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Institutional care is an affront to rights of children with disabilities

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In solidarity to the 16 days activism against gender-based violence, this article highlights the structural violence that impedes the rights of children with disabilities —including girls— in Kenya. The author Stephen Ucembe, who is an alumni of the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, emphasizes the need to protect the rights of children confined to institutional care.

Image Credit: Hope and Homes for Children

Every child, including those with disabilities, is entitled to the rights enshrined in the Convention of the Rights of the Child which Kenya has ratified. As a country, we have agreed to uphold these rights through the Children’s Act 2022.

However, in contravention of their rights, children with disabilities are often hidden away in communities or sometimes separated and isolated in institutions against their wishes. Isolation from communities on the basis of disability is discriminatory. It is a dereliction of duty – an abdication of responsibility by the government. Supporting these children to be visible in our communities and families normalizes disability. Hiding them from others dehumanizes and perpetuates stigma and discrimination, hence exacerbating the problem.

Furthermore, unnecessary placement in residential care institutions often multiplies violations; children with disabilities are denied other rights, like the right to family and community care, to culture, to identity, to freedom of association.

A global Human Rights Watch report, published in 2017 titled, ‘Children with disabilities: Deprivation of liberty in the name of care and treatment’ documented that children with disabilities often face severe neglect and abuse. This included beatings and psychological violence, sexual violence, involuntary and inappropriate medical treatment, use of abusive physical restraints, seclusion and sedation, denial of education and denial of regular contacts with families.

An investigative media exposé traced how the problems described above play out locally. It uncovered multiple human rights violations perpetuated against institutionalized children with disabilities, by a government agency.

Nobody is seeking to romanticize families and communities. There are many children facing abuse, neglect and exploitation, including stigma and discrimination within family and community settings. However, studies consistently point to serious violations in institutional care settings. Moreover, over 80 years of research shows that supported families and communities are far better equipped than institutions when it comes to improvement of children’s overall well-being.

The primary role of government should not be to create more barriers, or spaces that deepen inequality and diminish inclusivity. Yet, this is exactly what we do when we institutionalize these children or neglect them in communities. The role of the government should be to ensure their protection and enjoyment of all rights, through full inclusion and participation in the community.

To make inclusion a reality, we need responsive initiatives that tackle ubiquitous stigma and discrimination. That starts with community services and facilities available to persons with disabilities, enabling them to access education, housing, rehabilitation and therapy.  It extends to respite care centers that allow struggling care-givers time off, or time to go and work. And it means we must improve infrastructure and provide necessary assistive devices, aids and services, like hearing aids, crutches, wheelchairs, tricycles, white canes and walking appliances to support full participation.

Lastly, it’s up to us to ensure we do not leave these children behind in the care reform processes that the government has initiated. To support governments to include disabled children in family based alternative care, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities developed ‘Guidelines on deinstitutionalization, including in emergencies’.

These guidelines are meant to ensure an end to rampant violence against institutionalized persons with disabilities, including children. This advice should ensure children with disabilities are included and supported in families and communities, and prevent their institutionalization.

This article was first published on The Standard.

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Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Stephen Ucembe is the Regional Advocacy Manager, Hope and Homes for Children. He is a professional social worker with skills, knowledge, and experience working with children and young people without parental care, and vulnerable families. His preference is to work in Kenya, or regionally (east and southern Africa) with organization (s) whose mission and vision is family and child focused.

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Addressing eco-anxiety among children – from environmental education to outdoor learning

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Concerned about the long-term effects of environmental degradation and climate change, young climate activists such as Greta Thunberg are in the frontline of climate protests currently sweeping the globe. While children of all ages, not just adolescents, are becoming increasingly concerned with environmental change, environmental education programmes in schools, combined with the limited time children spend outdoors, may not be so helpful. In this article, Aurélia Chevreul-Gaud and Sylvia I. Bergh argue that outdoor education can play an important role in helping children reconnect with nature to ease their eco-anxiety.

From an early age, children are exposed to a wealth of information on environmental degradation and disasters featured in the media and in conversations among adults. Indeed, their approach to the world around them is mainly – if not only – shaped by this information. Environmental education programmes provided to children by primary schools are based on the idea that broadening the scope of the information children receive can help ensure an understanding of how human action impacts the environment and can foster their desire to act.

Raising children’s awareness of environmental risks and of the need to save the planet at first sight seems to be a good idea, as it can theoretically help them become responsible, problem-solving adults that can shape the world they want to live in. But what if it’s not that simple in case of children? With one of us being an outdoor learning specialist for primary schools, and with both of us having school-age children, we observe a large gap between the theory taught at schools and what happens once children step outside the classroom. Children seem to be out of touch with nature and don’t know how to interact with it, having internalized the discourse that they are harming instead of healing the natural world.

The question then arises: Are standard educational programmes centred on environmental disasters as effective as they seem, or are they simply engaging in fearmongering in a way that paralyses instead of inspires children to act?

Environmental education in its current form often leads to eco-anxiety among children. Why do we say this? We have observed that through environmental education programmes in primary schools, children between the ages of 4 and 12 learn that the environment is being threatened because of human action and that they have an important role in addressing this. They are taught about threats that include climate change, deforestation, drought, biodiversity loss, and plastic in the oceans. And they are taught that they have to act.

But how can they respond to such big and often-distant disasters? These are serious, anxiety-provoking questions whose solutions are far beyond their reach. The burdens are too heavy for their young shoulders to bear and not appropriate for their age and emotional development; their inability to act while watching the world around them crumble leads to eco-anxiety. Australian research shows that 44% of children are worried about how climate change will affect them in the future, and one-quarter of children believe that the world will end before they reach old age.[1]

And their responses to environmental harm can be inappropriate. We meet many primary-school students who react strongly to environmental harm, showing their love for nature and passion for saving the planet (listen to a podcast on this here). Sometimes with tears in their eyes, they vehemently warn others to tread lightly, using expressions such as “You are hurting the tree!” when a friend scratches an elm or a beech tree or “You are killing nature” when someone is walking in a field of daisies.

Such severe and inappropriate reactions reveal not only a misunderstanding among children about the resilience of nature and how humans harm the natural world rooted in limited interaction with it but also the intensity of the anxiety younger children have about their relationship with the environment. Eco-anxiety among young children not only leads to critical mental health impacts such as depression, anger and fear but also to inappropriate coping mechanisms such as denial and cognitive dissonance.[2] Indeed, “they are indifferent or afraid,” a secondary school teacher remarked when we asked him how his students react when he teaches on the environment.

 

Why and how is environmental education giving rise to eco-anxiety?

Most so-called environmental education programmes, meant to be inspiring and playful, are designed to be delivered in the classroom, often involving brand-new plastic toys, computers, or even virtual reality components. Children are asked to consider how to solve ‘environmental’ problems from behind computers and use these gadgets, but seldom go outdoors to observe what’s actually happening.

But a transition to outdoor learning programmes can help foster deeper connections between children and the natural world.

Outdoor nature education programmes in primary schools nurtures love for and a feeling of being one with nature, as well as long-lasting pro-environmental behaviours.[3] It gives children a solid – and joyful – base to develop a balanced set of problem-solving skills which involves emotions, thinking, and action. It fosters holistic thinking. When we provide regular education in nature, children become sufficiently comfortable with and curious about the living world. When day-to-day learning happens in nature, then the outdoors is not a place or resource anymore; the living world becomes their home.

