Childhood, Youth and Violence in Global Contexts

Research and Practice in Dialogue

K. Wells, E. Burman, H. Montgomery, A. Watson, K. Wells, E. Burman, H. Montgomery, A. Watson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137322593
• eBook ISBN: 9781137322609
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together academic and practitioner points of view, this edited collection shows how violence enters into ordinary, routine practices of childhood and children's experiences. The contributing authors seek to understand how violence is enacted against children in infancy, adolescence, in school, in care, at home and on the street.

1

Everyday Violence and Social Recognition

Karen Wells and Heather Montgomery

Introduction

This book is about violence in the everyday lives of children and young people living in poverty. It explores children’s experiences of violence in four contexts: early childhood, orphanages, homelessness and war. With the exception of the chapters on early childhood, none of these contexts might appear to readers as ordinary or quotidian spaces and events. However, what is evident from each of these chapters is that many children are living in extremely difficult situations of terror and insecurity where violence is a routine part of everyday life at different scales from the individual to the nation. It is in this sense that we are using the term ‘everyday’ violence – violence which, in the contexts in which children live, is routine, inescapable and mundane. In contrast to many other books on children and violence, we are not focusing on those forms of violence that, again in the specific sociocultural context within which a child lives, are considered exceptional and abusive. This focus on the quotidian allows us to ask, ‘what is the purpose of violence’, and given that the experience of living in deep poverty and living with war and political insecurity is harsh and often terrifying for adults as well as children, we ask ‘what difference does it make to be a child’? In this chapter, we suggest that ‘social recognition’ is an important concept that makes sense of the contradiction between the recognition of children as vulnerable persons and the levels of violence that they are subjected to. Although we all are always involved in struggles for social recognition, this struggle is different for children than it is for adults for two reasons: their exclusion from full social personhood and the materiality of their bodies.

Anthropology, violence and childhood

The violence of everyday life has become the focus of much anthropological writing (for an excellent collection of essays on the subject, see Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ and Philippe Bourgois’ 2004 anthology). While this has not always concentrated directly on children, it has shown the multiple impacts of violence on children and the many forms it can take, including the mundane but concealed forms of violence inherent in structural adjustment programmes and trade embargos (Quesada 1998), poverty (Scheper-Hughes 1992), racism (Bourgois 1998), pollution (Stephens 1995) or hunger (Farmer 2004). Others have looked at the violence inflicted on children within the home, often dismissed by previous anthropologists as socialization or necessary discipline. Such work has often left those who carried it out profoundly troubled. Helen Kavapalu, for example, was one of the first anthropologists to look specifically at children’s daily experiences of corporal punishment in Tonga. What she witnessed left her deeply uncomfortable because she found a society in which the beating of children was endemic. Beatings were designed to inflict both physical and emotional pain on the child and to ensure that they were aware of their subordinate status (Kavapalu 1993). As an anthropologist, Kavapalu was well able to explain and understand these beatings and clearly showed how such punishment was used to teach respect, obedience and, importantly, an understanding of social hierarchies and status relationships. Yet her personal response was much more ambivalent, and she found it hard to watch children in distress, being beaten or humiliated without making value judgments and without distancing herself from her own morality and understanding of what constitutes an act of violence against a child.

In order to examine violence against children in such situations, anthropologists have tried to use a structure which emphasizes the importance of local context and have argued that, while various forms of harsh treatment may be seen as totally unacceptable to Western observers, it is hard to label them as violent per se if they are judged fair and reasonable by the society within which they occurred. Anthropologist Jill Korbin (1977; 1981; 2003) has provided such a framework which differentiates between three types of practices that need to be untangled in discussions of violence (her framework refers specifically to abuse but is also useful in wider discussions about violence). The first category she examines is that of cultural practices, such as initiation or beatings, which may seem harsh, unnecessary and even abusive to outsiders but which are deemed culturally necessary and have the full approval of the community. Alongside the corporal punishment described by Kavapalu above, it is not difficult to find examples from many ethnographic accounts of what appear to be extremely painful, and physically and mentally harmful, practices inflicted on children, such as elongating babies’ heads, scarification, neck stretching, foot binding, tattooing, ear piercing or other bodily modifications (Montgomery 2009). Although painful and capable of causing long-term damage, few anthropologists would regard these modifications as acts of violence against children. They are carried out to mark membership of a community and culture, and within that setting they are culturally sanctioned.

