Contents

1 Introduction..................................................................................................................................... 20

2 Child Soldiers: A Single-Issue Campaign.......................................................................................

3 War-Affected Children: Bringing the Body Back In..................................................................... 22

4 Sexual Violence............................................................................................................................... 24

5 Psychosocial Impacts....................................................................................................................... 27

6 Injury and Disease........................................................................................................................... 29

7 Conclusion....................................................................................................................................... 31

References.............................................................................................................................................. 31

Abstract

Bringing children’s bodies back in: children’s experiences of sexual violence, psychological trauma, death, and injury in war. This chapter argues for a research agenda on war-affected children focused on how the specificity of children’s bodies impacts on their experiences of sexual violence, psychological trauma, and exposure to injury and disease. It claims that children’s geographies have paid little attention to the impacts of war on children and youth. In general, the focus of childhood studies and child protection policy on children in war has been on child soldiers. This obscures the wider impacts of war that many more children are subject to than those who join or who are forced into the armed forces, whether militias or government forces. Psychology and the health sciences have led the investigation of the impacts of sexual violence, psychological trauma, death, and injury on children and young people. This chapter argues that children’s geogra­phies has an important contribution to make in researching how the spaces of childhood (especially children’s bodies) shape children’s experiences of war and

K. Wells (EI)

Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies, Birkbeck, University of

London, Bloomsbury, London, UK

e-mail: k.wells@bbk.ac.uk

© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017

C. Harker et al. (eds.), Conflict, Violence and Peace, Geographies of Children and

Young People 11, DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-038-4_1 in connecting the scale of the body with the scale of national and international political economy.

Keywords

War-affected children • Sexual violence • PTSD • Rape • War casualties

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