In addition, spending time in nature offers children essential conditions to heal from depression and anxiety, especially eco-anxiety. An extensive body of research[4] shows that nature-based education is absolutely essential for developing a holistic understanding of and a strong, positive connection with nature. This is echoed in observations made by some of the 10-year-old pupils that participated in a dance lesson we organised outdoors. “I feel freer,” one exclaimed, while another believed that “we feel more inspired”.

 

What does this mean for primary school teachers and curricula?

Outdoor learning should not be the privilege of a few forest schools located far from the cities in which we live. It is possible in many traditional urban schools. But to integrate it more widely, we need teachers trained to deliver a substantial part of their curriculum through nature: we need to teach them how to design an outdoor lesson plan that meets their objectives, how to manage risk and safety wisely, how to take advantage of small local urban nature islands, and how to deal with bio-phobia (their own and that of their pupils). We need teachers to be equipped with environmental programmes promoting connections with nature and to be supported and appreciated by their schools and the parents.

And the payoffs are substantial. When we see pupils learning outdoors with a teacher who took the plunge, we see joyful children who are able to focus on their learning and who also develop an authentic connection with nature – children who have an idea of the smell of a slug (“like the rain”), who are curious and know what to expect when digging into the soil, or who respect fungi and pass on a wise approach toward them. We see knowledgeable students who are getting prepared to act wisely and in harmony with nature.

[1] Tucci, J., Mitchell, J., & Goddard, C. (2007). Children’s fears, hopes and heroes:
Modern childhood in Australia. Australian Childhood Foundation and National Research Centre for the Prevention of Child Abuse, Monash University, Ringwood, Victoria.

[2] Léger-Goodes, T., Malboeuf-Hurtubise, C., Mastine, T., Généreux, M., Paradis, P., & Camden, C. (2022). Eco-anxiety in children: A scoping review of the mental health impacts of the awareness of climate change. Frontiers in Psychology, 13 Retrieved from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.872544.

[3] Liefländer, A. K., Fröhlich, G., Bogner, F. X., & Schultz, P. W. (2013). Promoting connectedness with nature through environmental education. Environmental Education Research, 19(3), 370-384. doi:10.1080/13504622.2012.697545

[4] See for example Bola et al. 2022; Hosaka et al. 2017; Rosa et al 2018; Sugiyama et al. 2021.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

Aurélia Chevreul-Gaud develops change management strategies to implement outdoor learning on a daily basis. She is a mentor in nature-based education, creator of the 7 Connection Gateways Pedagogy© and holds a master’s degree in change management. She is also a public speaker – see her TEDx performance. Her current project based in The Netherlands, focuses on integrating outdoor learning into urban teachers’ practices and linking it with the International Baccalaureate Primary Year Programme.

 

 

Sylvia I. Bergh, is Associate Professor in Development Management and Governance, International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), and Senior researcher in the Research group Multilevel Regulation, part of the Centre of Expertise on Global and Inclusive Learning, The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS). Her recent research focuses on the governance of heatwaves, and she is currently starting up a new research project on the Inner Development Goals and how to foster the required skills in future global governance professionals.

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What Biden’s Presidency Could Mean for Children

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As soon as US president Joe Biden took office in January this year, he set about signing dozens of executive orders with the aim of reversing some of the most egregious policies instituted under the Trump administration. One was to reverse an order issued by Trump that had led to the forcible separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents at the Mexican border. In this post, Kristen Cheney details how this reversal order that will see families reunited and others signed by Biden can give us hope that conditions for children may finally improve in the US – but only if we make sure that the new administration is held to its promises.

While taking children from their parents is not exactly a new phenomenon in the US[1], the forced separation of children from their parents as part of the Trump administration’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ immigration policy was considered particularly inhumane, striking a nerve that led to a widespread public outcry and condemnation by national and international human rights defenders.[2]

Karen Rotabi and I warned in a 2018 Bliss blog that the policy could act as a legal front for trafficking children into unethical backdoor adoptions taking place without their parents’ consent. Just a few months later, The Associated Press released a report stating that this was exactly what was happening, “turning child abduction into de facto adoption”.[3]

Upon signing an executive order to reverse the Trump administration policy, Biden pledged to “undo the moral and national shame of the previous administration that literally, not figuratively, ripped children from the arms of their families, their mothers, and fathers, at the border, and with no plan – none whatsoever – to reunify.”[4] To correct this, Biden has commissioned a reunification task force to trace hundreds of the approximately 5,500 children who have been separated from their parents under the policy since 2017 and who have still not yet been reunited with their families[5] – but this won’t be so easy, given that most of the parents were immediately deported to Central America, and given that at least 628 children are still ‘lost’ somewhere in the US detention and foster care system.

Moreover, the Biden administration has drawn criticism for its continued detention of unaccompanied minors at some of the same sites used by the Trump administration that was decried for ‘locking kids up in cages’.[6] Biden’s administration is attempting to expedite the processing of unaccompanied minors’ and migrant families’ requests for asylum by converting Trump-era detention centers into processing facilities,[7] but with the number of children arriving at the border only increasing, they are still having trouble keeping up.[8] Though the Biden administration tried to distinguish these detention centers from those under Trump’s rule by highlighting the superior conditions of the facilities, critics claimed that “a cage is still a cage”.[9]

Yet even for those who are reunited with their families, the end of the nightmare signals the beginning of a long journey of healing from the trauma of separation. Decades of research has demonstrated the profound and long-term psychological, social, emotional, and developmental effects of such separation of children from their families.[10] The children and parents will have to get to know each other again after years of separation. Young children may even have forgotten their parents or their native language. They may struggle to cope with a sense of abandonment or may blame their parents for failing to protect them. The parents may in turn experience feelings of extreme guilt. All this will shape family dynamics for the rest of their lives. They will need years of support to heal, but at least for those families being reunited, the healing can begin. And hopefully policy will be developed around these reunifications that will also provide needed support.

Other positive developments

Despite the challenges at the southern border, there are a number of other policy measures emerging from the Biden administration that signal a turning point for children’s well-being:

First, immediately upon taking office, Biden reinstated the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program, prompting Congress to “enact legislation providing permanent status and a path to citizenship for people who came to this country as children and have lived, worked, and contributed to our country for many years.”[11]

Second, Biden’s economic relief plan includes a direct cash benefit of up to $3,000 per child, meant to reduce America’s high child poverty rate, which is one of the highest amongst wealthy countries.[12] Experts surmise that the credit, if permanently implemented, could cut US child poverty in half, especially in Black and Latinx communities.[13]

Third, Biden also signed an executive order once again rescinding the Republican “global gag rule” on public health funding that has repeatedly led to devastating effects on women’s and children’s health by negatively affecting access to pre- and post-natal care for millions of women and children around the world.

Finally, under Biden, America has rejoined the Paris Agreement and has promised to prioritise a science-based approach to tackling climate change, giving present and future generations some hope that they will be able to bear the brunt—and perhaps soften the blow—of the predicted impacts of climate crisis.

While Joe Biden may not have been the most progressive Democratic candidate, his administration—despite taking office at a time where the bar has been set historically low—may yet turn out to be one of the most child-friendly administrations of all time. But it is up to us to keep holding the Biden administration to ever-higher standards in order to ensure that an agenda that prioritises children’s rights and well-being is set and actively pursued.

References

[1] Briggs, L. (2020) Taking Children: A History of American Terror. Oakland: University of California Press.

