Spontaneous and deeply demanding of intuition: such is childcare.
This collection of essays from various activists, offers experiences and advice about the ‘gendered and low value’ work that is childcare in social change movements. And, while not quite as inspiring as it promises, it nonetheless raises interesting and often uncomfortable questions about this hyper-political topic. Read selectively though, and skip the rants loaded with unhelpful neologisms (edukkkated,…
First act
7:45 at a school in Germany. A group of pupils stand outside the door of a school building. One of them needs to get into the building urgently: He needs to use the toilet.
Just then, two trainers from the Trainingskollektiv Kölner (Cologne Training Collective ) approach the door, which is being guarded by a caretaker. Over the next two days they will carry out de-escalation training with a fifth form class. The two trainers reach the entrance hall of the school after…
“He had a pair of pliers in his hand. He kept asking where the mobile [phone] was. I told him I had not seen it... He got hold of my thumb and placed it between the pliers. He pressed it hard and crushed my thumb. I do not remember what happened next.” This description would be horrifying no matter who the victim was. What makes it particularly shocking is that these are the words of a nine-year-old boy tortured by police in Bangladesh. It is not an unusual case— in more than half…
PN: Denis, in your 1998 resignation speech at Harvard you made some very unequivocal statements about the impact of sanctions on children in Iraq. Do you feel that these widely reported statements, with their emphasis on children, have constructed the agenda for anti-sanctions campaigners and activists worldwide?
Denis: I think my resignation and departure—endorsed 18 months later by Hans von Sponeck—has certainly opened up the dialogue, and has made it easier for other…
The stark images of child soldiers in armed conflicts today are shocking: sometimes under 10, dressed in uniforms too large or sportsgear that belongs in a park, armed with high powered weapons that are often bigger than themselves.
Many of these children are often forcibly recruited at gunpoint, but often it is poverty, propaganda and alienation that drives them into armies, paramilitaries and militias. Many join armed groups because of their own experience of abuse at the hands of…
Sitting under the scant shade of a tree, a small huddle of boys started to talk about their life. I want to be the boss of a garage, said Xavier, a small boy; they all did.
This hope is what keeps them coming back, day after day, year after year. No they were not paid, as apprentices; food at lunchtime is all they receive. I watch them learning their trade in the blazing sun: Xavier and Bernard watch intently while the mechanic welds the car chassis, no more than a foot away from…
Valparaiso sits staring at the Pacific Ocean, its multicolour houses hanging from its 37 hills, indifferent to the rain and wind that sweep through the city's narrow, winding streets.
In Chile's oldest port, you are never too far away from the sea or the sky, and you are far too close to poverty. Since its leading industries abandoned the city for Santiago, its fortunes have slipped and it has become capital of the one of the country's poorest regions. One group of residents has…
In France, the strong ties that bind the national education system and the army are as old as compulsory schooling itself. Both institutions served in the building of the nation.
Schools served as one of the coloniser's main means of acculturation, enrolling pupils in 1914 to send out letters to the front or to organise fund-raising fairs which helped to maintain hatred and the warlike frenzy of the time. The Second World War saw the Marshal Petain1 children trained to sing…
When a student takes a gun to school and goes on a shooting rampage—as one 15-year-old is charged with doing in a community near me in California— the public immediately expresses its shock and confusion over how such a thing could ever occur.
Educators, politicians, and the mental health professionals who are called upon to deal with tragedies of this sort all struggle to come up with a plausible explanation. Usually, their attention focuses on narrow, individualistic conditions…
For more than 20 years, Colombia has been caught up in a brutal conflict between political opponents. On the left, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and other groups have conducted guerilla warfare against the government since the mid-1960s. Unlike other insurgents in the region who were dependent on support from the Soviet bloc, the Colombian “revolution” has been self-financed through kidnapping for ransom, extortion, and by “taxing” coca producers and cocaine exporters.…
Is it just another perverse display of the self-destructive “human condition” or are there structural requirements which demand “power-over” children and which can—in theory at least—be dismantled? This issue of Peace News takes a look at the experience of children in relation to war and peace. Not just a catalogue of trauma and misery—child soldiers, child labourers, child victims—but also a presentation of children as survivors, as (small) people who are constructing peace in their own…
