Challenging the image of the child solider

I heard a brilliant talk this week by David Rosen of Farleigh Dickinson University and Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom of Drew University.  They are interesting in problematizing some of the popular representations of child soldiers, and they do this by examining both the historical and contemporary representations of them.  Rosen has written a book called ‘Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism,’ which I haven’t yet read, but seems to encapsulate some of these argues.  The thrust of them is this:

1) If we re-examine the history of conflict in places like England and America in the last two hundred years, both through cultural representations and through the popular media, we can see many examples of young soldiers who were seen as heroes who made great sacrifices for their country–see Johnny Tremain and Gavroche in Les Miserables as examples.

2) The face of the contemporary ‘child soldier’ is almost inevitably black or brown, and is described as the manifestation of the horrors of third world life.

3) The change in this history may well coincide with changes in popular representations of childhood, shifts in discourses of imperialism to ‘development,’ and perhaps even some of the

3)  The discourse of development agencies interested in challenging the practice of child soldiers draws on the language of children’s ‘rights,’ yet imposes a peculiarly Western concept of childhood on these contexts, often neglecting to contextualize violence against children in a broader socio-structural context that has arisen in part because of Western structural adjustment policies.

I am not doing this work justice.  See here for a brief article by David Rosen that is a response to a book review of his work.  It encapsulates some of his arguments.

This work I think is an important problematization of an issue that seems to have unquestioned moral validity in Western human rights discourses.

Imprisoning Families

In the March 3rd issue of The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot investigates the stories and history of the T. Don Hutto Family Immigration Detention Center near Austin, Texas. The Center — euphemistically named, as it is actually a prison — houses immigrant families who have pending asylum applications or who are awaiting deportation. The Center is owned by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a private prison corporation (T. Don Hutto, former director of corrections in Arkansas, was also a founder of CCA).

Though the article is ostensibly about the negative impacts of incarceration on children and infants, Talbot indirectly addresses — and I would have liked to see this done more directly — the harms done to families as a whole. It seems that children’s health and ability flourish is directly impacted here by their inability to live their lives with their families, the ones they love, free of intrusion and coercion by a state that is not their own. This then means that their parents, too, are unable to care for their children in the way they wish, to nurture and sustain relationships with their partners and their loved ones beyond the prison walls, and to adequately empower themselves to fight their cases. Their hands are literally tied behind their back. It is the impact of this horrific experience on families — however small, large, traditional or not they are — that most concerns me about this place. This is particularly because many of these families have not actually been charged with a crime. They are simply awaiting a decision about whether they can seek asylum in America — a place that they have come to perhaps in part because George Bush’s cries of the ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ that America offers have resonated across the world in recent years.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the CCA and the Hutto Center, and was able to reach a settlement to make the conditions at the center more humane for children and families. This is a good step, but isn’t there a danger here in making the prison a better place while not simultaneously challenging the very policies that make such a place possible? The incarceration of children and their families with pending immigration cases is wrong; the profiteering by the CCA off places like Hutto is wrong; the immigration enforcement policies in America, which treat people like caught fish, without acknowledging their dignity and agency, are wrong.

For more on this detention center, in an article that appeared in February 2007 in the New York Times, see here.

Juvenile Justice in Africa

I’ve recently been interested in exploring the tensions between the enactment in 1989 of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child and the decline in the conditions of children worldwide that have occurred as a result of the structural adjustment policies that began with neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s.  I was perplexed by the fact that though all but two nations ratified the Convention (Somalia and the United States were the exceptions), and many states proclaimed interest in protecting the rights of the child, few states in practice actual follow the terms of the Convention, particularly with respect to children’s rights in legal procedures.

While researching the Convention, I learned that government officials in Mozambique adopted the terms of the Convention fully into their national laws, recognizing that the stated claims of the Convention could be used to eradicate child poverty.  The rights of children could be interpreted as the rights to live happy and healthy lives, free of poverty.

Assuming that Mozambique’s unique interpretation of the Convention might result in unique juvenile justice practices, I began to look for information about their juvenile justice system.  Sadly, the results of my search were depressing.  I found this article from The New York Times which looked at the conditions of young offenders in a number of African nations, and found that despite the fact that many of these nations had ostensibly strict allegiance to the tenets of the Convention, young offenders suffer terribly in these nations.