[2] Monico, C., Rotabi, K. S. and Lee, J. (2019) ‘Forced Child–Family Separations in the Southwestern U.S. Border Under the “Zero-Tolerance” Policy: Preventing Human Rights Violations and Child Abduction into Adoption (Part 1)’, Journal of Human Rights and Social Work, 4(3), pp. 164-179.

[3] Monico, C. and Mendez-Sandoval, J. (2019) ‘Group and Child–Family Migration from Central America to the United States: Forced Child–Family Separation, Reunification, and Pseudo Adoption in the Era of Globalization’, Genealogy, 3(4), pp. 1-24.

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/02/biden-to-launch-task-force-to-reunite-families-separated-at-us-mexico-border

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/04/trump-administration-family-separation-immigrants-joe-biden

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/24/biden-is-locking-up-migrant-children-will-the-world-still-care-with-trump-gone?

[7] https://www.npr.org/2021/03/04/973860288/biden-administration-moves-to-speed-up-processing-of-migrants-in-family-detentio

[8] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/08/us/joe-biden-news#a-surge-in-migrant-children-detained-at-the-border-is-straining-shelters

[9] https://time.com/5945307/biden-end-detention-migrant-children/

[10] Monico, C., Rotabi, K., Vissing, Y. and Lee, J. (2019) ‘Forced Child-Family Separations in the Southwestern US Border Under the “Zero-Tolerance” Policy: the Adverse Impact on Well-Being of Migrant Children (Part 2)’, Journal of Human Rights and Social Work, 4(3), pp. 180-191.

[11] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/20/biden-executive-orders-rejoin-paris-climate-accord-revoke-muslim-ban.html

[12] https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/02/07/child-benefit-democrats-biden/

[13] https://19thnews.org/2021/03/child-tax-credit-poverty-bill/?fbclid=IwAR2ozKdJ3C2zYXlBOJYmLbh0PNIkhf2f3xRTAxaTPKwn5X6njQpQL2btPGo

Opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the ISS or members of the Bliss team.

About the authors:

Kristen Cheney is Associate Professor of Children and Youth Studies at ISS. She is author of Crying for Our Elders: African Orphanhood in the Age of HIV and AIDS and co-editor of the volume, Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification, which was published in 2019.

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COVID-19 | The voices of children and youth in Tanzania’s COVID-19 response

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Rapid research into the effects of COVID-19 on young people in Tanzania reveals high levels of anxiety about the virus as it relates to relationships, economic livelihoods and the community. The research, led by Dr Elizabeth Ngutuku, draws further attention to the need for governments to consider the disease’s wider social and psychological impacts.

Source: Wikimedia Commons under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en. Image contrast altered.

Soon after the first COVID-19 case was reported in Tanzania on 16 March 2020, a series of closures were announced to schools and some businesses to avert the spread of the disease. However, the government changed tack in June, announcing the country had the disease under control. Life seemed to have gone back to the normal with schools re-opening and people returning to work.

In July and August 2020, as part of our advocacy using the findings from our research, ‘Adolescent’s Perceptions of Healthy Relationships in Mwanza and Dar es Salaam’, we carried out rapid research with children and youth aged 10-18 years through essay writing. The resulting 309 essays explored young people’s perspectives on the effects of COVID-19 on their relationships with others at home, their school, the community, technology and with the environment. Their narratives reveal that behind the sense of assumed normality, and assurance that the virus does not pose a threat to the general population, the youth position themselves ambivalently. While their voice on effects of the disease speaks to day-to-day immediate issues of survival, it also jumps scales to touch on relationships between nation states, relations with the government and a relationship with the country’s past.

The disease is ‘everywhere’

Young people noted that the disease permeated all areas of their relationships and equated this to being ‘everywhere and in everything’. Arguing that space itself was ‘sick’, this understanding can be read literally from President Magufuli’s declaration that the disease inhabits inanimate objects, like papaya and even animals such as goats. These voices reveal deeper perspectives when read alongside young people’s relationship with the environment, especially play spaces, trees, rocks and beaches, as shown to be important to youth in our earlier work in Mwanza and Dar es Salaam. Through art-based research and interviews, some of the young respondents explained that when relationships with their parents and siblings soured, they would go out to relax in these spaces or talk to animals.

Such a souring of family relationships was common during the period of school closures. While some acquired new skills like cooking, and bonded with their parents at home, others reported being overworked and the pressure causing constant collisions. Some young people noted that during such periods school normally provided solace through interactions with peers and teachers. Some girls were also looking forward to schools’ re-opening to avoid domestic sexual violence, as reported elsewhere to be on the rise in Tanzania during the epidemic, but other girls explained that staying at home had freed them from being approached for sexual favours by their peers and teachers.

Many young respondents voiced a perceived weakening of social ties, beyond immediate practices such as an inability to hug or greet each other, and playing or receiving visitors. They drew attention to the effects on a core social fabric and collective support. These young respondents remembered a collective past (perhaps drawing on the imaginaries of Ujamaa philosophy), with its emphasis on the care and welfare for others, in contrast to, for example, people during the epidemic who stopped carrying each other’s burdens, or what they called kubebeana mzigo. Drawing on a collective we, many respondents also noted that society’s collective dreams or aspirations (ndoto zetu) had been put on hold, which while going unspecified allude to school closures and an ability to continue their activities in the community.

Economics and politics matters to youth

The youth respondents emphasised the epidemic’s large and small economic effects. While they discussed their parents having lost jobs and livelihoods, and the inability to afford health care, they raised anxieties over there being ‘no longer milk for the small baby [sibling]’ and not being able to ‘ask for a second helping of food’, as they did before onset of the disease.

Moreover, the youth positioned themselves as actors in political relationships. For example, when referencing the diplomatic spat between Kenya and Tanzania over flights and truck drivers, they stated the disease had created enmity between countries, interpreting the closure of the shared border as an attempt by Kenya, which they called a good neighbour, to close itself off from Tanzania. Some noted that their relatives, and especially their breadwinner fathers who rely on cross-border trade, were afraid they would be quarantined in Kenya at their own expense, leaving them behind as carers for the family. This requirement was only reviewed in mid-September 2020.

Despite the atmosphere of the gloom, many young people also celebrated the President like a prophet who supported them with ‘kind words’, assuring them that ‘God could not allow them to die of Corona’. These youth represented themselves as political and cultural nationalists, who unquestioningly obeyed the President’s traditional steam therapy for the virus, as well as his call for the country’s return to faith, health, community and nation through prayer. For others, an obedience to Magufuli’s orders was more guarded, with some youth revealing how their parents forbade them to go to church, despite the leadership urging their attendance.

The youth indeed represented collective prayer in Kiswahili as praying bega kwa bega (shoulder to shoulder) against the disease, for which prevention is alternatively encouraged by the World Health Organization through maintaining social distance. The respondents further represented the perceived elimination of COVID-19 as a sign of good leadership by the government, because cases in Tanzania (which stopped publishing statistics in May 2020) were few compared to the high COVID-19 statistics in Kenya by June.

Listening to youth voices differently through essay writing reveals that behind the façade of a fearless nation fear remains prevalent. Our respondents reported that important political leaders in the community had died of the disease, and their essays revealed a veritable daily fear of their parents’ death. Some reported that they would observe their parents for signs of infection after they returned from work, and one youth in Dar es Salaam noted that he would each day observe his friends throwing a bottle of hand sanitiser to their mother on arrival.

Yet many children nevertheless celebrated their president, the sentiment ‘our president cannot lie to us, we cannot die of Corona’ expressed by many respondents, which can be read as cautiously confident despite their anxiety. It is at the interstices of this apparent guarded optimism that an imperative emerges for the government of Tanzania: they must listen to the wishes and voices of young people and protect them not only from the disease but its multitude of effects.

