The tsunami which hit southern Asia a month ago left children's lives in pieces.
Mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, family members of all generations have been lost. Friends, teachers, familiar faces from childhood killed. Homes and schools have been destroyed.
An entire generation of children face a life scarred by trauma and upheaval. They are vulnerable and more at risk than ever from exploitation and abuse.
Paedophiles who were previously operating in the country are already known to be exploiting the tragedy and the economic devastation, and there are fears of a rise in the internal trafficking of children for domestic labour.
But while there are many awful realities on which to base a bleak picture, those who work on the ground know they can do good work with the vast amounts of money donated by the public towards the relief effort.
Readers of this newspaper have already donated more than £85,000 towards to the Yorkshire Post-backed Unicef appeal for the children of affected regions.
Ted Chaiban, Unicef Sri Lanka representative, said: "The tsunami that hit Sri Lanka has caused enormous devastation and loss of life.
"But there are now opportunities as well to harness the donations that are coming into Sri Lanka and use them to improve the situation of children."
From the beginning of Unicef's work, priority was given to finding separated children.
In Sri Lanka, where about a third of the population of 19,000 were under 18, a survey has now established that almost 900 children lost both their parents and 3,200 have only a mother or father who survived.
Helga Hanks, a Leeds consultant clinical psychologist, and Leeds consultant paediatricians Chris Hobbs and Amanda Thomas were part of a team of experts who before the tsunami had spent time in Sri Lanka and the Maldives helping establish the beginnings of child protection work.
Sri Lanka's national child protection unit was set up in the late 1990s as a response to the growing problem of paedophiles.
Mrs Hanks and Dr Hobbs first went to the country in 1997 as part of a team sent to raise awareness about child abuse – not only by the sex trade but also including physical abuse and child labour – and to help train staff.
When they returned four years later the system had moved on leaps and bounds.
But they fear the devastation could seriously jeopardise much of that work, with children not only open to abuse from strangers, but also within the home.
Of the orphaned children tracked by Unicef and the Sri Lankan child protection agency since the tsunami all but 38 were being cared for by other relatives.
"If these children are taken into distant families, they could still face abuse. Some families, many who have lost their own livelihoods, will not be able to afford to take on more children and if they are offered money for the children they may take it", Dr Thomas said.
Many of those who were trained to identify and deal with abuse will themselves be among the dead and missing.
The Leeds team support the work being done to register children as quickly as possible and to establish a foster-care system rather housing children in orphanages.
Mrs Hanks said the children must be quickly settled into environments conducive to helping them recover from their trauma.
"Children have a very, very strong survival mechanism and they might look like they are coping, but actually they are not", Mrs Hanks said.
The trauma, she said, will affect children of all ages, including the very, very young.
maggie.stratton@ypn.co.uk