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Presentation: Engaging with children as actors in conflict: A challenge to the prevailing victim-villain dichotomy
[SLIDE 1]
Over the course of the next few days, we are going to discuss various aspects of the effects of conflict on children. But, I think we need to consider first the fundamental question of who are children in conflict? I suspect that all of us have an image, or several images, in our minds, based on our experiences, our research and increased media coverage of children in war. I would suggest that there are two dominant images of war-affected children portrayed in much of the literature.
[Slide 2]
The first is an innocent child victim caught up in a conflict beyond her control or making. Weak, vulnerable and traumatised, the child is the ‘human face of conflict’, used to elicit aid and call for peace.
[Slide 3]
The second image is children as villains and rebels in conflict. The increased publicity surrounding child soldiers in Western media has reinforced the image of an adolescent boy with a gun as the epitome of the child villain.
These stereotypes are often heavily gendered and agist, in that the ‘victim’ is often portrayed as a pre-pubescent girl, while ‘villains’ are more likely male adolescents.
Where do these images come from? Do they reflect reality?
[Slide 4]
My presentation today will try to understand and challenge some of the assumptions underlying the victim-villain dichotomy and present an alternate conceptualisation of children as actors in the context of war.
I would like to start off with a quote from a young Congolese refugee I interviewed in London, UK to frame the discussion:
“Since the First Republic until currently, no president [of the Democratic Republic of Congo] has succeeded another in a democratic way. Consequently, the country has never known peace and the corrupt, violent political system has deterred economic, social and cultural development.” (London, 21 February 2004; my translation)
This insightful level of political analysis suggests that we have underestimated the capacity of young people in conflict and that the consequent victim-villain dichotomy simplifies a much more complex reality on the ground. The assumptions underlying prevalent conceptualisations of children in conflict need to be problematised and re-evaluated.
[Slide 5]
The first assumption that I would like to question is the idea that all children in conflict zones are highly traumatised. Much of the literature assumes that conflict will have a negative impact on young people’s mental health and moral development because it interrupts ‘normal’ developmental processes, resulting in trauma or deviance. Concerned that children’s traumatic reactions to conflict were going unnoticed and hence untreated, many Western psychologists advocated clinical interventions, often based on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis. Others emphasised the danger of deviance, as dramatically illustrated in Burlingham and Freud’s (1942, p. 31) early study:
The real danger is not that the child, caught up all innocently in the whirlpool of the war, will be shocked into illness. The danger lies in the fact that the destruction raging in the outer world may meet the very real aggressiveness which rages in the inside of the child. At the age when education should start to deal with these impulses, confirmation should not be given from the outside world that the same impulses are uppermost in other people.
This perceived tendency towards deviancy has resulted in assumptions of the need for psychosocial ‘rehabilitation’, which forms an important element of programmes for demobilised child soldiers.
[Slide 6]
Children in conflict do have experiences that are literally beyond the imagination of many of us, and some of them may require specific interventions. However, an emphasis on trauma and stress overlooks resilience and coping among children in conflict situations. Medical illness models, which are often based on a small sample size of children exhibiting symptoms, often pathologise what may be normal reactions to conflict. As Kos argues: "The war experience certainly does influence a child's perception of the world and humanity and their social constructions of reality, but this does not mean that the child is psychologically harmed. In most cases the psychological consequences of war on children are in the range of normal human feelings and memories."
In contrast to the traditional psychoanalytical focus on trauma and deviance, some of the literature emphasises children’s enormous capacity for creativity, resilience, coping and positive reactions in the face of conflict. For example, in my work with girls and young women in a Somali refugee community in Ottawa, Canada, I was struck by their enormous resourcefulness and capacity to adapt to their very different social, cultural and economic environment. In fact, these girls often became the link between their families and the broader community, acting as translators, not just in the linguistic sense, but also in terms of navigating the Canadian refugee determination system and accessing services for everyday life.
Others have highlighted the western bias inherent in much of the psychoanalytic methodology, which does not pay enough attention to social, economic and cultural contexts and the relationship between trauma, meaning and culture. As Honwana (1998) has argued, in some cultures, trauma and guilt are perceived traditionally as collective affiliations, affecting not only individuals, but also their families and communities. Wessells and Monteiro’s (forthcoming) work on traditional cleansing ceremonies for child soldiers in Angola also emphasises the importance of this community involvement.
[SLIDE 7]
Second, the victim-villain dichotomy tends to overlook children’s rational choices in the face of difficult circumstances. In other words, it is assumed that children passively accept the situation with which they are presented. Indeed, the term ‘war-affected children’ reinforces the image that children are passive objects in a war that rages around them, rather than actors who dynamically engage with, and affect, their environment.