This post was first published by the LSE’s Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa and first appeared here

About the author:

Elizabeth Ngutuku has a PhD in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her work investigates young people’s experience of poverty, vulnerability, citizenship claims and sexual and reproductive health. Dr. Ngutuku coordinated the rapid research on behalf of Nascent/ISS as part of the APHR project funded by Oak Foundation

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How do grassroots networks in Kenya tackle violence against children?

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In the absence of state infrastructure, grassroots networks play a crucial role in addressing the prevalence of violence against children in Kenya. How do these networks work and how can they be supported to overcome their challenges?

In much of Africa, where the state plays a limited role in preventing child vulnerability and in-service provision, grassroots informal community-based networks play an important role in addressing violence against children (VAC). I draw on research carried out in 2019-20 with Civsource Africa that focused on the role of different types of networks on the prevention of violence against children in Kenya, showing that while different actors at different levels are networked in the prevention of VAC, grassroots networks are on the front line of preventing and responding to this violence.

However, our research notes that there are challenges in the functionality of these networks, including in the way they interact with other more formal networks working to prevent VAC. These issues need to be addressed, taking care that grassroots networks do not lose their unique identity.

How do grassroots networks work?

Networks are conceptualised as interconnected webs of actors, pooling together for mutual reciprocity in addressing VAC. In our research, there were formal and structured networks that comprised non-state actors like NGOs and other state institutions such as Kenya’s Department of Children Services, the Ministry of Health and actors in the court system.

At the community level, the unstructured grassroots networks included individual community volunteers, child protection volunteers, community-based organisations and community health workers. They also include community-based paralegals, who support children and caregivers in legal redress, as well as opinion leaders who are consulted in issues of violence against children.

These grassroots individuals and groups either worked separately within their communities or were networked with other actors, to whom they reported to or referred issues of child protection. For example, they were working with local community leaders in charge of sub-counties (known as chiefs), the Department of Children’s Services, the Ministry of health, the police and with different NGOs.

Some of these grassroots actors worked as appendages to the state system of child protection. For example, child protection volunteers are selected by the community but vetted by the Children Office and are expected to monitor issues of violence in the community and report to the Children Officers. The community health workers are appointed and vetted by the community during meetings known as Barazas. While some worked independently, they were part of the Ministry of Health strategy for delivering services to the grassroots and therefore expected to take up issues of child abuse and violence and referral to appropriate services. Being selected by the community reinforces the codes of trust that make them accountable to the local population. These actors were therefore expected to give periodic reports on VAC through public meetings.

The financing and capacity arrangements of these structures are diverse. For example, the community-based networks pool together their resources and energy to carry out dialogue in the community and follow up after cases of VAC. Some of them receive funding from the organisations they are affiliated with. Some volunteers working with the NGOs were receiving training, small funding for targeted activities and transport to follow up after cases of VAC. Some of the volunteers and CBOs were also working with several organisations at the same time.

 

The benefits of community networks

Working independently or through other structures, these grassroots networks of community volunteers build the resilience of children by training them on their rights, offering psychosocial support and identifying cases of violence. They also build bonds that make it easier to address violence, by encouraging the development of positive norms and an ethos of child protection through dialogue on responsibility towards children. They also enhance the community’s collective efficacy in caring for their children through training on income generating activities. The grassroots actors also build bridges by connecting children with the police and other leaders who enforce laws, and probation and children officers who ensure state child protection.

Vertical collaborations with larger networks addressing violence against children enables these networks to draw synergies since some NGOs provide services addressing structural causes of VAC. For example, a CBO in an informal settlement in Nairobi noted that one of the NGOs supported the development of a community VAC alert system. Such collaboration ensures that effort in violence prevention is not just a local exercise but is connected at different nodes, thus ensuring that broader interventions are based on children’s everyday experiences of violence. For example, the child protection volunteers are part of the local Children Area Advisory Council, which is part of the National Council for Children Services, the highest oversight body on children’s issues.

These networks are homegrown and rely on community trust relations and, therefore, enhance faster dissemination of information on VAC at the grassroots level. They also act as first responders or what is seen as the first mile on issues of violence against children in their communities.

Similarly, our research finds that grassroots actors are acknowledged by other actors such as the police, children’s officers and local administrations, who listen to them. This validation is important in accountability to children’s rights since it might help the grassroots actors to check for excesses by such leaders when handling issues of violence, without fear of reprisals.

Overall, these simultaneously local and place-based, vertically integrated and culturally competent responses to violence emerged as important in addressing violence against children. They also, however, face challenges.

Challenges the networks face in addressing violence against children

Due to a lack of adequate resources, including for transport and in some cases support to children facing violence, our research found that some volunteers stopped following up after cases of violence. While some were receiving support from other organisations, most of them used their own resources; some of the larger networks they work with often rely on donor funding and so, when funding ceases, the NGOs moved on, breaking the VAC referral pathways. The NGOs that participated in the research explained that community volunteers are not remunerated since they were seen as serving their communities.

In cases where community-based networks were linked to other structured networks, the playing field was uneven. The volunteers felt that they only participated nominally in these networks and were being ‘used’ as cogs by providing their services and information for writing grants, and then ‘dumped’ after the NGOs received them. This should also be seen through the lens of the philanthropy-wide shifts in Africa where funders require NGOs to demonstrate that they are working with community structures, which supports van Stapele’s research in Kenya where community based organisations characterised the relationship with NGOs as colonialist and saw themselves as ‘donkeys’, engaged in drudgery for the NGOs’ benefit.

In our research, the grassroot actors reported that, to get even, they would hoard information or register their own organisations to access the largesse of donor funds. Such tensions weaken the synergies that would accrue from networking, ultimately affecting efforts to address violence against children.

Even more, while proximity to the community is a resource, it also has a downside; some volunteers reported that they are victimised by the perpetrators of violence.

How to support grassroots networks

Grassroots networks in Kenya play an important role in preventing violence against children, and their work can be a basis for testing innovative models in child protection, and take to scale the prevention of VAC, and therefore they need to be supported. Care should, however, be taken so that systems in these networks that rely on trust are enabled to respond to violence without being undermined.

Efforts should also be made to ensure that collaborations are not only geared towards meeting the needs of external catalysts, such as NGOs, without tangible benefits for children. Further, these networks should not be co-opted into donor funding cycles which may not allow space for innovation because of their short-term and competing motivations.

To address the skewed power dynamics between actors, there is a need for strengthening the accountability of these grassroots organisations, as this will enhance accountability to the community and ultimately to children. There is an imperative for revisiting the very terms on which these organisations are crowded in by other actors.

 This post is an output from LSE’s Centre for Public Authority and International Development at the LSE’s Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa and first appeared here

About the author:

Elizabeth Ngutuku has a PhD in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her work investigates young people’s experience of poverty, vulnerability, citizenship claims and sexual and reproductive health.

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Moria’s male refugees need help just as much as anyone else

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The recent fire that razed refugee camp Moria in Greece has left around 13,000 refugees homeless and fleeing once again—this time to an unknown destination where they hope to find safety at most, or temporary shelter at the least. While humanitarian aid organizations have scrambled to provide aid to the destitute refugees and Europe’s leaders have assumed a cold and calculating approach, it seems that refugee men are being forgotten. Dorothea Hilhorst argues that all refugees, regardless of age or gender, should be helped and that the plight of young men, who are often not considered ‘real’ refugees, should also be highlighted.

