4

Examples of Policy and Program Strategies for Reducing Violence and Promoting Citizenship Engagement and Peace

The workshop brought together examples across policy, research, and practice to demonstrate strategies and tools that have had measurable effectiveness in reducing violence and promoting peace. Examples highlighted at the workshop illustrate the range of actors necessary for transformation to occur. Mark Miller of the National Institutes of Health in the United States noted the breadth of research expertise necessary to understand the effects of violence on young children, which he characterized as spanning neuroscience, biology, and brain development; the clinical sciences of psychology, mental health, and the social sciences; communities, populations, and contextual factors; and finally implementation, which includes operational and logistics to scale programs to levels higher than single communities. Miller went on to note that despite central elements of research focused on data collection, with representative samples, good analytics and summaries over the short-, medium-, and long-term perspectives, arguably the most important function of research is in its dissemination, translation, and potential to catalyze change as data informs the decision-making process.

HRH Princess Sarah Zeid of Jordan, co-chair of Every Woman Every Child EveryWhere, introduced Every Woman Every Child (EWEC) as a global movement that aims to save the lives of millions of women, children, and adolescents around the world by targeting major health challenges through the provision of health services. EWEC EveryWhere is an unprecedented effort prioritizing the health and well-being of women and children in humanitarian and fragile settings. She argued that priority areas

will not become actionable until financial mechanisms change toward predictable long-term flexible funding that reaches the needs on the ground where different actors such as community organizers, women’s groups, and religion leaders are most adept at reaching individuals and families.

EXISTING POLICY STRATEGIES FOR CHILDREN IN CONFLICT

Salah spoke not only to the vulnerabilities of women and children during times of conflict but also to their power as agents of change and peace. Citing the growing body of evidence that is revealing the participation of women in peace making, peace building, and peace keeping, Salah stated women’s involvement has tangible effects on peace and security in societies, yet peace building discourse has traditionally not been inclusive of children, youth, and women (Leckman et al., 2014). Salah referred to the scientific evidence from multiple disciplines that continues to substantiate the link between early years and early life environment, including the notion that long-term violence prevention and behaviors are linked with peaceful communities. The intra- and interfamily and community relationships are powerful agents of change that can promote resilience, social cohesion, and peace, yet Salah questioned how to translate these voices into policies that empower women, youth, and children to assume their role as peace builders. She suggested that the agenda for sustainable development offers an opportunity for this transformative shift to occur in concert with the Security Council Resolution 1325. The latter is dedicated to the women, peace, and security agenda that provide what Salah deemed an impressive normative legal framework that integrates women’s equal participation in peace and reconciliation initiatives. The aforementioned is occurring alongside the escalating engagement of civil society buttressed by the rising voice of women and children requesting their own involvement in promoting resilience, social cohesion, and peace (United Nations Security Council, 2000). This civic participation begs how to translate the scientific evidence alongside efforts of the international community to prevent violence and sustain peace. More specifically, the question becomes how to translate the voices of real people into policies and programs (Coomaraswamy, 2015). Salah posed a series of questions (indicated in italicized text below) to speakers eliciting responses grounded in each of the speakers’ unique policy-based experiences.

To HRH Princess Sarah, Salah asked what role the provision of health services has in strengthening family and community cohesion, particularly in very fragile environments. HRH framed her response through a series of policy actions, the first of which is to prioritize the sexual and reproductive rights of women and girls, amid contexts when these rights remain contested, neglected, or rejected. Doing so not only meets the needs of

this vulnerable population, but also upholds their dignity and unleashes their power and potential to act as first responders, partners, and agents of change. HRH remarked that critical health services are necessary for mothers to remain healthy: hygiene products must be available for girls to remain in school; and for newborns to be healthy, mothers themselves cannot be children. Furthermore, HRH maintained that proper nutrition is necessary to support a woman in what should be her choice to conceive, and then in her carrying, delivering, and nursing her child.

Second, HRH advocated for counting everyone, everywhere, by providing birth certificates and identity cards, even in the most dire of circumstances where vulnerable populations are currently denied access to services because these people “do not exist.” Providing concrete examples, HRH referenced children conceived in violence due to rape, mothers who are children themselves, and children whose mothers are forced to flee without identity papers. She stated that these children should not be denied services. Doing so denies these children access to services that could prove valuable interventions for particularly vulnerable populations.

A third priority area that HRH emphasized was the emotional and mental well-being of mothers so they can advocate, love, and care for their children. While children are resilient and can still imagine peace after enduring adversity, a supported mother can have a profound and lasting effect not only on her child, but her family, community, and society.

