Children's Experience of Conflict Related Emergencies: Some Implications for Relief Policy and Practice

Abstract

This paper challenges the limited models of childhood, conflict and relief which determine most humanitarian interventions targeting children in conflict related emergencies. In particular, it notes the tendency of relief programmes to focus on "spectacular" groups of children (orphans, child combatants and refugees) at the expense of larger child populations indirectly affected by conflict. This relief bias is attributed to an inappropriate 'apocalypse model' of conflict which sees relief interventions only as repair. The bias also lies in a mistakenly universalist model of childhood and a medical paradigm which pathologizes children's experience in conflict and characterizes children as passive victims rather than active survivors. The paper argues for greater recognition of the wider social experience of children in conflict, and for relief practice which takes account of childhood resilience and children's different roles and capacities in coping with conflict. Appropriate interventions must engage with the wide variety of indigenous coping mechanisms involving children and not simply replicate a standard package of relief interventions in every emergency, based on simplistic and universalist interpretations of children's experience of conflict.