Camp Moria, housing 13,000 refugees mainly from Afghanistan, burnt down on 8 September. The tragedy has been long in the making—Europe has failed the migrants in Moria for years, forsaking them to a sub-human non-life in overcrowded refugee camps. Those of us who hoped that the dramatic fire would act as a wake-up call have seen little progress this past week in the wake of the fire. Europe, except for Germany, has so far responded in a cold and calculating way.

The little response we have seen has mainly focused on unaccompanied children and to a lesser extent on families. The Netherlands, for example, has offered to receive a few hundred families from Moria. The ‘offer’ is even less generous than it appears, as their number will be deducted from the total number of vulnerable refugees to be received by the Netherlands on the basis of a standing agreement with UN refugee agency UNHCR, much to the dismay of the agency.

The focus on unaccompanied children plays into the primary feelings of sympathy of many Europeans. A Dutch woman who started a campaign to collect sleeping bags for Lesbos told a reporter from the national news agency in the Netherlands: “I am a mother. When I see children sleep on the streets, I must do something, no matter what”. It may be natural for people to respond more to suffering children than to adolescents and adults, but surely politics should not only be dictated by motherly instincts alone?

It remains important to unpack the thin policy response to the fire in Moria. The focus on children and families makes a false distinction among refugees that makes it seem as if only children are vulnerable. It is a cheap, yet effective trick that puts 400 child refugees in the spotlight to distract the attention from the almost 13,000 others that live in similar squalid conditions.

Unfortunately, we have landed ourselves in a time where official politics are not guided by cherished and shared institutions like the refugee convention, which stipulates that people fleeing from war are entitled to be heard in an asylum procedure and, while the procedure is pending, received in dignified circumstances. Instead, policies seem cynically oriented towards one goal only: deterrence. The underlying idea of policy comes across as something along the lines of “[l]et 13,000 people suffer in front of as many cameras as possible so that desperate people will refrain from crossing the Mediterranean to seek shelter and asylum in the affluent countries of Europe”.

While 13,000 people suffer, the gaze of Europe singles out several hundred children for our solidarity. The distinction between these children and the other refugees rests on two equally weak arguments.

Firstly, it is implied that children are more vulnerable than other refugees. Whereas this is true in some respects, the level of despair and hopelessness experienced by all people in Moria is shocking. During my visit to Lesbos last year, aid workers told me that many refugees in Moria—children, adolescents and adults—suffer from a triple trauma. The first one was caused by the violence that triggered their escape, the second by the long passage to Europe and the crossing of the sea, and, finally, new trauma arising from the dismal conditions in the camp, the permanent state of insecurity, and the lack of future prospects. A vast majority of the people in Moria qualify to be seriously considered in asylum procedures because they fled from the violence of war and are extremely vulnerable.

Secondly, the focus on children leans on an idea of ‘deserving’ versus ‘undeserving’ refugees. Children cannot be blamed for their situation and are presumed innocent. The same applies to women in the eyes of most people. Adult men, and especially single (young) men, on the other hand, are looked at with a multitude of suspicions. Men are associated with violence and often suspected to be culprits rather than victims of war. They are also distrusted as they may be associated with sexual violence against women that is indeed widespread, but certainly does not hold true for all men. Finally, they don’t solicit feelings of sympathy because they are considered strong and capable of managing their own survival. Or worse, they are considered fortune seekers instead of bare survivors of war.

However, it is a myth that men should not deserve our sympathy! In situations of war, men are more likely than women to be exposed to violence – killing, torture, arbitrary arrest, or forced subscription in a regular or rebel army. Traumatized and destitute, they find themselves in a situation where they do not qualify for many of the aid programmes that are based on the same gender biases and reserve their resources for women and children. Quite a lot of young men see no other option than to prostitute themselves in order to survive.

Singling out unaccompanied children therefore is delusional. It seems to be designed to placate the large numbers of Europeans who want to act in solidarity with refugees. Our politicians keep telling us that social support for refugees has dried up, but while they listen in fear to right-wing populists, they are blind to the wish of equally large constituencies that want to welcome refugees.

As we are left in anger and shame, let us not step into the false dichotomy of deserving/undeserving refugees. Policy should be guided by legislation, not by false distinctions that are based on and reinforce popular sentiments. All refugees in Moria, irrespective of their gender or age, should be able to tell their story while being sheltered in dignity. All these stories need to be heard in proper asylum procedures—without prejudice.

About the author:

Dorothea HilhorstDorothea Hilhorst is Professor of Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is a regular author for Bliss. Read all her posts here.

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COVID-19 | How ‘COVID-19 hunger’ threatens the future of many by Jimena Pacheco

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Empty Plate

As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses and lockdowns continue, even more people are suffering from hunger and malnutrition due to their inability to access nutritious food. The pandemic has revealed the importance not only of alleviating immediate hunger produced by the sudden loss of movement and restrictions to economic activity, but also the longer-term effects of a lack of nutrition arising from the inability to access or pay for nutritious food during the pandemic. Children are particularly vulnerable: the lack of an adequate diet can lead to persistent losses in health, education and productivity that can have lasting effects. The after-effects of the pandemic could be more severe than its immediate effects, writes Jimena Pacheco.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that the COVID-19 crisis will expose 265 million people to the threat of severe hunger. The effects of the increase of hunger worldwide could be more catastrophic than the virus itself on the long run. Hence, it is of the utmost importance to implement policies that fight the pandemic from a holistic and intertemporal perspective, including the challenges presented by the accompanying hunger crisis.

According to the IMF, the global economy will suffer a downturn of -3% in 2020, pushing 200 million people out of employment.[1] In addition, millions of self-employed and informal workers will suffer from the abrupt interruption of their income flows brought about by illness or measures to curb virus transmission, including total lockdowns that prevent the normal circulation of people, goods, and services. In addition to the contraction of household income, the prices of cereals and other foodstuffs have increased as a result of trade barriers and difficulties transporting goods due to the lockdowns. As a consequence, we observe a deterioration in the nutrient intake of the population.[2]

Both the quantity and quality of calories are affected. The disruption in food markets has decreased access to vegetables, fruits, and proteins. These food products are labour intensive and need good storage and good distribution logistics, all of which have been affected by the COVID-19 crisis. In addition to supply shortages[3], the mobility restrictions and volatility of the price of quality food products, as well as sudden income cuts, have pushed households to consume more perishable, cheaper, and less nutritious foods.[4]

But not only the direct effects of interrupted distribution chains are visible in the nutrient intake patterns of the poorest populations. The most vulnerable populations usually live in resource-poor countries with weak fiscal finances, tight health budgets, and high debts. The coronavirus crisis has led these countries to reallocate resources to fight the pandemic, leading to the neglect or interruption of state-driven food programs. Children who were able to receive a square meal at schools can no longer do so, and food- and cash-transfer programs have also been interrupted. The WFP estimates that the school closures and mobility restrictions have prevented 368 million children from receiving meals through school food programs worldwide—a devastating observation. While some countries have ensured that children remain fed, there are no data available on the coverage and quality of those alternative solutions.[5]

Poor childhood nutrition has lasting effects

It is not only the immediate hunger caused by the COVID-19 crisis that is worrisome. The insufficient intake of nutrients during childhood increases vulnerability to infectious diseases, and starvation leads to premature death. Those children who survive are likely to face the lifelong impacts of malnutrition. Malnutrition during childhood generates changes in an individual’s metabolism to save energy. Furthermore, women who have suffered starvation during childhood are shorter and have a higher probability of giving birth to babies with a low birth weight. Besides, children who did not have sufficient nutrients during childhood perform worse in school and are less productive as adults. All these mechanisms that are being fed by coronavirus responses will generate long-term impacts that are likely to persist for more than one generation if we do not counteract the ‘COVID hunger’ now.