Korbin’s second category is the idiosyncratic or individual maltreatment of a child, carried out against cultural norms and acknowledged as such and likely to cause a child serious harm. Here the important point is not the intensity of the violence but the deviation from the cultural norm. The third type of abuse she identifies is the social or structural abuse of children, where children as a group are targeted, or when they suffer distinctive consequences as a result of poverty, ill health, hunger, social inequality, war, government policy or social neglect. These forms of violence have been conceptualized by others as structural violence – a concept that many of the contributors to this book deploy and which we explore in more depth further on in this chapter.

While this three-part schema is intellectually coherent and useful in many instances, particularly on its insistence of understanding structural violence as fundamental to children’s experiences, it also points to two potential, interconnected, areas of conflict between academics and practitioners. The first one concerns cultural relativity and the extent to which academics can, or should, remain as neutral observers when confronted with violence against children, while the second concerns intervention – either to prevent violence against children or to try and improve children’s lives after they have experienced violence. Cultural relativity has long been a hallmark of anthropological research, but as Kavapalu’s research suggests, it is often impossible to maintain in the field. While understanding and explaining need not lead to condoning or supporting – and today few anthropologists would argue that cultural relativism should be absolute – there is, nevertheless, a thin line and anthropologists have often found themselves in conflict with practitioners over issues such as female genital cutting (or mutilation depending on your viewpoint), child punishment, child prostitution or child soldiers. Increasingly too, they have found that the role of the detached observer is not one they are morally comfortable with and some – such as Kovats-Bernat (this volume), Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgeois (2004) – have called for and tried to implement a new type of engaged and subjective anthropology which offers critical analysis and explanations but makes no pretence to be detached. Indeed, Scheper-Hughes rejects the idea of the anthropologist as a ‘neutral, dispassionate, cool and rational, objective observer of the human condition’ (Kovats-Bernat this volume; Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgeois 2004, 410), believing that anthropology must be politically committed and morally engaged. She believes that cultural relativism, which brings with it moral relativism, is an unsustainable position for modern anthropologists, arguing that ‘those of us who make our living observing and recording the misery of the world have a particular obligation to reflect critically’ (2004, 416), and must produce ‘politically complicated and morally demanding texts and images capable of sinking through the layers of acceptance, complicity and bad faith that allow the suffering and the deaths to continue’ (2004, 417). She rejects the idea of an anthropologist as a spectator and argues that they must take on the more active role of witness and in doing so must be accountable and responsible, engaged and empathetic.

This raises the second problem of intervention. In the past the anthropological ideal, as laid down by Malinowski (1922), was that of the researcher as a neutral outsider – watching, observing, even experimenting but not intervening and eventually withdrawing from the situation leaving it unchanged. Although this has been questioned from the very beginning and proved hopelessly unrealistic in practice, there is often a reluctance to get involved, and intervention is still not seen as the proper role of the anthropologist. For practitioners, of course, the situation is very different. While many academics have the freedom to observe and understand violence against children, practitioners, by definition, are trying to prevent such violence and have fewer options to privilege local understandings without the need to intervene. Academics such as Claudia Seymour, writing about children and war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, will inevitably have different perspectives and see their roles differently to practitioners such as Deborah Haines (this volume) whose work with Save the Children aims to restore normality for war-affected children. Here, the humanitarian strategy might be another example, for Seymour, of the obfuscation that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) practice in relation to the gap between children’s legal rights and their actual lives.

