Since arriving in Jordan in 2012 as a refugee from Daraa, Syria at the age of 12, Jana’s life has not been easy. She lives in Azraq, a sprawling refugee camp situated in the middle of an inhospitable desert approximately 100 kilometres from Jordan’s capital city, Amman.
Jana’s family were unsure how to register her at school when they first arrived and they suffered from financial difficulties, so it was only after a year that she was able to resume her education as a Grade 6 student. She also experienced a lot of harassment in the first camp, Zaatari, where they stayed. ‘There used to be people who opened the tent and entered it while we were in it . . . I mean young men.’ However, she has since moved to Azraq camp with her family where her brother was detained for violating the Jordanian labour laws and has found the situation to be better. ‘Here, on the contrary nobody dares to do the same. In terms of safety and security, Azraq camp is better.’
However, from an education standpoint, the move was not positive and Jana grew increasingly frustrated with the poor quality of teaching. Accordingly, when her sister’s new husband introduced her to his Jordanian friend, she saw an opportunity to try and change her life and leave the confines of the camp, and so, at the age of 15, Jana decided to get married. Her parents did not approve of the marriage, but Jana was determined that it was the right decision and it would help improve her circumstances.
I told them that I wanted to marry him because our life was not as I wanted it to be. We did not have the money to live a proper life. So I thought that if I got married my situation will improve.
Unfortunately, married life was not as Jana had imagined. ‘I did not know what would happen after marriage. I did not know that I will be holding such a responsibility.’ She felt that she ‘lived as if I was a foreigner in that house’. Six months after the marriage Jana decided to get a divorce, but shortly after she had returned to her parents’ home, she found out she was pregnant.
Jana is now living with her family in the camp with her son, and every month she requests a permit to go out of the camp to visit her ex-husband to let him see his son. She loves her son very much but lives in constant fear that her ex-husband and his family will take him away from her: ‘the only thing I fear is to lose my son.’ Jana would like to go back to school and restart her education but feels it is impossible in the short term due to childcare responsibilities. ‘It is not over for me yet, but the problem is my son. I cannot leave him.’
Jana is one of more than 70 million people globally who have been displaced by persecution, violence, conflict and human rights violations – an unprecedented number in the history of the world. Of these 70 million individuals, 41 million are internally displaced, and nearly 26 million are refugees; the remainder are asylum claimants (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2018). This means that 1 in every 108 people in the world is now displaced. And of these vast numbers of displaced people, almost half – an astonishing 31 million – are children and adolescents under the age of 18. Of this total, 13 million are recognised refugees and 17 million have been internally displaced within their countries’ borders. A further 1 million are asylum seekers (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), 2017).
As Jana’s story shows, displacement causes enormous disruption to young people’s development trajectories in multiple ways. It compromises their access to education, as schooling is difficult to set up quickly in camp settings (UNHCR, 2018), and schools in host communities are often unable to cope with an influx of new students (Wanjiru, 2018; Jones et al., 2019b). Where there are few opportunities for household income generation by parents, many displaced adolescents in the global South enter work, often under dangerous or exploitative conditions (Evans et al., 2013; Gercama et al., 2018; Guglielmi et al., 2019; Jones et al., 2019b). Jana’s experiences also emphasise the way that gender shapes the experience of adolescence in diverse humanitarian contexts. In pursuit of financial stability and protection, girls may marry at an earlier age than they might have otherwise, but many girls will have little say as to when or to whom (De Jong et al., 2017; Jones et al., 2019b). Trauma – whether experienced during forced migration and/or in camps and settlements – exacerbates the emotional upheaval that adolescents are already experiencing as a result of bodily changes, placing young people at risk of poor mental health for years to come (Jabbar and Zaza, 2014; Hassan et al., 2016; Khan et al., 2018; Wanjiru, 2018).
Jana’s story also emphasises the agency of adolescents in the face of these challenges. Far from being passive victims of trauma, violence and exploitation, adolescents find ways to navigate the structural constraints that are generated or amplified by displacement. As Jana’s experience illustrates, these challenges not only affect adolescents as individuals but also reshape their relationships with their families, their peers and their communities. Attending to adolescents’ capabilities does not mean downplaying or depoliticising the injustices of displacement, for which literatures on both refugee and young people’s agency have rightly been critiqued (Evans et al., 2013; Easton-Calabria and Omata, 2018). Rather, this book seeks to directly connect and contextualise adolescents’ experiences in relation to the broader social and political processes that shape their opportunities and choices.