The way forward: immediate action and long-term monitoring

The need for timely and adequate policies to prevent hunger and starvation is pressing. Bodies such as the FAO and WFP have suggested a number of measures that can be implemented to combat immediate hunger and a longer-term lack of adequate nutrition linked to economic losses and poverty. These include:

  • Installing emergency cash transfers that smooth the income shocks of the vulnerable households
  • Assuring the correct functioning of food markets by decreasing barriers for food trade
  • Improving dietary quality, among others, by assuring the access to vegetables, fruits, and meat at affordable prices in local markets, or increasing the quantity and quality of school meals
  • Supporting maternal services by strengthening public health services, especially regarding the access to nutrition supplements
  • Promoting homestead food production.

However, the implementation of these recommendations does not seem feasible in countries that are resource strapped and already fail to invest in quality nutrition, healthcare, and food-producing agriculture.[6] We need commitment from governments and international organizations to allocate enough resources to fight hunger today in order to avoid future costs for society. Furthermore, we have to assure that the response to the ‘COVID-19 hunger’ and the monitoring of its effects persist long after the pandemic has ended.

Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Natascha Wagner for her thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft of this post.

[1] Also see https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—dcomm/documents/briefingnote/wcms_740877.pdf
[2] The situation is especially difficult in urban areas, where households are unable to smooth the consumption shock through household-level food production.
[3] There are even more channels that contribute to rising hunger and lack of food supplies—the pandemic stopped the movement of migrant workers involved in harvesting activities, resulting in a loss of production for many farmers because of a lack of workers to pick vegetables.
[4] Nutritious food can be 10 times more expensive than basic calories as a result of COVID-19.
[5] For example, in Madrid, the municipality controversially signed a contract with a fast-food provider to cover the meals for vulnerable children. Health institutions and families have raised complaints about the nutritional quality of these meals that the children received for almost two months. See https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2020-05-03/las-pizzas-de-ayuso-y-algunos-kilos-de-mas.html [in Spanish].
[6] World Bank data show that on average around 7% of a country’s GDP is dedicated to healthcare. For OECD countries it reaches 10%, while it is under 5% in Latin America and Southeast Asia. In the least-developed countries, the expenditure in healthcare is as low as 1% of a country’s GDP. See https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.GHED.GD.ZS.
Title Image Credit: Jimena Pacheco

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.

Jimena PachecoAbout the authors:

Jimena Pacheco is a development economics Ph.D. candidate at the ISS. Her research interests rely in development, health and education economics. Currently, she is working in the impact of negative shocks -economic and natural crisis- in human capital formation in Ecuador and Spain as main cases.

 

Does attending preschool benefit Indian children at a later stage? by Saikat Ghosh

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Colourful pens

Despite having one of the world’s largest early childhood education and care program named ‘Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS)’ in operation since 1975, the impact of such provisions on children’s later development is still largely unknown in India. Empirical evidence from India suggests that attending preschool makes children more sociable but does not improve their cognitive ability.

Does Early Childhood Education (ECE) matter?

Childhood is the most important phase of human life and the strong foundation made during the early years can lead to improvements in children’s cognitive and social development. It has already been witnessed that ECE contributes substantially to children’s development and well-being and children attending early education programs is associated with improved performance in school1, 2. ECE is considered extremely effective for children from disadvantaged backgrounds as it can narrow the gap in early development between children from different socio-economic classes3.

On the contrary, evidence also suggests that early, extensive, and continuous nonmaternal care may have some development risks for young children and the larger society4, 5. Although ECE may increase cognitive skills at school entry, it may also increase behavioural problems and reduces self-control6. Therefore, there also exist some sort of disagreements regarding the effects of ECE programs on children’s development.

Based on the above backdrop, a study was recently conducted to understand whether attending preschool provide any benefit to children at the later stage of their life. Based on a sample of 1369 first graders, the study took place in India which is home of approximately twenty percent of the world’s child population in the age group of 0-6 years. The key question asked in this context was: do the children who attended preschool possess greater skills at the primary school level? Children’s accumulation of cognitive and social skills was assessed by respective class teachers using twelve indicators such as their attention towards class, ability to remember lessons, friendliness towards peers, etc.

Does attending preschool help Indian children?

The results from the study suggest that the ECE provisions in India are able to contribute to child development, but only partially. Children who attended preschool were found performing better, but this association was not uniform over different skill types. Although attending preschool seems to help children in improving their social skills, there was no such effect with respect to cognitive skills. Furthermore, in contrast to the parental notion about the private preschools being better than the ICDS ones, there was no such evidence found of any of the preschools having a relative edge over the other.

Given the fact that not only preschool attendance but also the quality of the preschool matters, one can hold the quality of preschools in India as responsible for not being able to provide any cognitive incentive to children. The focus of the ICDS programme seems more on the feeding aspects than on promoting behavioural change in childcare practices. The people responsible in these settings are often not very well educated and do not have the required skills to take on this responsibility7( p.30). Besides, the curriculum followed in the private preschools were also criticized for its quality and suitability for children8, 9. Therefore, both types of preschools seem lacking the quality to contribute to children’s cognitive development.

On the other hand, regardless of the quality of care and curriculum, attending preschool allows children to interact and communicate with peers and integrate themselves. Normatively, first friendships are established during the preschool years, and the acquisition of social skills such as helping and sharing, etc. during preschool predict later school engagement and academic success10, 11.

Therefore, by providing an improved and more scientific curriculum to the children, ECE provisions in India can help children in greater skill accumulation. Taking into account that parents mainly send their children to preschool for early education and school readiness12, emphasizing on the educational component of the ICDS programme could attract more parents towards it. Given the fact that the ICDS programme is mainly targeting the marginalized section of the society, expanding its coverage and improving the quality of service provisions would certainly help children from the disadvantaged backgrounds to build a strong foundation.

References:
  1. Weiland, C. & Yoshikawa, H. (2013). Impacts of a prekindergarten program on children’s mathematics, language, literacy, executive function, and emotional skills. Child Development, 84(6), 2112–2130.
  2. DeCicca, P. & Smith, J. D. (2011). The long-run impacts of early childhood education: Evidence from a failed policy experiment. National Bureau of Economic Research. Working Paper 17085.
  3. UNICEF (2016). The state of the world’s children: A fare chance for every child. Retrieved from: https://www.unicef.org/publications/files/UNICEF_SOWC_2016.pdf
  4. Belsky, J. (2002). Quantity counts: Amount of child care and children’s socioeconomic development. Development and Behavioural Pediatrics, 23(3): 167-170.
  5. Belsky, J. (2001). Developmental risks (still) associated with early child care. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry & Allied Discipline, 42(7): 845—859.
  6. Magnuson, K. A., Ruhm, C. J. & Waldfogel, J. (2004). Does prekindergarten improve school preparation and performance?. NBER Working Paper No. 10452
  7. UNESCO (2006). Select issues concerning ECCE India. Paper commissioned for the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2007, Strong foundations: early childhood care and education.
  8. Kaul, V. & Sankar, D. (2009). Early childhood care and education in India’. New Delhi: NUEPA.
  9. Swaminathan, M. (1998). The First Five Years: A Critical Perspective on Early Childhood Care and Education in India. New Delhi: SAGE.
  10. Howes, C., Hamilton, C. E., & Philipsen, L. C. (1998). Stability and continuity of child-caregiver and child-peer relationships. Child Development, 69, 418–426.
  11. Ladd, G. W., Price, J. M., & Hart, C. H. (1988). Predicting preschoolers’ peer status from their playground behaviors. Child Development, 59, 986–992.
  12. Ghosh, S. (2019). Inequalities in demand and access to early childhood education in India. International Journal of Early Childhood. DOI: 1007/s13158-019-00241-8

    Image Credit: Jay Galvin on Flickr

About the Author:

saikatDr. Saikat Ghosh is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LifBi), Germany where he is leading a project focusing on early childhood education in India.  He is a former ISS Graduate (2011-12) and awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Bamberg in 2018. His research interest centers on poverty, education, inequality, and social policy analysis with a particular focus on developing countries. Formerly, he has worked for the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS), Germany, UNU-WIDER, Helsinki, and the State Government of West Bengal, India.

