War-Affected Children: Bringing the Body Back In
The bracketing out of hegemonic states and international capital from the impacts of war continues to be a problem. However, some progress has been made in expanding the focus of child protection in war from child soldiering to the broader impacts on children of armed conflict since the publication in 1996 of Graςa Machel’s report prepared for the United Nations on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children.
Her report highlighted the disproportionate impact of war on children and identified them as the primary victims of armed conflict. In response to this report, the UN General Assembly created a Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict. In 2005, a monitoring and reporting mechanism was established to report on “six grave violations” against children in war. These are: the killing and maiming of children; recruitment or use of children as soldiers; sexual violence against children; attacks against schools or hospitals; denial of humanitarian access for children; and abduction of children. The legal basis for action on these six violations is drawn from a range of international and humanitarian law (Machel 2001).There has been little research in the subdiscipline of children’s geographies on the impacts of war on children other than as child soldiers (Woodward and Galvin 2009) or refugees and displaced persons (Grabska 2010; Hopkins and Hill 2010; Sporton et al. 2006; Valentine et al. 2009; Wells 2011). Exceptions include research on child evacuees and rural childhood during WWII (Kallio 2008; Paksuniemi et al. 2015; Smallman-Raynor et al. 2003), on young Germans’ responses to the 2003 Iraq War (Horschelmann 2008), the reintegration of former LRA recruits/adbuctees in Northern Uganda (Cheney 2005; Verma 2012), and a special issue of the Journal of Children’s Geographies on war, political conflict, and youth subjectivity (Wells 2014).
Research on the impacts of war on children and youth has predominately been done by psychologists, and the literature on psychosocial interventions and assessments of war-affected children is substantial (for meta-reviews see Betancourt et al. 2013; Jordans et al. 2009). A smaller body of research from anthropologists has focused on conflict and postconflict in West Africa (Coulter 2009; Hoffman 2011; Utas 2003; Vigh 2006) and more broadly on youth, violence, and social change in Africa (Honwana and de Boeck 2005). With few exceptions in medical anthropology (e.g., Eggerman and Panter-Brick 2010) anthropologists and psychologists have kept their distance from one another. Anthropologists argue that psychology encodes unwarranted global assumptions about children. Anthropologists may agree with psychologists that all bodies share a capacity for pain as a corporeal response to harm, and emotional states like bereavement and shock are experienced in the body. However, their commitment to understanding how particular cultural contexts give meaning to bodily experiences, meanings which mediate the relationship between physiological response and emotional affect, undermines a straightforward account of the body in pain, to borrow the name of Elaine Scarry’s seminal book (Scarry 1987). In relation to childhood, this presumption that cultural meaning overdetermines bodily response has most often been played out in the debate on what constitutes child abuse (Korbin 1983; Wells et al. 2014) and the debate on female genital cutting (Wells 2012). In theorizing the impacts of war, David Rosen’s claims about the shifting meanings attached to child soldiers has been very influential (Rosen 2015) and a long-standing debate on whether posttraumatic stress syndrome is a Western construct (Hart 2008) has also shaped the debate in anthropologies of childhood.Psychologists are not unaware of how culture shapes the interpretation of experience, including bodily harm. They recognize that violence and healing involve culturally specific practices and, particularly among psychosocial studies, they also recognize the importance of social context (networks, for example) to children’s capacity to heal and recover from the psychological impacts of war.
However, psychological research is grounded in the assumption that humans share certain universal capacities and responses (for example to shock, bereavement, and bodily pain).Childhood studies, including both the anthropology and geography of childhood, was founded on distancing itself from the classic studies of children and childhood, rooted in the psy-disciplines and the health sciences. It was also founded on a rejection of the structuralism of socialization theory, emphasizing children’s capacity for agency. The crucial issue of what children’s “biological immaturity” bought to children’s experiences was underplayed, and the similarities between children’s and adult’s capacities were emphasized.
This inattention to children’s bodies on the part of childhood studies has not deterred psychology and the health sciences from researching war-affected children. Indeed, most of what we know about the impacts of on children is from these disciplines. This chapter therefore draws on their work to describe the impacts of war on children’s bodies and psyches. In the following three sections, this chapter shows that children are much more vulnerable to violence than adults are and that this vulnerability is rooted in the differences between the bodies of children and adults. This chapter begins with sexual violence. Readers may want to be aware that what follows is graphic and tries to convey some of the visceral impacts of sexual violence on children’s, especially girls’ bodies.
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