Guardians of Childhood

June 9th, 2008

Filed under: News — nest @ 2:27 pm

12.12.2007

Harini Amarasuriya’s talk

Guardians of Childhood

to an invited audience

20^th November 2007-11-2007

Galle Face Hotel,

6.00pm

Ladies and Gentleman, thank you very much for turning out to listen to me as I attempt to put forward before you some thoughts on children and more specifically, childhood. These are some ideas that I am working on for my doctoral research; they are very preliminary, somewhat random and probably half baked! I am quite apprehensive about sharing these not very well formulated thoughts with such a distinguished audience. However, I would like to emphasise at the outset that the ideas I put before you today can in no way be considered complete. When Sally** asked me to give this talk, I don’t think she had any idea how much her work and the work of Nest has influenced my research interests. As some of you know, my very first ‘proper’ job was at Nest***. And although it is many years since I moved on to other work, (although my links with Nest remain) those five years at Nest have had a profound influence on me. My work at Nest gave me an opportunity to see the world from a somewhat unconventional perspective. Each one of us who are a part of Nest, may have a different understanding of what Nest is about. To me, Nest’s philosophy is quite simple: no human being (or animal for that matter) in this world deserves to be treated with cruelty; cruelty is an outrage and we have a responsibility to do something about it. What I learnt at Nest was also that cruelty can take many forms and shapes. And that the cruelty that comes from those who are supposed to protect us and care for us can be particularly horrific. Leaving Nest, to work in what for want of a better word, I will refer to as the ‘development sector’ sometimes as a practitioner, sometimes as a researcher, sometimes as a trainer or teacher, I have always been sensitive to the contradictions in the sector which while professing to help make the world a better place can yet be so oblivious to the ways in which its practices can sometimes fail to help the people it seeks to help and in some situations even cause distress to people. The disconnect between the messiness, the complexities, the heartache, the resilience and strength that I could observe among the communities we were seeking to help and the clinically distinct, precise categories and concepts that the project proposals, evaluations and guidelines that we were supposed to be working with or the beautifully written and formatted project proposals became too obvious to be ignored. Yet, development discourse talked about participation, empowerment, sustainability, the rights based approach, all of which stressed the need to respond to the needs of the people and communities we worked with; it stressed the importance of listening to the people; and it warned against parachuting in with solutions. I would often reflect on the work of Nest where responding to the situation at hand was the key principle in determining the type of intervention needed as opposed to looking for situations that fitted the type of intervention that was on offer or even constructing the situation in order to fit the intervention.