Children as experts: rethinking how we produce knowledge by Kristen Cheney

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Children in the rain

Most research on adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights is adult-led and adult-centred, not only ignoring young voices but denying diversity amongst young people. But a new project co-led by Kristen Cheney of the ISS departs from the premise that young people are the experts of their own lives, giving children and adolescents the chance co-create knowledge. In this article, Cheney details the importance of youth-led participatory research and how this is done through the new project.

It is often assumed that social research is the domain of experts—and that those experts are necessarily adults. Most research on adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights (ASRHR) is adult-led and adult-centred, not only ignoring young voices but denying diversity amongst young people. Information about young people’s sexuality therefore often remains insulated within their peer groups, preventing innovation in ASRHR programming. This too often leads to a deficit or pathological perspective on adolescence in ASRHR research and intervention.

ISS departs from this premise in our latest youth participatory research project, Adolescents’ Perceptions of Healthy Relationships. The APHR project is funded by the Oak Foundation, with the objective to inform their child abuse prevention programming through greater attention to the broader societal, structural factors that provide an enabling environment for the sexual abuse and exploitation of children. The project is led by ISS’ Kristen Cheney and involves Auma Okwany as East Africa lead researcher.

Instead of embracing prevalent adult-imposed models of adolescence, the APHR project departs from the premise that young people are the experts on their own lives. Indeed, we believe that young people are essential co-creators of knowledge, best suited to conduct research on their own thoughts and experiences. They have the best access to their peer groups where vital information is often kept locked away from adults’ gazes. So whenever possible, we conduct youth-led, participatory research. This way, young people become not mere objects of research but co-producers of knowledge about young people’s lives through greater disclosure of more authentic viewpoints.

Conducting research in Oak’s two main project areas, East Africa and Eastern Europe, ISS leads an international team consisting of partners from International Child Development Initiatives (Netherlands), Animus Association (Bulgaria), and Nascent Research and Development Organization (Tanzania). Together, they support young people in Bulgaria and Tanzania to participate in every step of the research, from designing quantitative and qualitative tools to data collection to analysis, dissemination and advocacy. This Circles of Support youth-centered approach provides training for adolescents as young as twelve years old to act as young peer researchers (YPRs), with support for research activities throughout the project—while always ensuring that young people’s considerations take precedence over adults’ opinions (Figure 1). Despite some adults’ concerns that young people might not be up to the task, we consistently find that young people are not only competent researchers, but also capable self-advocates.

Untitled.png
Figure 1. YPRs in Dar Es Salaam discuss important aspects to consider in research on adolescents’ perceptions of healthy relationships (2017). Their input is incorporated into the research design from the start.

Preliminary Findings

Having completed an extensive survey of nearly 2,000 adolescents aged 10-18 across Bulgaria and Tanzania, our approach has proven fruitful for getting at adolescents’ views on what constitutes healthy relationships. We are still collecting qualitative data that will both validate and deepen our understanding of the survey findings, but our preliminary observations from the survey revealed which characteristics and relationships adolescents value most in each setting.

In Bulgaria, responses indicated that adolescents generally value trust and respect most in their relationships. While they reported mostly positive relationships with family—particularly with their mothers—adolescents’ responses indicated that the more problematic relationships were those with peers and others in their school settings.

We are following up the survey to further unpack these results, in order to understand how adolescents define trust and respect, as well as to understand family and school dynamics.

Untitled1
Figure 2. A YPR in Sofia, Bulgaria, shares her group’s qualitative questions with the group.

In Tanzania, adolescents also reported supportive relationships with their mothers. In addition, they found that religious leaders were important in guiding young people’s behaviour. They indicated that a large part of their understanding of being loved, in various relationships, is someone providing for their needs, both emotional and material. But preliminary survey findings also pointed to widespread abuses toward adolescents—from various people at home, school, or in the community. To some extent, their answers even pointed toward a normalisation of that violence; for example, some pointed out that there were high levels of bullying in school, yet they did not necessarily consider this a bad thing, depending on the circumstances. Some saw excessive discipline from teachers as concern for their learning, while others reported that fighting to defend a friend shows that you are loyal and is therefore ‘healthy.’ The TZ team is currently completing qualitative data collection (Figure 3), which we hope will help us further unpack these responses during analysis.

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Figure 3. A YPR in Tanzania interviews a classmate (2018).

Scholar Activism

Our research team has been providing excellent support to our phenomenal young peer researchers (YPRs). Through our Circles of Support approach, the team in each country has been able to tailor training to the YPRs’ needs and abilities. To ensure that young people’s concerns predominate, we have consulted YPRs at every stage, while constantly checking our own tendencies to want to redirect research toward ‘adult’ concerns. As a result, we are seeing exceptional personal growth as well as group cohesion amongst our YPRs.

Untitled3
Boy and girl YPRs in Magu, Tanzania, come up with research questions together (2017).

For this reason, we consider our participatory approach ‘always already advocacy’. ‘Protection’ is sometimes invoked to deny young people’s participation, but participation can be inherently protective, especially in ASRHR, where knowledge is power. Our training covers basic concepts that help empower kids to know their rights and develop their ASRHR competencies—which they then disseminate to others. Participatory research also fosters more interpersonal communication by modeling healthy relationships within the research process itself (Figure 4).

Headshot 02 17About the author: 

Kristen Cheney is Associate Professor of Children and Youth Studies at ISS. She is author of Crying for Our Elders: African Orphanhood in the Age of HIV and AIDS and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification.

The Orphan Industrial Complex comes home to roost in America by Kristen Cheney and Karen Smith Rotabi

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The recent removal of migrant children from their parents at the southern US border has caused great public outcry, but Kristen Cheney and Karen Smith Rotabi argue that it could become another incarnation of the Orphan Industrial Complex that glorifies ‘child rescue’ and the charitable commodification of children without parental care—one that actually produces orphans for a hungry adoption market through dubious legal means.

What is happening to migrant children is egregious and yet predictable: children separated from their families and moved hundreds of miles away to foster homes—by an adoption agency with ties to US Secretary of Education Betsy de Vos.

To those who are appalled by this move by the Trump administration, the situation is unconscionable and ‘not who we are’ as Americans (though there are numerous historical cases of intentional family separation by the state).

To those of us in children’s studies, however—and particularly those of us who study orphanhood and adoption—it was only a matter of time before the Trump family separation policy crossed paths with the Orphan Industrial Complex.