HRH qualified these priority areas by reminding workshop participants that mental and physical stimulation, touch, love, kindness, and repeated messages about sharing, respect, responsibility, and consequences for actions and inactions are the bedrock of early childhood, guiding the hands of a child’s moral compass. Yet urgent needs compounded by constricted budgets disrupt the sequence for establishing this bedrock in children around the world. HRH suggested that many of the structural inequalities could be approached with better communication around a more cohesive message that encompasses the policy implications and leaves room for the voices of outrage when accountability is not upheld. HRH urged workshop participants to be honest with respect to humanitarian and fragile settings: if efforts are not going to reach those left further behind because of a lack of capacity to operate in the most appalling of conflicts and violence, then that reality needs to be apparent so others may fill in the gaps—and be unilaterally supported in their efforts. HRH stated that only in supporting individual efforts alongside the efforts of others will we be able to do more for more people and more effectively.

To His Excellency Selim El Sayegh, Former Minister of Social Affairs, Lebanon, Salah questioned how can governments, policy makers, academia, and

civil society be mobilized to harness the potential in women and children to be agents of change and peace in situations of conflict. His Excellency El Sayegh’s response was framed by illustrating obstacles to policy making, and then posing a series of alternatives to overcome the obstacles. In a failed state, remarked El Sayegh, it is important to move beyond the assumption that there is a policy despite ongoing obligations to the needs of children and women. Additionally, El Sayegh stated that diversity is a vehicle for conflict. He encouraged workshop participants to let go of linear thinking on where conflict ends and peace begins and instead to understand that conflict and stability coexist, particularly in the Middle East. He also argued for the role of peace builders to be inclusive and extend notions of peace beyond traditional boundaries. Lastly, El Sayegh questioned where and from whom the financial capacity will come to support transitions toward peace in a society. With no functioning government, a weak business environment, poor diplomatic relations, high levels of corruption, and inequitable distribution of resources, El Sayegh questioned how, amidst such circumstances children and families can be supported to build peace. To counter these obstacles, to teach peace, and to affect the collective memory of children growing up amidst these conditions, El Sayegh called for action in the following areas: generating statistical data to substantiate situations or interventions, allocating funds appropriately, countering the cyclical nature of extremism feeding extremism, and shaping culture during times of both peace and war (see Box 4-1). Doing so envelops the child, mother, family, and community in the holistic dialogue. El Sayegh warned that this process will not reinvent the world, but at the community level, rehabilitation and reaccreditation is possible if dialogue can be grounded in daily living practices where, in the Middle East, there is still a community-based culture that occurs in shared social spaces, to which children are central.

To Rabih El Chammay, Head of Mental Health, Ministry of Public Health, Lebanon, Salah requested that he reflect on the links between mental health and peace building. El Chammay did so by first reflecting on the internal struggles of those seeking inner peace that he came to understand through his own work and practice as a mental health clinician. He conjured that most of the conflicts one sees in the world are manifestations of conflicts within the individual self. Moving beyond the individual, El Chammay commented on the link between mental health and peace building at the policy level where he argued social justice should be the cornerstone for alignment between the two. El Chammay noted that violence and conflict are significant determinants of poor mental health, which bring about feelings of sorrow and grief—normal reactions to abnormal situations. He provided the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) definition of mental health as not the pure absence of a condition but rather a state of well-

being in which a person is able to cope with normal stress, to be productive, and to contribute to his or her community. El Chammay urged that this capacity to contribute can be easily linked to peace, but good mental health is especially challenged during times of conflict, which elicits feelings of sorrow and grief—completely normal reactions to an abnormal situation. What individuals need most during such times, according to El Chammay, is safety and reinforcement of the links with community, while basic needs are being met. Those that will inevitably develop PTSD and psychotic episodes will require health care systems, which he urged needs to be in place.

El Chammay suggested a sequencing of priorities for individuals during times of conflict, stating that emergency mental health care is typically left out of the provision of other basic needs such as shelter, protection, and education. El Chammay encouraged workshop participants to view

mental health interventions such as life skill education that is integrated into schools, as an intervention for peace building insofar as it contains elements of conflict resolution and other essential tools for peace building. Likewise, El Chammay argued that symbolic acts of recognition in many cases can be more effective than simply providing medication or therapy by itself. It is especially during times of emergencies when El Chammay reminded workshop participants that individuals need to have the mental clarity to make decisions to navigate the urgency and complexity of their situation, which can determine life and death for individuals and families. He argued that investments in maternal and child mental health during times of conflict would improve individual mental health outcomes in the present and would improve the psychosocial disposition of societies in the long term. Doing so El Chammay hoped would assuage a society’s propensity to attribute acts of violence to an individual’s mental disposition too quickly when describing drivers of conflict. In his experience as an internally displaced child in Lebanon himself, El Chammay concluded with what he deemed the critical ingredient in linkages between peace building and good mental health: hope—the most powerful manifestation of life and one of the most effective engines of change in society.

