existing funds to prepare the agency’s field staff for any crises that could arise. As a result of such training, he said, the agency will be able to allocate emergency funds more efficiently once crises actually occur.

“We want to be able to move staff fast,” Jonsson argued. “This change in UNICEF is fundamental in character.”

U.N. bodies have always had to grapple with emergencies, with UNICEF, the World Food Programme and the office of the High Commissioner for Refugees taking on an increased role in emergency response in recent years. But UNICEF has never had to deal with so many and such frequent crises as now, requiring a greater amount of preparedness from all staff, Jonsson said.

Bellamy is pushing for all U.N. bodies, including the Security Council, to become more involved in efforts to coordinate emergency responses.

Also, in June, UNICEF plans to report on progress on child rights in Africa, including the targeting of women and children in armed conflict, as part of its effort this year to focus international attention on Africa’s crises.