10-4 Children: The Battleground of Change

Vietnamese Amerasians: Identification and Identity

During our first week at the Philippine Refugee Processing Center (PRPC) we walked to one of the camp's markets early every morning and had waved to a young adolescent Amerasian (age 14) on the way. On the third morning, instead of simply waving she raised her hand quite high and yelled out, "I'm American, I'm American too." Her exclamation, along with the often-posed first question to us: "Are…

Urban American Indian Preschool

During the past 15 years, American Indians in the San Francisco Bay Area have established and maintained an early childhood education school to meet the community's special needs. The results have been significant and far-reaching. A setting has been created that reinforces a strong and positive sense of self-identity for Indian children, while developing social and academic skills. The extended…

Uprooted Mayan Children

I: Chiapas We wound our way down the dirt path, past the rough-shod huts, scrawny dogs and heaps of trash that make up this small barrio on the outskirts of San Cristobal de la Cases in Chiapas, Mexico. My companion on this particular day was Apolinar, a nine-year-old Kanjobal Indian from Guatemala, whose home this had been for the last four years. He had already finished his lessons in a Mexican…

Tribal Children: the Superexploited

The world's tens of millions of working children are found in most sorts of societies, on every continent. They are employed primarily because they are children. This makes them an obedient, pliable workforce without even the rudimentary rights that exploited adults have. They are also employed because of their parents' absolute poverty and the vulnerability that breeds. All children who work…

Shuar Children: Bilingual-Bicultural Education

While the morning mist still hovers above the streams and rivers of the jungle east of Ecuador's Sierra de Cutucu, Shuar Indian adults head off to tend their gardens and pastures. Meanwhile, their children walk to a small building in the center of a recently nucleated settlement. It's new school, the settlements first in fact. Their parents built it. Many schools in Latin America are constructed…

Robert Coles: The Political Life of Children

Robert Coles, child psychiatrist, educator and writer, best known for his series Children in Crises, has recently written two books on the moral and political life of children. Coles began work on The Political Life of Children in the 1960s, when he began to question his past indifference toward matters explicitly political in his conversations with children. He refers to a discussion with Dr.…

Re-education and Relocation in Guatemala

Saraxoch Last year, the road crew working about a mile outside Saraxoch told us the inhabitants there were guerrillas; that the army kept them under tight control because, fooled into taking up arms, they had killed a lot of people; who knew how many? they added. The civil patrol stationed at the entrance to the village would not let us past the pole hung across the road to block the entrance,…

ORT: The Need for Education and Participation

Considering that Mozambique had one of the worst health situations in Africa at the time of liberation, there is no question that an enormous amount has been accomplished, and that a great potential exists for accomplishing even more. The level and quality of services I observed in the health centers was outstanding. Of note were the competence and high quality of work of the técnicos and agentes…

Oral Rehydration Therapy: Hope for Millions of Children

There is now an incredibly cheap, simple, safe and effective method by which parents themselves, however poor, can protect the lives and growth of their children against one of the most common causes of child malnutrition and child death in the modern world UNICEF, State of the World's Children, 1986. Of the world's 1.6 billion children under the age of 15, 21 percent live in poverty in…

NATO's Invasion: Air Combat Training and its Impact on the Innu

I discover immediately that the CBS "Journal" team has already spent a considerable amount of time in Goose Bay talking with frontiersmen - local business leaders, government and military personnel. I'm sitting on an upturned lard pail in the community of Sheshatshit, Labrador, behind the house of Innu hunter Sebastian Penunsi, and fielding all kinds of tricky questions from the Journal team. "…

India: Development Process & Indigenous Children

Indigenous people all over the world have for centuries through the present seen their lands taken away from them, their humanhood robbed and their culture destroyed and deprecated. Being people bred in solitude and natural surroundings, with spontaneous and intuitive responses they have developed their family systems based on their own genius, innate skills and requirements. The child is an…

Iban Youth: Rock & Roll in the Longhouse

We had heard the Iban of Sarawak were a friendly people - that they opened their homes to anyone with an interest in their culture - but we were hardly prepared for a reception like this. The river "express" had just pulled away from Kapit's public dock when we were accosted by a group of happy youths. "Where you going, man?" asked one. "Not what I had expected of an Iban teenager, he wore…

Hmong Children: A Changing World in Ban Vinai

"Camp culture" has become a familiar term to foreigners working with children in the refugee camps of Southeast Asia It refers to that particular blend of influences both modern and old world, local and global - global that plays such a dominant role in the children's lives. A generation has come of age in refugee camps in Southeast Asia since the end of the Indochina War. At Ban Vinai Camp in…

Guatemalan Refugee Children: Conditions in Chiapas

Since 1980, it is estimated that 150,000 refugees, most of them Indian, have fled Guatemala to the relative safety of Mexico. Officially, Mexico has had an open policy toward the refugees, but the reality is that Mexico has only recognized 46,000 Guatemalans as "official" refugees, and currently carries out a policy of turning away new arrivals. In the official camps, most refugees say they fled…

Effects of Urbanization on Children's Behavior

In our research on children we have found that settings influence children's behavior. There are three relevant aspects of a setting: the space and contents of the space, as in the set of a play; the cast of characters who are present on the set; and the activities which occur on the set involving the cast of characters. In the six populations we have studied, which include children in Okinawa,…

Cultural Survival Projects - 1986

Since 1982, 60 percent of Cultural Survival's limited funds have supported field projects. Several new projects have been added to the program during this year; others have finished their funding cycle with Cultural Survival. Following a brief description of Cultural Survival's project philosophy and project selection process, we provide extensive description of a few representative Cultural…

Chile: The Loss of Childhood

It is as though I had no childhood. I look for it, but I can't find it. Repression has repercussions far beyond its immediate victims. The files of PIDEE - Protection of Youth Damaged by State of Emergency, an organization founded in 1979 and dedicated to healing childhoods shattered by political repression in Chile -give evidence of this. These files are about children and youths scarred by…

Children: The Battleground of Change

What does the child's mind make of the world? Each society has its own special concept of what it means to be a person and its particular way of embedding that sense in its young. By direct and subtle means, children are informed of what and whom they may become, admire, hate and fear. At least initially, the social and political consciousness of the adult world becomes mirrored in the mind of…

Children's Rights in International Law

In not so distant times many national legal systems classified children along with married women and lunatics as being legally incompetent and thus not entitled to exercise a wide range of rights on their own behalf. Worse still was the fact that, whereas married women and lunatics were considered to be entitled to special measures of protection, children were not. Instead, the earliest…

Children and War

Throughout this century, there have been many attempts to give substance and effective existence to the rights of children in armed conflicts. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The Geneva Convention of 1949 and the added Protocols of 1977, the special Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Emergencies and Armed Conflicts adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1974,…

Child Soldiers of Uganda: What Does the Future Hold?

Uganda gained independence in 1962 under peaceful circumstances. Trouble started in 1966 when Milton Obote, in an attempt to consolidate his power, ordered his army to depose the King of Buganda, and made changes in the constitution. In 1971 Idi Amin, Commander of the Army, seized power in a military coup and ushered in a reign of terror and bloodshed which lasted until 1979 when the Tanzanian…

Adolescent Sexual Training and Behavior

Every society has cultural rules and customary strategies whose intent is to ensure reproductive continuity from generation to generation. Viable methods of infant care, child rearing and mate selection during adolescence are necessary for such continuity. A cross-cultural study of the strategies that have been used over the course of human history to prepare boys and girls for marriage and…