To Friedrich Affolter of UNICEF, Salah posed the question of what prompted the change in the UN to consider the role of social services as critical to contributing to peace building. Affolter responded by reflecting on the history of the UN’s approach to peace building—partly rooted in diplomacy and partly in interventions seeking to stabilize societies affected by conflict through security interventions, economic and government reform, support for free elections, and so on. Notwithstanding these important support interventions, the UN Secretary-General and the Peacebuilding Support Office have come to recognize that equitably and transparently leveraging social services in a way that meets community needs also contributes to peace, resilience, and social cohesion, and deserves consideration. In reference to the work of UNICEF, Affolter highlighted how UNICEF’s position as a UN agency delivering critical services (education, water, sanitation, hygiene, health, and nutrition) in fragile and postconflict contexts enables the agency to leverage services not only in order to meet basic needs but also to contribute to the conflict-sensitive transformation of relationships between individuals and groups. Affolter illustrated his point through an example of an intervention in Somalia, where school construction programs served as an opportunity to invite clans with histories of conflict to join hands in selecting and donating land and building a school that would serve children and employ teachers from both communities.

Affolter recognized that there are challenges for those working in the field of early childhood development when it comes to highlighting the potential linkage between early childhood development and peace

building. Notwithstanding the existing neurological evidence that illustrates the relevance of early learning and socioemotional enablement for brain development, peace builders seeking to stabilize fragile systems understandably question the immediate macropolitical relevance of such efforts.

Even so, Affolter argued that it is possible to provide examples where early childhood development interventions have contributed to peace building through the transformation of intergroup relationships. After the civil war in Ivory Coast, a kindergarten program open to children of diverse ethnic groups eventually prepared the grounds for mothers and eventually fathers from different ethnic backgrounds to restore conversation, dialogue, and communication, benefiting 17 multiethnic communities (65,000 citizens) with recent histories of violent conflict. Kindergarten services furthermore opened the possibility for mothers to make use of newly found free time by participating in mother club literacy programs as well as small business support initiatives, both social platforms that proved effective to share and to bond, and to overcome distrust that had burdened interethnic community lives for a prolonged period of time.

Affolter commented that the cascade effects could be seen in women becoming active members of the community, engaging in entrepreneurial undertakings, and eventually bringing their husbands (often members of political parties with ties to militant groups) along in this peace building trajectory. Elsewhere such as in Burundi or Uganda, host communities struggling to absorb incoming refugees and internally displaced persons benefited from investment support for school and early childhood development centers, as they facilitated the peaceful integration of children from host community and refugee groups, both experiencing considerable amounts of distress that could have sparked resentment and inter-community violence.

Affolter concluded that while peace building is multidimensional, requiring diplomacy and structural reforms, social services also do play a significant role. For example, schools and early childhood development centers provide social platforms for intergenerational and intergroup social programming. He also noted that they can recultivate trust and respect between government institutions and communities.

PROGRAMS TARGETING VIOLENCE AGAINST CHILDREN

Andrew Claypole, Senior Advisor, Office of the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General (SRSG) on Violence against Children, juxtaposed violence against young children and child rights. He began with a review of the global context for ending violence against children framed through the notion of freedom from violence as a funda-

mental human right that the international community has committed to safeguard through the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (see Box 4-2).

Yet despite international standards in place through the convention, Claypole stated that violence against children continues to persist, claiming as victims more than 1 billion children ages 2 to 17 years (Hillis et al., 2016). Eighty-four million girls are victims of emotional, physical, or sexual violence committed by their partners. Child trafficking continues to increase, with some regions of the world harboring in excess of 60 percent of identified victims, and children under the age of 15 are victims of 8 percent of all global homicides (UNODC, 2013). In addition to domestic and community violence, the Syrian conflict has created a substantial population of unaccompanied and separated children exposed to armed violence and susceptible to abuse and exploitation, which Claypole argued negatively affects their psychological, emotional, and physical development. Beyond the direct ramifications of such circumstances, violence prevention, response services, and productivity losses have been estimated to be as high as 8 percent of global gross domestic product, which includes productivity loss (Pereznieto et al., 2014).

The 2006 UN Study on the Violence against Children provided the first comprehensive depiction of children’s exposure to violence within the family, in schools, in care and justice institutions, in work settings, and amidst communities (Pinheiro, 2006). Claypole mentioned that the message the study communicated was that no violence is ever justifiable, and all violence can be prevented. To promote and monitor how effectively the UN study’s recommendations were being put into action, the UN General Assembly established the position of the SRSG. The UN study recommended that every country have a comprehensive legal framework banning all forms of violence against children in all settings, including the home. As a result, Claypole stated that 47 countries currently have comprehensive and explicit legal bans on all forms of violence against children, and more than 50 countries are moving toward that same goal. To monitor and report the impact of violence against children, he mentioned that the SRSG draws heavily on current scientific evidence as well as the knowledge and experience that exists around violence prevention. These initiatives are given impetus by the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including for the first time a specific target (16.2) under Goal 16, which calls for an end to all forms of violence against children and ending the abuse, neglect, and exploitation of children, that is mainstreamed across several other violence-related targets (see Box 4-3). Claypole concluded by stating the challenge ahead is to how to transform this compelling vision into a hard reality.