This book arrives at a timely juncture for such a venture. The Sustainable Development Agenda 2030 to ‘Leave No One Behind’ emphasizes the need to ensure that the structural barriers that prevent the most marginalised people from participating in and benefiting from development investments, with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) specifically outlining key indicators relating to youth, gender and more recently displacement. Alongside this, growing attention to the protracted nature of humanitarian crises and the attendant challenges for adolescents has led to increasing interest to the development of collective, long-term solutions to mass displacement. In 2018 alone, 13.6 million people were newly displaced, but the numbers of people classed as being in protracted displacement – when a population of more than 25,000 people has spent more than five consecutive years in exile – also increased, from 66 per cent of refugees in 2017 to 78 per cent in 2018 (UN DESA, 2017). Change is urgently needed.
Addressing knowledge gaps
This volume addresses a number of key knowledge gaps with regard to young people’s experiences of displacement. In this section we map out these central thematic domains, before turning to a discussion of the book’s research methodology and an overview of each chapter.
Age and gender
With some noted exceptions, the majority of research at the intersection of young people and forced migration overlooks the particular experiences of adolescents in contexts of displacement in favour of a focus on children or older youths (Ball and Moselle, 2016). Yet focusing on adolescence is important because during this life stage, individuals undergo major biological and cognitive changes that affect their social position as adults (Patton et al., 2012; Viner et al., 2015). These social transitions can lead to unequal opportunities and outcomes. Whilst these will vary across contexts, it can generally be observed that the life-worlds of girls often become even smaller due to restrictive norms and expectations for adult women (Watson, 2015). Adolescence (10–19 years) is also increasingly seen as a key window for fostering positive development trajectories for all young people (Sheehan et al., 2017). In humanitarian settings, structural concerns such as poverty and insecurity present major challenges for ensuring these positive trajectories. Given the enormous numbers of people who are displaced, it is essential to develop a better understanding of how young people encounter displacement and what works to improve their outcomes during this critical life phase.
In contexts of displacement, we know that certain risks are amplified for adolescent girls (UNESCO, 2019). Sexual and gender-based violence is prevalent in humanitarian contexts but is usually under-reported, and formal institutions have limited capacity to prevent rape and harassment in such settings (Hynes and Cordozo, 2000; Hossain et al., 2014; Odwe et al., 2018). Agencies may also misunderstand the risks perceived by girls themselves (Williams et al., 2018). Driven by concerns about the safety of girls and their protection needs, families often limit girls’ mobility, and their participation in social events may be even further discouraged (De Jong et al., 2017; Jones et al., 2019c). Efforts to keep girls safe can negatively affect their bodily integrity and psychosocial wellbeing, with an increase in child marriage – and thus early motherhood – seen across contexts of displacement, typically driven by a lack of alternative options for socioeconomic security, and poor provision of sexual and reproductive health services and information (Guglielmi et al., 2019; Jones et al., 2019c). These efforts to protect girls often inadvertently end up curtailing girls’ agency and capabilities.
Displaced adolescent boys face challenges of a different kind. While girls are more likely to be confined to the home, boys may be expected to work in unsafe jobs to support their families (Evans et al., 2013), leading them to miss out on education. A lack of quality schooling can be a factor in this, as can violent schooling environments – with boys at greater risk of violence from teachers and peers than girls (Jones et al., 2019a). These experiences result in poor psychosocial outcomes for many adolescent boys (Jabbar and Zaza, 2014; Hassan et al., 2016). Unemployment and disenfranchisement – which are major issues for adolescent boys and young men in contexts of displacement because they disrupt transitions to masculine adulthood – are also linked to their recruitment into violent nationalist and other political movements (Mikhael and Norman, 2018). Conflict-affected populations are also known to be at risk for substance abuse (Ezard, 2012), yet most interventions focus on adults despite increasing recognition that adolescent boys may be particularly vulnerable to drug and alcohol use (Greene and Kane, 2020).
Despite widespread recognition of the importance of age and gender for international development, research has also not engaged substantively with the gendered dimensions of adolescents’ experiences within humanitarian settings. Where gender is acknowledged as a factor shaping the experiences of young displaced people, research has tended to focus on young men and boys, traditionally treated as possible ex-combatants and as potential future threats to security (Hart, 2008) and thus a source of concern. When young women are considered, it is generally in relation to their vulnerability (particularly to sexual violence) rather than a focus on their capabilities (Boyden and de Berry, 2004). Positioning displaced young women simply as ‘at risk’ and young men as ‘a risk to others’ as a starting point for programming not only obscures the structural determinants of vulnerabilities but also undermines young people’s capacity for agency (Evans et al., 2013). Moving beyond reductive framings of gender and youth by challenging the assumptions that underpin them is a key contribution of this book, with all chapters directly engaging with young people’s own perspectives and experiences.
Education and opportunity
Research at the intersection of humanitarianism and adolescence has a strong focus on education. SDG 4 seeks to ensure ‘inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learn...
