Peace-building for Children in the Midst of War
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Development. Copyright © 2000 The Society for International Development. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (200003) 43:1; 46–52; 011887.
Children’s Rights in Conflict and Peace
Peace-building for Children in the Midst of War ILENE COHN1
ABSTRACT Ilene Cohn reviews the considerable effort by the international community to protect children in time of war. She argues that there continues to be a gap in child protection and service provision due to current emergency and development programming and funding methods. Cohn advocates a new approach to programming, budgeting and evaluation of child protection programmes and calls upon the international community to develop the capacity to fill the gaps in what is known about how best to protect children throughout armed conflicts and long into their aftermath. KEYWORDS child rights; education; health care; protection; vulnerability
The child protection gap In times of chronic emergency and protracted conflict, international programming agencies and donors often overlook the importance of ensuring continuous attention to central aspects of children’s lives such as education and health care, and the provision of adequate support for the caregivers essential to a child’s psychosocial and physical protection. Programme planning and budgeting at many important international organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) reflects an out-moded linear concept of armed conflicts in which violence is presumed to progress along a continuum from the outbreak of hostilities through to a peaceful resolution and transition to a postconflict period. Even agencies dedicated to intervening on behalf of children often fail to build long-term child protection measures into their emergency programming. Development-oriented agencies typically await indicators of stability before beginning to lay the groundwork for their more substantial endeavours. The increasingly irrelevant ‘relief-to-development’ programming model explains in part why innumerable children in places like Sri Lanka, Angola, Burundi, Sudan, and Colombia languish in the child protection gap.
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Cohn: Children in the Midst of War This ‘twilight zone’ between emergency and development planning and response is widely acknowledged but difficult to address. Even when innovative efforts are made to bridge the gap, there is very little institutional knowledge of what constitutes ‘best practice’ programming in any of these critical child protection domains. War’s impact on children Central to the new thinking about continuous, longer-term programming is an understanding of the changing nature of armed conflict and its impact on children. Throughout the second half of the 20th century armed conflicts have increasingly erupted within state boundaries but have had enormous regional and even global repercussions. An alarming and ever-increasing number of victims have been civilians,2 among whom children are disproportionately represented. Children increasingly
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