This disconnect between discourse and practice could not be more stark as in the case of policies and interventions focussed on children. A dominant theme when talking about children today is the concern with the threats and assaults to the innocence and purity of childhood. Contemporary thinking on children is underscored by the belief that childhood is period of human existence that should ideally be characterised by safety, happiness, lack of care and security. However, there is also increasing attention to the fact that for many children, childhood is not a particularly happy period. Local and global media is saturated with stories of lost and stolen childhoods, of suffering children who have ‘lost’ their childhood. According to these stories the world is no longer a safe place for children. Many of us look back on our own childhoods and marvel at the freedom we enjoyed and pity the children of today whose every move is anxiously watched and monitored. Another theme running through these stories is that of adults who have contaminated and polluted the purity and innocence of childhood through their depravity, greed, cruelty and neglect. During a time when we are made more aware than never before of the value and innocence of children and childhood, it is ironic that the realities of children’s lives seem to be so far from that ideal state of innocence and happiness, that all children we are told have a right to experience. We are constantly reminded that children are the future, the hope. We are reminded of our responsibilities as adults to leave behind a world that is habitable for future generations. We (mostly women actually) are scolded for putting too much pressure on children, for hitting children, for neglecting children, for abusing them, for leaving children behind and seeking employment in the Middle East. Along with the innocence and purity of children is the implicit message that adults cannot be trusted to take care of children. What is more, adults who are closest to the children; mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, stepfathers and stepmothers are seen as especially villainous and are deemed to be utterly incapable and untrustworthy of taking care of children. The message that is driven home to us constantly is that children need to be protected from those who are closest to them, as the threat to children and childhood is from within the family and the community. The need for greater protection of children has resulted in a greater awareness of the need for expertise and the professionalisation of child care and child protection. Whether it be in the form of laws and regulations or whether it is in the from of formalising child care arrangements, the role of the professional in protecting and caring for children is becoming indispensable. The stages of childhood and child development are documented and observed; child nurturing practices are discussed widely in the media; books on techniques for making children behave better or be better achievers are usually best sellers. Parents are expected to have read the latest books be updated with the newest techniques of child rearing and be much better prepared for parenthood than I am sure most parents of our generation were. My mother has often told my bother, sister and I that she had no clue about raising children when my brother and sister were born. She claims that she was much better prepared by the time I arrived on the scene thanks to the famous Dr Benjamin Spock, I believe. However, if you listen to what my brother and sister have to say they would tell you that she did a much better job before reading Dr Spock! And for those of us who cannot afford to buy the books or don’t have access to the information there are an abundance of agencies ready to help. Whether they be children’s homes, children’s clubs, pre-schools, day care centres, or child friendly spaces, there are currently far more institutions dedicated to children today than in the past. However, has the contradiction between the mythic state of childhood innocence and happiness and the reality of the experiences of most children become any less as a result of this increased awareness, expertise and availability of institutions focussing on child care and child protection? For example have the lives of our children become better as a result of the increased number of people trained on the Child Rights Convention? Is our education system dealing better with children because of education reforms which focus on child centred teaching? Are children safer within families and in the communities because we have all been made more aware of child sexual abuse or due to the greater number of professionals and laws in place to protect children? Looking at what reports on children are telling us and also the perceptions among most people, it does not appear as if children are particularly safer or happier than they have been before. So then, how do we explain this contradiction between our greater sensitivity, awareness and understanding of the value and importance of children and childhood and their actual lived experiences? How do we understand this profound concern adults have with children alongside the vilification of adults as responsible for ruining childhood? It that we can divide the world into two groups of adults: those who protect childhood and those who violate childhood? The contradictions are blatant not just in the circumstances of children’s lives in an admittedly complex and scary world, but even in the process of celebrating and valuing children. The celebration of Children’s Day has become a common phenomenon in recent years. However, observing how Children’s Days are celebrated, one is struck by the extent to which children are invisible in the celebrations. Children are present certainly, but one wonders if it is children we celebrate or adult perceptions and constructions of children and childhood. Many of you must be familiar with scenes of scores of children packed uncomfortably into halls or wilting in the sun made to listen to adult after adult talk about the value of children; children being exhibited for the entertainment of adults; children being forced to compete against each other; successful children being selected and felicitated by adults. Usually the children who are subject to such celebrations are dressed in uncomfortable clothes and are being constantly reminded to be on their best behaviour. All this is set against the discourse of the importance of listening to children, the importance of play in children’s lives, the need for not putting pressure on children to succeed and compete with each other. Its almost as if Children’s Day is a day when adults indulge themselves in a celebration of a mythical idea of children and childhood using children as props. I am sure many of you are aware that recently the Grade 5 scholarship examination results were released. If you paid attention to this, you would have noticed that many of the newspapers featured the children who did exceptionally well at the examinations. Television programmes interviewed them, on Children’s Day they were felicitated in their districts. I happened to observe one such felicitation ceremony where the Chief Guest (naturally an important adult) after holding forth at length on the damage to children’s lives due to the rat race for education, scolding parents for ruining childhood by forcing them to go for tuition classes, lamenting the loss of play and freedom in children’s lives, citing the Grade 5 examination as a prime example by which parents ruin the lives of children ended his talk by proclaiming the child being felicitated as a role model for other children and the pride of not just the child’s family but of the entire district and school. He went on to tell the other children in the audience that it was their duty and responsibility also to do as well as this child. The jostle among the adults on the stage to take a photograph with the child after he was presented with an award was a sight to behold. Another characteristic of the modern discourse on children that I would like to explore is the fact that while it constantly highlights the risks to children, there is also the prevailing idea of children also posing a risk to others, children and adults. Children out of control, children who have escaped adult supervision are seen as threats or the primary causes for escalating social problems. Thus, for example, children living on the streets, child soldiers, children who work, or even children who dress in a particular fashion are seen as problematic. In

