— Kate Fincke at 3 Quarks Daily. MR. NOBODY: HOW CHILDREN USE METAPHOR TO GET TO SLEEP, COPE, GRIEVE AND GROW
— Desmond Tutu at Project Syndicate. Vaccination’s Lifetime of Blessings
Why do armed groups recruit large numbers of children as fighters, often coercively?
…The answer lies in more attention to the strategic interaction between rebel leaders and recruits. We adapt theories of industrial organization to rebellious groups and show how, being less able fighters, children are attractive recruits if and only if they are easier to intimidate, indoctrinate, and misinform than adults. This ease of manipulation interacts with the costliness of war crimes to influence rebel leaders’ incentives to coerce children into war.
"—
Chris Blattman at his blog. What child soldiering tells us about trafficking, child labor, and enslavement
From a paper by Chris Blattman with Bernd Beber (Ungated working paper here).
A week or so ago I posted a link to an interview with writer Barry Lopez with Terry Gross at Fresh Air. Lopez discusses writing an article for Harper’s Magazine about hischildhood sexual abuse. Sometimes I have to kind of force myself to listen to or read about really bad stuff. So I was surprised that listening to the whole interview, about 40 minutes, was so engaging.
What impressed me so much was how Lopez had a perspective from his “child’s eye” view. It’s not that such trauma is easy to forget, but just growing up people change; so it’s really hard, for example, to “remember” what it was like before you learned to read or to add numbers. Somehow Lopez remembered, or developed an intellectual understanding of how he as a boy thought, and what he had to say deeply affected me.
I think everyone wants to protect not just our children, but children in general. It’s hard for me to read or listen to reports of child sexual abuse because it’s so upsetting. Reading research papers is just hard. But Barry Lopez’s story and Beber and Blattman’s paper together perform a sort of pincer maneuver on coercion of children. These reports are important because they help people and communities better understand how we can protect children.
—
Barry Lopez on Fresh Air. In ‘Sliver Of Sky,’ Barry Lopez Confronts Childhood Sexual Abuse
Snippet of the article by Lopez at Harper’s.
The whole interview is so insightful, but this point about children is so important in all sorts of contexts. It’s good to remember as adults that it’s often difficult to understand children. It’s good to talk with them, but even then the difference in understanding can be difficult.
Barry Lopez has wisdom about who we are as people. While the interview concerns a very hard subject, there are very powerful insights offered.
—
Tabitha Mwangi in The Nation. When beasts eye boys
Manning up for all the wrong reasons: When child sexual abuse is reported, the victim is almost always a girl. But, as a recent study found out, more and more boys are suffering in silence
— UNICEF. Violence, social and gender norms
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Meagan Cloherty at WTOP. Father creates video time capsule of daughter’s childhood (VIDEO)
Frans Hofmeester at Vimeo.
Via Sociological Images: THE “BABY PRODUCER
Play is the work of children ~Caroline Pratt
“Permission to dream. To be human is to dream,
to think beyond what exists today. To celebrateSteelcase’s 100th anniversary, we’re collecting dreams – insights into the coming century –to guide and speed us all to the achievements to come.”
This is a very nice video reminding how much we must learn from our children.
— Michael Chabon The Omega Glory (PDF). Originally published in Details Magazine, 2006. At The Long Now Foundation.
The most powerful grip a man will ever encounter.
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