Hello. In this segment we're going to focus on a special population of young people in conflict, children who are engaged in ethno-poltical conflicts often as volunteers because they want to be involved. And there have been some very important studies done, of young people who engage in these kinds of conflicts, from regions of the world like Northern Ireland, which has a long history of ethnic and political conflict between Catholic and Protestant groups. In the Middle East where again there's a long history of conflict between ethnic and politically oriented countries and youth and when we look at these literature's we will see that a number of them approach the questions of youth engagement from a socio-ecological perspective. They view an individual youth they measure their behavior for example, they have maybe symptoms of trauma or aggression. But they are considering that young person in the context of other systems. Their family, their peer group because there are often groups of children who get involved in these kinds of conflicts. Their schools and their neighborhoods, those are called micro systems. Those are the systems that children interact with directly. Children are part of a school classroom, for example. They're part of a peer group. Then, the, they consider the large macro system. The society, the political policy, and in this literature they're particularly interested in the level of political violence, in the whole region, at a macro level and how that violence spills over and affects the micro systems that young people live in and then the behavior and attitudes of the young person himself or herself. Their also interested in structural inequality which often gives rise to these kinds of conflicts, where. There are great differences in the distribution of power and wealth in a particular region. One of the researchers whose done important work on this them in recent years is Cummings and his many colleagues who have collaborated in Northern Ireland, and they have done a six wave longitudinal study. That's enabled them, is enabling to examine some very important questions and trajectories in these young people who who are engaged in or have been engaged in this kind of conflict. Just a sample of their finding are listed here sectarian violence in Northern Ireland was affected or related to child problems in their research. They found that the exposure to this kind of sectarian violence appeared to have effects on young people that were mediated in part by the sense of security that the young person felt in their community or family. At the same time, they observed in their research that many of the young people are doing well despite the fact that they experienced in the past this, this kind of secratarian violence and they found that the kind of qualities that make a difference in predicting how young people will do include their relationships with their mothers which is a protective factor. And also the social identity of both the young person and the family within the context of their community. Another important recent, research project on this theme that also uses a socioecological perspective has been done by Boxer and colleagues and they, this is a study from the Middle East. It's a longitudinal study where they're looking at change over time and they've measured, at three different levels. They measure at the macro level, the level of political violence, they measure at the micro system level, the, what's going on in family or community, and they also measure the aggression, for example, of the individual youth. And they studied different populations affected by the conflict in the Middle East, as you can see here Palestinian youth, Israeli Jews, and Israeli Arabs. And what they have found in this project that's quite striking is that they found that high levels of political violence exposure appear to spill over from the macro level into how well families and communities are functioning. And that, in turn, cascades to the behaviour of the individual youth and what you see, controlling for everything else, is an increase in youth violence, as, and aggression, associated with this kind of cascading. Effect of living in a world where violence is happening at both the macro and micro level. Another important investigator in this area is Brian Barber, and I would recommend that you visit online his Center for the Study of Youth and Political Conflict. He has which is located at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in the US, but his research has been focused in this regard on the Middle East and he's done research on youth in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for some time. And in that conflict, young people are often voluntarily engaged and what he has observed is that some of these young people gain a sense of identity and a sense of empowerment from doing something. In contrast to feeling like their lives are out of control, these young people, by joining into the conflict, feel that they're helping out with the situation and he has pointed out that the meaning of their roles, to these young people. The meaning of what they're doing by engaging in these conflicts is extremely important for whether that engagement has positive or negative effects on the young people. Of course it can be very dangerous to engage in these conflicts but, on the inside some of the young fe, people report a better sense of well being because they have joined. Similar, similar results have been reported in other studies in the Middle East, in Gaza for example. This study of Palestinian children found something quite similar. They found that at low levels of exposure to this kind of political violence you saw a typical dose response gradient where you know, the more exposure there was to conflict the more problems the young people had. However as you got up to very very high levels of exposure, something different appeared to happen and all of a sudden young people started reporting more positive experiences and what this these authors suggest is that when you have extreme political violence exposure over a period of time. That this can inspire heroism and engagement in young people but again, it's still a very dangerous situation for those young people. This similar change has been observed in research on child soldiers and a classic piece of work by Neils Boothby on young boys who were caught up in the conflict in Mozambique I think provides a very good example of this. He did research on children who were usually coerced into joining Renamo, which is the Mozambique national resistance which was a conflict. And when he found that, if they were just there for a short period of time, less than six months, they viewed themselves as victims of this organization. However, as time went on, they were often rewarded for participation and gradually the young people started to view RENAMO differently. So he found that they started to change their perception and and and view themselves of this org, violent organization rather than victims and he quotes one of the young boys saying. Then he made me chief of a group of other boys I had power. This shows that similar kind of transformation where engagement can give young people a sense of power and authority. Eh, it's still dangerous, but it can help the young people feel more positive about life in a very, hopeless situation. So I think these findings are provocative for those of us interested in war and resilience because we have to understand how it is that, despite the danger, high exposure to war and conflict could be viewed in a positive light by some of the young people participating. The research in this area does, though, still point to resilience in most of these young people as the conflict ends and they're reintegrated into society. And its resilience is both common and it's also related to some very familiar protective factors that we've encountered in this class and will see again. It's connected to the quality of relationships and support they have, both from their families, the community and the other young people that they're interacting with. And it's also importantly related to the meaning and interpretation that the young people themselves have of what they've been through. There's another important question for research that we need to address before we end this class. So in the next segment, we're going to talk about pathways to peace we aren't doing to well so far with preventing war. But there's a growing interest in doing more intervention and education to promote a more peaceful world because of the devastating effects that war has on everyone but particularly on young people.