Yet the situation is not as polarized as this might suggest. All the chapters in this book show that there is much common ground, space for overlap and synergy between academics and practitioners, and the differences between them are not greater than the similarities. Both academics and practitioners working on children have been heavily influenced by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which – whatever its faults and deficiencies – has led to a rethink about the role of children within their families and within society and about their roles and rights in relation to violence. Certainly, as children begin to be envisaged as equals or right-bearers and family relationships are idealized less in terms of hierarchies, the issue of violence against children and the question of appropriate and inappropriate use of force become more problematic. Outside the family, there is an increasing acknowledgement of the economic and social roles children play, as well as their agency and ability to participate fully in society. While such thinking may well be a product of Western individualism (Burman 1996; Goodman 1996; Boyden 1997; Twum-Danso 2009), with less relevance outside the minority world, it has still been deeply influential for academics and practitioners alike and is one of the areas where ongoing discussions between them are necessary and urgent.

Structural violence

One area of convergence between practitioners and academics is the attempt to give moral agency to political and economic structures through the concept of structural violence. This concept originates in the Political Scientist Johan Galtung’s 1969 paper, in which he argues that ‘[v]iolence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations’. This definition rests on an implicit assumption that individuals have ‘potential’ that is immanent to them but only realized in particular conditions. It is unclear, however, how one would know that an individual’s actual somatic and mental outcomes were less than their potential outcomes. Galtung’s thesis is not in fact, despite this definition, about the capacities of individuals but of social groups and of the conditions that prevent the full flourishing of the human spirit. It is not Galtung’s intention to deploy, say, psychological functioning as a measure of normal (or potential) achievement against which the limiting impact of structural violence can be measured. The purpose is rather to suggest that the constraints and burdens that inequality places on the lives of the poor are a form of violence. It is in this sense that the concept of structural violence is imbricated with or enters into everyday life. Structural violence tries to make visible the ‘hidden injuries’ of class and racial oppression.

The medical anthropologist Paul Farmer has argued for the efficacy of the concept of structural violence within medical anthropology in explaining the unequal distribution of illness and early death by attending to the ‘ethnographically invisible’. This phrase signals precisely that we cannot see what injury violence has caused, or we cannot directly trace the agent of violence to the suffering subject’s experience. This is because ‘structural violence is violence exerted systematically – that is, indirectly – by everyone who belongs to a certain social order’ (Farmer 2004, 307, emphasis added). Despite this emphasis on the indirectness of structural violence, Farmer does not want to completely move away from the connection between violence and its impacts on the body. He says that all forms of structural violence ‘come to have their “final common pathway” in the material’ (2004, 308), that is to say in its impact on bodies.

By contrast, Bourgois and Scheper-Hughes, whose powerful ethnographies of the violence of everyday life (Selling Crack in El Barrio and Death Without Weeping) have placed them at the centre of anthropological investigations of violence, want to conceptualize violence ‘as operating along a continuum from direct physical assault to symbolic violence and routinized everyday violence, including the chronic, historically embedded structural violence whose visibility is obscured by globalized hegemonies’. In this definition, acts anywhere along the continuum should be in their view conceptualized as violence, implicitly, regardless of whether or not they cause bodily harm. For them it is not the act but ‘[t]he social and cultural dimensions of violence [that] . . . give it its force and meaning’ (2004, 318).

In these renderings, violence becomes a metaphor for the effects of inequalities. There is the danger here that violence against children, who are the least protected from interpersonal violence because of their dependency and physical and social immaturity, is cloaked by the metaphor of structural violence. As a metaphor, structural violence may simultaneously make visible the constraints and psychic injuries on adults of a specific social order and make invisible the direct physical injuries that children are exposed to.

In Bourgois’s review of his ethnographic research over the last 30 years, he makes this link by suggesting that the experience of economic precariousness and the often frustrated search for respect lead to domestic violence by men against women and children. He speaks of ‘the shift from politicized violence to intimate violence’ (2009, 18) and argues that

[t]he street culture that emerges from the drug economy represents a creative response to exclusion and creates new forums for masculine achievement, such as gang leadership and drug entrepreneurship. It is predicated, however, upon being expressively aggressive, unexploitable, and enmeshed in drugs and violence. Drug sellers must engage in public displays of violence to enforce credibility.