Brazil, children living on the streets were killed by the authorities; the killing of child soldiers in the course of war is not seen as an affront to the innocence of childhood. Sometimes, children dressed in particular ways, in the current fashion of low slung jeans, baseball caps backwards on their heads, noisily hanging out together on the streets or in buses are often viewed by adults as potential troublemakers. Thus children while being lovable, cute, innocent and playful are also seen to have the potential for great evil unless kept within check. Whereas previously, non compliant children would be seen to be ‘going through a phase’ or ‘juvenile delinquents’ in need of rehabilitation, there is a growing anger and fear of these children who are seen as primary causes for escalating social problems. Also, children who are viewed as ‘victims’ by the child protection system are not necessarily treated with a great deal of sensitivity and care either. While the moral outrage and anger that is expressed when a case of child abuse is exposed for example, is certainly loud and powerful, the system’s response to the child in the particular situation is often as severe as the abuse itself. At each step, the child is often subject to a feeling that having ‘lost’ the ‘innocence’ of childhood, he or she cannot and indeed should not recover the state of grace they were in before. Children are usually incarcerated in atrocious conditions while adults who perpetrated the crimes against the children walk free. Once a case of child abuse or neglect is reported, the outrage and horror of the incident takes precedence over ensuring the wellbeing of the child. Whether this is to do with some sort of anger towards these children who are seen in some way to have erred, is something that needs to be explored. The work I plan to do for my research is trying to understand or explain these contradictions. I also to try and understand what these contradictions can tell us, not about children so much as about the adults within the system. Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes has suggested that the value that adults place on children is shaped very much by context. She argues that in affluent societies for instance, parents tend to focus on the qualities of children that testify to the superiority, value or status of the family. Thus, for middle class parents as well as parents who think of their children’s success in terms of their own social mobility and status, the children’s intelligence, physical beauty, social skills, and talents are considered important. She goes on to say that the instrumental value of children, for example, the economic value of children for poor families, is replaced by their expressive value; and that the psychological worth of children for their parents, as a symbol of their success has increased enormously with demographic changes such as families have fewer children, or the need for children to contribute to the family economy lessening. Applying this argument to the Sri Lankan context poses interesting questions.

Sri Lanka although considered a developing country and apparently experiencing economic growth and a reduction in poverty, also has one of the widest gaps between the rich and the poor, according to a recent Asian Development Bank report. What are the values that define children and childhood in such a context? What happens when the values and context of one section of the community is taken to be the norm and the standards are set accordingly? What happens when one group has the power to impose their values and standards on the other? What happens when the group that is less powerful does not have the means to reach the values and standards that have been set as the norm? What happens when the inability to maintain these norms are seen as an intrinsic lack of quality and capacity within that group? What means are then used to impose these norms? I would like to also examine these questions within the context of the shifting trends in development discourse and practice. One of the most significant shifts within development discourse took place in the late 1970s, and early 1980s in