The Orphan Industrial Complex

The Orphan Industrial Complex (OIC) is the charitable commodification of children without parental care. It is driven by persistent narratives of “orphan rescue” that not only commodify orphans and orphanhood itself but that frequently spurs the “production” of “orphans”, resulting in child exploitation and trafficking (Cheney and Ucembe forthcoming). The OIC includes such activities as fundraising for orphanages, orphanage volunteering, and international adoption.

The OIC has largely been operating internationally, driven by North American and European desires for children and/or experiences with orphans abroad (Cheney and Rotabi 2017). Now that we are seeing young children at the doorstep of the US, the next chapter in a long story of child abduction into adoption is currently being written—this time domestically.

Adoption scholars and children’s advocates have been speculating on social media that the plan is (and has likely been all along) that they move the young children far from their parents at the border, charge an absurd amount for fostering and/or reunification that the parents can’t pay—either because they just don’t have the money and/or are still in detention—then when they can’t pay, the authorities declare the children abandoned and available for adoption. This has happened before, and make no mistake, it is happening as we type. And it is perfectly “legal”, in that the courts are sanctioning these actions; indeed, they are enabling the stealing of children against the will of their parents.

Bethany Christian Services of Michigan, an adoption agency with ties to billionaire Education Secretary Betsy de Vos and a history of coercive adoptions, has placed approximately 80 children in foster care thousands of miles from the southern US border, where some of the parents are detained while other parents have already been deported to Central America. Bethany and other agencies have government contracts to provide so-called “foster care” while reunification strategies are sorted. We submit, why would a large-scale adoption agency be trusted with such a critical and essential task all those miles removed from the location where the child was separated from their parent(s)?

Tackle the enabling environment first

Because the courts are so often complicit in child stealing, it is difficult to actually talk of “illegal adoptions”. That is why Cheney told the UN HRC Council last year that using the law to battle “illegal adoptions” is not enough; we need to address the enabling environment that is undergirded by “child rescue” and “better life” narratives that justify helping ourselves to the children of the poor and desperate. These discourses are also what undergird the OIC, thus perpetuating such violence against children and families. As we know from previous experience, there are people out there who have no scruples about adopting the children separated from their detained and deported migrant parents—many of whom came to the US with their children to protect them from violence and instability at home—and in fact there are whole social movements dedicated to adoption.

Yet, a number of the families crossing the U.S. border are actually eligible to apply for asylum based on societal violence: asylum seekers from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are over-represented in the recent influx. All three countries suffer notorious gang violence and other problems that rise to the definition of persecution when an individual or family is targeted. Ironically, US government policies have fueled poverty and violence underlying the requests for asylum from the region (Costantino, Rotabi and Rodman 2012). Gang violence is just one symptom that has, in turn, pushed some of the region’s most vulnerable people to immigrate northward for safety (Carlson and Gallagher 2015).

Rather than being welcomed at the border as asylum seekers, they are charged with a misdemeanor for illegal entry to the US. To make matters worse, there are credible stories of immigration agents coercing parents with threats of child adoption if they should file for their rights to seek refuge. As the U.S responds to asylum seekers and others with such a heavy and uncaring hand, Federal Judges are now weighing in: a recent court order requires the children affected and in foster care to be quickly reunited with their families. However, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions fought the court order—and lost. Nonetheless, this mean-spirited delay of the court judgment being realized inevitably will prolong the waiting game which is a potential means of child abduction into adoption through the courts. All too often, when a challenge to separation finally comes to court, judges have ruled that a child has lived with a foster family for long enough that they have emotionally attached to the new family. On the basis of the best interests of the child, legal judgments favoring adoption rather than returning a child to their parents have prevailed. This has already happened in notorious cases of child abduction into US adoption from Guatemala (Rotabi and Bromfield 2017).

In the case of an organization like Bethany, they typically serve the very hungry adoption marketplace rather than facilitate parent-child. While Bethany can and should mobilize to change its case management model from adoption to reunification, the clock ticks on the family lives of vulnerable children.

The dark side of adoption

It may look like some of the children adjust well to their new homes and families, but let us tell you what is going to happen if we do not stop it: the older children will likely not adjust well to being ripped from their parents and told they have new families, so those adoptions are bound to “fail”, with kids running away, ending up cycling through multiple foster homes, or worse. For younger kids, the memories of their families and the harrowing journey they have made with them will likely fade over time as the children get adjusted to their new homes. But imagine how they will feel as they come of age and learn the true circumstances of their adoptions; that they were essentially stolen at the border from a parent(s) who carried them for thousands of treacherous miles seeking safety from the very violence instigated by the US. Older adoptees have been devasted to learn of such questionable reasons for their international adoptions, and it can lead to a dissolution of their relationships with their adoptive parents as well as incredible emotional difficulties that come with such a revelation: adoptees, for example, have high rates of depression and suicide.

Many adoptee advocates note that adult adoptees are often driven to learn more about their origins, as an integral part of their identities. In fact, origin tourism has become another facet of the OIC, marketizing adoptees’ need to search for their birth families (Dorow 2010, 78). Nonetheless, one of the strongest recommendations to come out of the International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy held at the ISS in 2014 was for preservation of records in adoption so that when the time comes for individual adoptees to search for their original families, they will have access to the vital information necessary.

If we cannot stop this from happening now, we need to make sure this injustice is well documented so that sooner or later, it can be righted, and these children can finally be reunited with their families.

References:
Carlson, Elizabeth, and Anna Marie Gallagher. 2015. “Humanitarian Protection for Children Fleeing Gang-Based Violence in the Americas.” Journal on Immigration and Human Security 3(2), 129-158.
Cheney, Kristen E., and Karen Smith Rotabi. 2017. “Addicted to Orphans: How the Global Orphan Industrial Complex Jeopardizes Local Child Protection Systems.” In Conflict, Violence and Peace, edited by Christopher Harker and Kathrin Hörschelmann, 89-107. Singapore: Springer Singapore.
Cheney, Kristen, and Stephen Ucembe. forthcoming. “The Orphan Industrial Complex: the charitable commodification of children and its consequences for child protection.” In Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification, edited by Kristen Cheney and Aviva Sinervo. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Costantino, Rosalin, Karen Smith Rotabi and Debra Rodman. 2012. Violence against women and asylum seeking: Global problems and local practices applied to Guatemalan women immigrating for safety. Advances in Social Work 13(2), 431-50. Available at http://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/advancesinsocialwork/article/viewFile/1974/2465.
Dorow, Sara. 2010. “Producing Kinship through the Marketplace of Transnational Adoption.” In Baby Markets: Money and the New Politics of Creating Families, edited by Michele B. Goodwin, 69-83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rotabi, Karen Smith, and Nicole F. Bromfield. 2017. From Intercountry Adoption to Global Surrogacy:  A Human Rights History and New Fertility Frontiers. Abingdon: Routledge.

About the authors: 

Headshot 02 17.pngKristen Cheney is Associate Professor of Children and Youth Studies at ISS. She is author of Crying for Our Elders: African Orphanhood in the Age of HIV and AIDS and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification.

Headshot_Rotabi_CSUMB_Fall2017.jpgKaren Smith Rotabi is Professor and Chair of the Department of Social Work at California State University Monterey Bay. She is co-author of From Intercountry Adoption to Global Surrogacy: A Human Rights History and New Fertility Frontiers and co-editor of Intercountry Adoption: Policies, Practices and Outcomes.

Cheney and Rotabi co-organized the 2014 International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy at ISS.