Children and Youth on the Front line: Ethnography, Armed Conflict and Displacement

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 15 No. 1 (2005) ISSN: 1546-2250 Children and Youth on the Front line: Ethnography, Armed Conflict and Displacement Boyden, Jo and de Berry, Joanna (2004). Berghahn Books; 274 pages. $$25.00 (paper) $75 (hard). ISBN 1845450345 (paper) 578-883-9 (hard). This deeply disturbing but brilliant collection will be a challenge to a burgeoning literature on children in war situations. The findings of this book, especially if read in conjunction with David Rosen’s new book (2005), will be deeply disturbing to those who wish to make a black and white distinction between children and adults. It also has disconcerting implications for the impunity of those who have committed crimes before they were 18. The question raised throughout this book is: “what is a child?” Heretofore, most reports and publications on the subject of children, war and child soldiers have been based on studies of children as an “undifferentiated category,” stressing mainly the mental health consequences of their experiences of participating in war. Much of this research has ignored the ways “political conflict affects adolescents’ economic and social roles and integration, and its effects on gender relations, powers within childhood and intergenerational relations” (Boyden and de Berry 2004, p. xvii). Moreover, one of the major problems with this literature is methodological. Most studies rely on adult perceptions of children’s experience of war rather than tapping the point of view of the children themselves, as this book seeks to do. The book begins with a case study of Mozambique and a general discussion of the situation of separated children. The latter is absolutely vital reading for those devising “best interests of the child” policies, especially if they are only relying on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) or on “disciplinary” assumptions. The author of the study, Gillian Mann, brings anthropological insights to bear on certain contemporary assumptions about the 404 widely differing capacities of the socially constructed roles of girls and boys. The painful experiences of girls in both Uganda and Kosovo are related in the next section of the book, but the conclusions are challenging. While not neglecting the appalling experiences of the girls they interviewed, the authors both suggest that the girls’ experiences may also be “liberating.” Children often gain insight into familial structures and how they are most likely to be oppressive. Girls become aware that “adult” solutions to their protection, such as early or forced marriage, often bring only more suffering. They are keenly aware that their “future protection and survival” (Swaine and Feeny in Boyden and de Berry 2004, p. 84) is best assured through their own decisions rather than those imposed by others. Jessica Schafer’s discussion of the use of patriarchal imagery in the Mozambique war, however, shows how important the specific cultural and political context is to understanding recruitment to military activity and the loyalty of children in terms of expectations of the role of a good father. What the book does not and cannot do is resolve the dilemma raised by Rosen (2005, p.157) thousands of children and youth today are caught up in armed warfare and are committing horrible crimes. How should we see them? As innocent victims of political circumstances who should be protected and forgiven? Or as moral agents who should be held responsible for their actions? We live in a world where the death penalty continues to be practiced and where the alternative punishment for war crimes is a life of incarceration. Given this reality, are not those working for a better world correct in pushing for observance of the CRC’s +18 standard for the definition of child? I lived for more than three years with a former “child” soldier. He was 16 at the time he moved in. He had been abducted at the age of 8, and before he escaped, he committed horrendous deeds which could only be defined as war crimes. Having lived in a rehabilitation center for boy soldiers for several months in his own country before 405 he fled to Cairo, he wrote an essay on how to “rehabilitate” boy soldiers. His message: assign the boys a guardian to whom they...