Children first? Revising child-centred interventions

Since 1979, International Year of the Child, the protection of children involved in war and adverse situations has become an international priority for rights activists and policymakers. How can children living in different cultures and countries best be helped?

Research by the Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford suggests that empirical research is lacking on key childhood issues in local contexts. Policy is in danger, therefore of misapplying North American and European conceptions of childhood, which can lead to intervention failures. Given the pressing need to support children in extreme situations, the study suggests that effective policy requires a sound basis in local field research and theory.

There is a long tradition of applying child-centred interventions, in situations of political violence, based on a view of childhood as a time of need and vulnerability. Children are seen as victims, taken out of their social and cultural context and served with measures based on prior identification of needs. Medical, physical and psychological needs are prioritised over social and economic ones. Treatment often uses a case-by-case approach. Key critiques of this approach include:

• Children are raised in different cultures and social groups and thus have different capacities and needs.
• The universalist approach ignores the diversity of children’s responses to adversity.
• The emphasis on passivity, vulnerability, crisis and loss can invalidate children’s coping strategies and the contributions they make to family and community, further threatening their sense of well-being.
• Interventions tend to aim at healing individual children with scientific medical therapies, but ignoring the social and political dimensions of hardship risks undermining the community effort to return to normality.

Perceiving the child as a vulnerable victim may have powerful emotional appeal for adults but can be detrimental to children. It renders them helpless and incompetent in the face of adult decisions that may not be in their best interests.

If children are to be helped to overcome stressful experiences, suggested directions for policy change include:

• Treating children’s views and perspectives as a source of strength not weakness
• Accepting and recognising children’s competencies in coping with adversity and contributing to family and community welfare during periods of conflict
• Promoting an active role for children in the decisions and processes that affect them
• Founding social and cultural understanding on systematic social and ethnographic research, using pre-conflict studies where they exist
• Opening policy up to integrating alternative systems of health care, situating healing strategies within their social and cultural context and using local resources wherever possible.

Source(s):
'Children and Social Healing' from 'Children in Extreme Situations', proceedings from the 1998 Alistair Berkley Memorial Lecture, Destin Working Paper Series #5, LSE Development Studies Institute

Funded by: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

id21 Research Highlight: 29 March 2001

Further Information:
Jo Boyden
Refugee Studies Centre
Queen Elizabeth House
21 St. Giles
Oxford OX1 3LA
UK

Tel: +44 (0) 1865 270271
Contact the contributor: jo.boyden@qeh.ox.ac.uk

Queen Elizabeth House (QEH), UK

Other related links:
The Children and Armed Conflict Unit provides reports on the impact on children

Warchild helps the innocent victims of war

Save the Children features further relevant resources

Child Rights Information Network has further research under the theme of 'Armed Conflict'

Search the Centre for Conflict Resolution for more specific information

Childwatch is committed to child research