Sri Lanka. This was the shift from the welfare state to targeted welfare policies. This targeted notion of welfare was in keeping with the liberal notion of empowerment, which focussed on individual capacities of the poor to get out of poverty and vulnerability. This resulted in an emphasis of interventions on vulnerability and self help, focussing on changing the conduct of populations. Thus, the behaviour and conduct of not just populations, but also states are assessed and programmes are designed to change their conduct. These programmes range from entrepreneurship training to conflict resolution training to child rights training or in the case of states, pressure to ‘reform’ their economic and governance systems. What this has meant is that since the behaviour, attitudes and social practices of populations have become areas of interventions, intimate and everyday areas of people’s lives are becoming legitimate areas for intervention, either by the state or by non state development agencies. These interventions also entail identifying the ‘vulnerable’ based on different criteria and of course children feature very much in this identification of vulnerability. This emphasis on vulnerability and self help through changing behaviour, attitudes and practices took place within the context of dealing with the impact of neo-liberal economic policies especially on the poor. In some ways it could be argued that instead of the conditions that kept people in poverty being challenged, the poor were being told that changing their behaviour and attitudes would get them out of poverty. In the same way, contemporary thinking on children would have us think that the gap between the ideal state of childhood and the realities of children’s lives is to do with an inherent lack of quality or capacity among the adults around them. Thus, Vanessa Pupavac, in an article very critical of current development interventions, argues that this focus on children as a means of social change is linked to pathologisation of adulthood and the professionalisation of intimacy. The language of development is a means through which modern problems and its related solutions are constructed and represented. Experts can identify a number of problems and design the solutions for them. It is important that we understand the various factors at both global and local levels that influence what aspects of contemporary life are problematised and which solutions are seen as appropriate. The current global interest in children parallels a shift in development discourse from welfare to a rights based approach. The Child Right Convention has become the central principle in the organising of child focussed interventions. While the CRC has been criticised for universalising Western notions of children and childhood, it also represents a shift in the type of interventions being implemented for children. For instance, it has been argued that there is now a greater emphasis on interventions focussing on individual vulnerabilities requiring professional intervention while de-valuing the social, political, cultural and economic circumstances within which children live. Thus for example, the problem is not the fact that state investment in education in

Sri Lanka is shrinking. The fact that over 500 rural schools were closed down forcing many children to travel long distances in areas with poor transport facilities was rationalised as making the education system more efficient. Instead, the problem is located in the inability of school curriculum to keep pace with the demands of the labour market or the lack of teachers skills in child focussed teaching. The focus is on including conflict resolution skills for children, self esteem development within the school curriculum. The fact that children in some rural areas continue to walk many miles to school, that they often come to school hungry, is ignored. Or that in many rural schools, text books are a luxury, and that even basic facilities such as desks, chairs and sanitation facilities are missing. I wonder how many of you saw a news item on television recently, where children could not go to school because the rickety old bridge they crossed to get to school had collapsed. The bridge was a death trap to begin with, but the fact that this particular community was bemoaning the loss of even that was a sad indication of what these people had to put up with on an everyday basis. Teachers are sent on child rights training, never mind the fact that they don’t have the equipment to teach or that the number of children in each class room is increasing. The contradiction between the norms set by the CRC, the self esteem training, the conflict resolution modules and the everyday struggles of people seem to get lost somewhere in the jargon of development discourse. Thus, while development strategies are allowing different areas of life to be subject to ‘expert’ intervention, the ways in which local structures are shaping the conditions under which people live their everyday lives are neglected. The focus on individual vulnerability, behaviour and attitudes of people often down plays the significance of the material conditions within which people’s vulnerability, behaviour and attitudes are shaped. And this brings me back to Nest and its influence on my work. Nest***** has always been suspicious of grand theories and sweeping statements about people’s lives. Jeanne Maracek, Vice Patron of Nest****, once said that Nest’s work is about immersion in all the messy, piecemeal, emergencies and exigencies of life. That the community work is not about grand schemes or sweeping visions of community upliftment. That it is about the continual, quotidian, slogging through the everyday. But what Jeanne, did not say that day is that this does not mean that Nest does not hold on to a grand vision of the kind of world it would like to see. But that the important thing is not to forget the continual, quotidian, slogging through the everyday in the pursuit of the grand vision. It is this lesson that I learnt and continue to learn at Nest to this day. Before I end I would like to thank Dileepa Witharana for helping me with the slides for this talk today. Thank you very much for your patience and kind attention. NB. **Sally Hulugalle is Board Director and Founder of Nest.*** Harini Amarasuriya began work with Nest in 1994**** Professor Jeanne Maracek is Head of Department of Psychology,

Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, USA, and has visited

Sri Lanka every year for the past 22 years.***** website: www.nestsrilanka.com****** Harini Amarasuriya is Sri Lankan. Formal education at Bishop’s College,

Colombo 7. First degree at

University of Delhi, India. Masters at

Macquarie,

Sydney, Australia. Reading for her PhD at

Edinburgh University, Scotland.

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Guardians of Childhood

June 9th, 2008

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