Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Foreword
- Introduction: children, politics and communication
- one Charting change in the participatory settings of childhood: a very modest beginning
- two Children’s autonomous organisation: reflections from the ground
- three The children of Loxicha: participation beyond the UNCRC rhetoric?
- four Displaced children’s participation in political violence: towards greater understanding of mobilisation
- five Between a rock and a hard place: negotiating age and identity in the UK asylum system
- six Understanding silences and secrets when working with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children
- seven Doing Britishness: multilingual practices, creativity and criticality of British Chinese children
- eight Closings in young children’s disputes: resolution, dissipation and teacher intervention
- nine Keeping connected: textual cohesion and textual selves, how young people stay together online
- Conclusion: autonomy, dialogue and recognition
- Index
four - Displaced children’s participation in political violence: towards greater understanding of mobilisation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Foreword
- Introduction: children, politics and communication
- one Charting change in the participatory settings of childhood: a very modest beginning
- two Children’s autonomous organisation: reflections from the ground
- three The children of Loxicha: participation beyond the UNCRC rhetoric?
- four Displaced children’s participation in political violence: towards greater understanding of mobilisation
- five Between a rock and a hard place: negotiating age and identity in the UK asylum system
- six Understanding silences and secrets when working with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children
- seven Doing Britishness: multilingual practices, creativity and criticality of British Chinese children
- eight Closings in young children’s disputes: resolution, dissipation and teacher intervention
- nine Keeping connected: textual cohesion and textual selves, how young people stay together online
- Conclusion: autonomy, dialogue and recognition
- Index
Summary
I am telling the stories of my country. I can't help it if those stories are steeped in politics. That's the reality I’ve been living in. That's the reality that these people have been living under. The lands are filled with mines. The markets are filled with ammunition and weapons. All you have to do is look at the children and you’d see the politics that have gone into shaping their lives. That's just the reality of life here. Ghobadi (2004)
In his film Turtles Can Fly, Bahman Ghobadi presents a stark picture of Iraqi Kurdish children and their struggles to survive around the time of the US-led invasion of 2003. Towards the end of the film a group of boys head off to the nearby town to obtain guns and then set these up on the roof of their school as defence against a possible military attack. This is not recruitment in the conventional sense but the self-mobilisation of a group of children under the leadership of a 13-yearold. Ghobadi's film also shows us the rape by Iraqi soldiers of a young girl and her subsequent suicide, the wretched living conditions in a makeshift displacement camp, and large numbers of children engaged in the manual defusing of landmines for meagre pennies. Amid these horrors, the children's efforts to arm themselves are hardly shocking. Indeed, given the dangers and deprivation, such action appears tragically reasonable: an expression of young people's determination to survive against considerable odds in a setting where adults have failed in their duty to protect.
Often absent from the burgeoning literature and debate on children's involvement in military action and political violence is careful attention to the processes through which mobilisation occurs. The appalling cases where children are abducted and compelled to take part in acts of brutality are well known. Yet not all rebel groups and government forces operate in the same manner in pursuing the recruitment of underage personnel. It would be misleading to consider the actions of a group such as the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda – notorious for its abduction and brutal initiation of children – as typical.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Children, Politics and CommunicationParticipation at the Margins, pp. 69 - 88Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2009