Though I am reluctant to generalize about African nations, I write about this issue more broadly to try to suggest that the disjuncture between several of these nations’ stated desires to eradicate child poverty and their inability–as a result of structural dependence on global bodies like the World Bank–to resolve the problems of poverty.  The negative side-effects of structural adjustment policies, which withdraw money from public institutions and focus on private investment, among other things, is to pull money away from institutions that serve women and children in particular, like schools, hospitals, and, as we see, prisons.  Though I don’t want to suggest that prisons should benefit from public spending entirely–in fact, I believe that public investment in resolving social inequality may have a kind of ‘trickle-down’ impact on crime–I do think that global economic policies propagated by developed nations prevent countries like Mozambique from acting autonomously to develop policies consonant with their goals.

To read more about child justice in Africa, see here.

Throwing Rocks

I was nearly brought to tears yesterday when I read an article in the Baltimore Sun about the criminalization and punishment of young Palestinians in the West Bank. According to the article, more than 5,000 young Palestinians under the age of 18 have been arrested and detained by the Israeli authorities. They are tried in military courts and are given limited access to lawyers and human rights organizations. Their interrogations and trials are secret. These young people are increasingly seen as a threat to the Jewish state — because they are young, they are seen as the most vulnerable to radicalization. According to Mark Regev, spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry, there is a “deliberate strategy by extremist jihadist groups to exploit young people and to manipulate them in a terrorist war against us.” What is sadly familiar to me is the rhetoric that young people are malleable and vulnerable–capable of great harm without even knowing it. These Palestianian youths are perceived to be capable of horrific crimes against humanity, and images of these youths abound in the national media. They have become familiar, like this one:

What seem less familiar are images like this:

But the politics of representation are tense, particularly in the midst of conflict. According to the Sun article, “a 2006 report conducted by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, found that 90 percent of cases involving settler violence against Palestinians are never prosecuted because authorities claim a lack of evidence or that they cannot identify a suspect.” Violent acts perpetrated by some settlers against Palestinians is underreported, and some suggest that the Israeli state tolerates this violence to a certain extent. (For more on the human rights violations that have emerged as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on both sides of the fence, see here).

Stone-throwing, the kind of archetypal crime of conflict that we see so often represented in the media, seems to be the crime that captures Palestinians in this net of penality. According to the Sun article, Israeli authorities believe that stone-throwing has been one way that young people participate in Palestinian militancy. Yet, as shown above, throwing stones happens in both directions, and perhaps becomes emblematic of the complex and horrific violence that young people are exposed to on a daily basis in Israel and Palestine. It is strange that on the surface rock-throwing looks a bit like child’s play, but is in fact far from it, and is a deeply violent act of conflict that seems to have no end.

For me, sadly, I’m not surprised that young people are netted into this conflict. As documented by countless human rights groups, Palestinians have faced serious structural and symbolic violence as a result of the conflict–their access to water is limited, their movement restricted, and poverty runs rampant.  For me, these are the conditions that lead to retaliative violence against the dominant state.   Or, as the Sun article suggests, some young Palestinians who get arrested simply to “find a better life than they face at home.”

I know that I tread in dangerous waters when I speak about this conflict, and I must admit ignorance about the depth, weight and complexity of it. I also know that the violence perpetrated on both sides of the conflict has been horrific. But I also feel that the incarceration of so many young Palestinians in this conflict is a sad statement about the fears and insecurities made manifest in this conflict.

Resource of the Day

The Justice Mapping Center is an innovative organization that uses the computer mapping system called Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to effect policy change in the criminal justice system. Their work is wide-ranging, but their projects include making maps of where incarcerated people go when they get out of prison, overlays between criminal justice populations and other populations who receive government assistance, and the concentration of social welfare institutions.What I think is so interesting about this group is that they use mapping software to effectively demonstrate the connections between under-resourced communities and cycles of crime and imprisonment. There is an article in the New York Times today which describes how the center was able to use their work to help get government funding into neighborhoods in Houston where many people from prison return to.

The Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University has worked with the Justice Mapping Center to create visual displays of information related to prisoner reentry. What can be so compelling about projects like this is that they take complex data and make it legible — they work as journal article or a research monograph might. They also, as the Columbia researcher suggest, help us look more holistically at the consequences of crime on communities beyond the public safety paradigm (This is from the report ‘Architecture and Justice’:

This work relates to the principles espoused by Edward Tufte, a graphic designer keen on encouraging the elegant display of complex information. He is interested in moving away from our reliance on Powerpoint and other static forms of communicating information. I like this little poster he created about the cognitive style of Powerpoint:

When thinking about influencing policy, I think it is important to heed Tufte’s warning. The communication of information can lead to rigid thinking. This was demonstrated well by the neighborhood mapping that took place in New York during the zero tolerance era, in which the NYPD concentrated their policing efforts based on mapping technologies, but leaving out, as shown by the Columbia project, broader considerations about the longer term impacts on communities who were impacted by incarceration as well as crime.