(2009, 29)

Bourgois wants to link the interpersonal (or intimate) aggression of (poor) men toward each other and toward women and children to the effects of the US war on central America and the ‘structural violence’ of the US labor market (2009, 30). In this way, physical violence becomes the responsibility not of individual protagonists but of structural or institutional forces. Politically one can understand the progressive political urge that lies behind this discursive move, but it is nonetheless very problematic in its inattention to the agency of violent men and the harm experienced by others (including children) at their hands.

Corporeal violence or bringing the body back in

To use violence as a rhetorical concept or metaphor is to relinquish its visceral impact. As Lois Wacquant notes, the concept of structural violence ‘collapses forms of violence that need to be differentiated, such as physical, economic, political, and symbolic variants or those wielded by state, market and other social entities’ (322). He suggests that nothing is gained by putting together social inequalities like racism and sexism with racial and gender-based violence or poverty with war or genocide (323). He contends that the task of a materialist anthropology of suffering should begin with ‘distinguishing various species of violence and different structures of domination . . . rather than merging them into one catchall category liable to generate more moral heat than analytical light’ (322).

The body has a specific materiality; an assault on personhood may be damaging, but its damage needs to be theorized separately from bodily harm. Bodily harm may simultaneously inflict psychic trauma, and whether or not this is the case or to what extent may well depend on the symbolic order in which it is enacted. Children’s bodies are different to those of adults. This self-evident fact has been somewhat obscured by the emphasis within childhood studies on the social construction of childhood and the recognition of children’s agency. Children, because of their physical immaturity (their size, the immaturity of their internal organs), are at a greater risk of harm from violence than adults would be if they were subjected to the same level of assault as a child. Like Korbin, Shepher Hughes and Bourgois want to distinguish between ‘a violent act or a culturally defined legitimate expression of parental authority and responsibility’ (2). This very formulation presupposes that cultural legitimation and violence are mutually exclusive terms. Clearly they are not. What else is it if it is not violence to slam a child against a wall (which is one of the examples they cite)? If that violence is culturally legitimated, it is no less violent for being so.

Social recognition

The injunction against violence against children is now a cornerstone of the international governance of childhood. However, as this collection makes very clear, everywhere children are subjected to forms of violence that they are supposed to be protected against in the name of their universal rights. It is in this context that we ask the question: what does violence do? This is not intended to legitimate the injury of children’s bodies. It is rather to suggest that unless we lay bare what in any given cultural context the violence of everyday life accomplishes for the entry of children into the social order, for their recognition as human beings and social persons, we will not be able to make any meaningful progress on instituting the protections that are supposedly already their birthright.

As the above section shows, anthropologists have ‘displayed an ambivalence about culturally sanctioned practices that may cause children pain, suffering or harm . . . [they] have gone to great efforts to explain how such rites, although physically painful and emotionally frightening, fall outside the rubric of “abuse” in that they are collective expressions of cultural values’ (Korbin 2003, 434). Korbin points out that ‘not only adults who perform and perpetuate the rites, but also children who are subjected to them, view these rites, however painful and terrifying, as having a positive long-term value’ (2003, 434). For Korbin the question is how do ‘meaning and agency act as mediating forces between violence and its impact’ (Korbin 2003, 441). We suggest that one of the meanings attached to many acts of violence is the conferment of social recognition on either the perpetrator or the subject (often, both) and that this social recognition expands the space for agency.

Elaine Scarry in her book, The Body in Pain (1997), claims that violence unmakes the world. What we understand her to mean by this is that humans make the (social) world through language and that pain destroys our capacity for symbolic expression and through this our ability to be in and to make the world. However, when this claim is applied to children it loses some of its explanatory power because children are often subjected to pain precisely in order to make the (social) world. Violence against children, particularly against infants, is not usually intended to be an end in itself; it is intended to produce other ends, specifically to incorporate the child into the social world. Everyday violence against children takes t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Everyday Violence and Social Recognition
• Part I: Street Children and Everyday Violence
• Part II: Institutional Care
• Part III: Early Childhood
• Part IV: War and Everyday Violence
• Index