Harnessing the international energy channeled toward child rights and violence issues, the SRSG launched a new initiative in March 2016 to galvanize political will and mobilize widespread social support for children’s protection from violence. The High Time to End Violence against Children Initiative calls on governments, communities, civil society, the private sector, and individual citizens to commit to bringing an end to violence against children. The High Time Initiative works through partnerships to promote a culture of respect for children’s dignity and their rights, and mobilize efforts into tangible change.

Constanza Alarcón, Executive Director of the Foundation Alpína in Colombia, presented the situation in Colombia where armed conflict is the result of profound inequality and social exclusion. Affecting more than 7 million victims and claiming the lives of more than 1 million, the decades-long conflict in Colombia has negatively affected family, social, and cultural structures (Reportes, 2016). Alarcón noted that these effects on children took time for the government of Colombia to understand, given that the perception had been that children were not the directly impacted by conflict.

The conflict in Colombia not only resulted in the forced recruitment of children and adolescents, but also displacement of this same population that then experienced the disruption to provision and quality of

necessary services. Especially for children, displacement was among the primary consequences of this war, where those displaced moved particularly into urban zones, which Alarcón said resulted in significant violence in metropolitan areas. One of the main challenges with this demographic urban shift is the ongoing process by which families need to return to their rural homes, where employment opportunities and a way of life do not currently exist. Prior to the conflict, the Colombian government did not have a system to register children before they reached the age of 6. In the wake of the conflict, Colombia has now ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child and has generated specific legislation for victims of conflict. Doing so recognizes that children deserve rights and children are subject to contextual conditions that necessitate interventions. Yet Alarcón noted that it took time for the government of Colombia to recognize the impacts of conflict on children, with indicators including stress, depression, fear of public, and limited learning aptitude (Castañeda, 2015). Through this process, Alarcón noted that children have to be cared for in integrated ways that include addressing effects generated by the conflict.

Alarcón outlined a process by which the government of Colombia instituted a program to train and sensitize teachers to behaviors that were a consequence of the conflict. In addition to pedagogical, psychological, social, and emotional elements, a hallmark of this effort was to address relationships and interactions between adults and children. This included approaches toward healing that placed an emphasis on reconnecting relationships with families and friends. Working with teachers through the educational system, the first step was to sensitize the teachers to the behaviors of children that were manifestations of the conflict so these behaviors could be handled appropriately. Literature, art, and play were also used as vehicles to heal and overcome the effects of conflict. Teachers approach these manifestations of expressions alongside the families of the children, so all may understand the psychosocial trauma that may emerge, but also through healing processes to accept the presence of others. Because reconciliation is an important part of society in Colombia, Alarcón stated that community rituals, returning to places associated with home and community, and tempering painful memories are all fundamental to the implementation of the programs that seek to promote reconciliation.

Alarcón concluded by stating that these efforts for addressing early childhood development amidst the conditions fostered by structural violence in Colombia demonstrate how an integrated framework can be used to help children overcome their exposure to prolonged conflict.¹

PERSPECTIVES FROM THE GROUND

Prior to a systematic summary of breakout sessions, workshop participants came together using Poll Everywhere to offer candid responses on what individuals learned from the breakout sessions and what emerged that was a surprise during the breakout sessions (see Box 4-4).

This collaborative Poll Everywhere activity was followed by Ghassan Issa of the Arab Resource Collaborative moderating a panel where individual workshop participants reported out from three breakout sessions. Individual participants in the breakout sessions discussed three area of focus that may help ensure the needs of children, youth, women, and caregivers are appropriately accounted for during times of conflict (see Boxes 4-5, 4-6, and 4-7). To frame the need for action, Issa stated that emergencies are becoming chronic, yet in the current state it is becoming increasingly difficult to convince donors and governments that because of the complexity and longevity of conflict, interventions need to coincide with the pace of conflict in the region. Issa urged that thinking evolve to

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¹ On June 22, 2016, Colombia and Farc rebels signed a historic ceasefire to end what has been a 50-year conflict—one of the world’s most long-standing wars.

consider that children cannot wait for the conflicts to end. Strategies need to take into account the coexistence of chronic challenges facing children with their acute basic needs emerging from conflict.

Issa concluded by reminding workshop participants that children and families have the transformative power to promote peace and reduce violence. He went on to say that children and families can be agents of change and agents of peace rather than simply victims of violence. Issa maintained that this can be achieved by addressing the political and socioeconomical determinants of violence and conflict, and integrating parts of peace building into existing community activities.