While children participating in armed conflict are often perceived to be reacting to political indoctrination or adult goading, this belies an often complex, rational decision-making process involved in taking up arms, including ideological commitment, self-defence, economic survival or increased opportunities. For example, child soldiers in the DRC have told me over and over that they joined armed forces and groups to ensure that they had one meal a day and a roof over their heads. Research with girls involved with armed groups in Colombia and Sri Lanka has shown that some join out of ideological commitment and/or to gain social power in societies where gender inequalities often constrain girls’ choices.
I am not intending to negate adult exploitation of children in many of these circumstances, nor to abdicate adults of their responsibilities to widen choices and improve the cont. However, we need to view children’s decisions in the social, cultural and political context in which they are taken, in order to understand and respond appropriately to their particular situation.
[SLIDE 8]
Third, the perceived passivity of children in conflict also denies the reality of important socio-economic roles that they play. Due to socio-economic break-down and the demographic reality of many conflict situations, in which children and women make up a large percentage of the population, children often take on many ‘adult’ responsibilities. For example, displaced Congolese children from the age of 6-7 take on increasing levels of responsibility for child care, cooking, cleaning, collecting water and other household chores. By age 11-12, a girl may be almost exclusively responsible for these tasks, especially if she is the eldest and her parent(s) and guardian(s) out of the house for long periods of time. Moreover, young people may contribute to a family's income by engaging in petty commerce, providing services like hair braiding and sewing, doing piecework manual labour such as construction or automobile repairs, engaging in sex work or exchanging sexual favours for cash or goods, etc. These contributions to family and community life contrast sharply with the dominant image of children in war as passive, helpless victims or reckless villains. They also beg questions regarding children’s participation in decisions that affect them (which will be discussed below).
[SLIDE 7]
Finally, on a more theoretical and philosophical level, but also perhaps more fundamentally, the victim-villain dichotomy is based on certain assumptions about childhood, which need to be challenged. For much of the twentieth century, child development theorists took the Western, adult male as the end goal and tried to explain how children progress through universal, age-dependent stages towards this goal through developmental processes. These theories have been critiqued for their gender biases and ethno-centricity and the development literature has very much moved on from this point. This has involved including and expanding Vygotsky’s theories that culture and environment are fundamental structuring processes shaping development.
In tandem with this shift in psychological thinking, other disciplines have also proposed a new paradigm in the study of childhood. This proposes the idea that children’s capacities and roles are not biologically inevitable, but rather socially constructed within an adult-centric framework. As James and Prout have explained, the social institution of childhood is an "actively negotiated set of social relationships within which the early years of human life are constituted. The immaturity of children is a biological fact of life but the ways in which this immaturity is understood and made meaningful is a fact of culture."
Analyses of development in other times and places show that many of its assumed constants, such as children’s capacities and position in society, are in fact variables. For example, in many African societies, once individuals reach puberty, they are initiated into adult society through rites of passage, moving from childhood to adulthood without the Western notion of adolescence. While cultural relativist arguments are definitely open to debate, I think all of us would recognise that children and young people are not monolithic categories – there are huge variations within and between societies, due to class, gender, ethnicity, etc. Conflict does not remove these differences, can actually exacerbate them. Therefore, victim-villain dichotomy artificially reduces the multiplicity of situations and experiences of children in war.
[SLIDE 11]
Recognising the complex ways in which children are involved in, and respond to, conflict is not intended to belittle the very difficult situations in which they live. Rather, it provides a more relevant perspective in which to engage with children in such situations, so that they are regarded as part of the solution, rather than a problem. Children’s views and voices have historically been ignored, marginalised or, at best, circumscribed within a framework prescribed and controlled by adults.
In recognition of the important socio-economic roles that many children play in the context of conflict, these responsibilities should be matched by corresponding decision-making opportunities. This means that young people must be given channels for self-advocacy. In contrast to prevailing universal notions of what children can or cannot do at certain ages, we should provide a variety of ways in which everyone can participate in decisions that affect them.
The prevailing victim-villain dichotomy of children in war draws on their perceived vulnerability and incapacity, which can justify their marginalisation from decision-making. Clearly, moving beyond the prevailing adult-centric approach to children in war thus requires a challenge to entrenched, inequitable adult-child power relationships within societies.
In conclusion …
Let us reconsider the question that I posed at the beginning – who are children in war? I have provided a few snapshots today:
- the young Congolese political activist
- the Somali girls who are building links between their families and communities and Canadian society
- the abducted LRA children
- the Colombian girls who join FARC to escape domestic abuse and gain social power
- the Rwandan child head of household
- Congolese boys and girls who work in the informal economy
The diversity of these few examples should challenge us to question categories that decontextualise a complex political, social and cultural situation in the context of conflict. Recognising children’s social, economic and political roles is the first step in engaging with them as rational, relevant actors in meaningful dialogue in order to understand, and respond to, their circumstances in conflict.