Name: Oliver Eig
Social Justice Group: Child Soldiers
Date of Fieldwork: January 12, 2018
Name of Organization: United Nations
Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: Stephanie Tremblay – Communications / UN SRSG for Children and Armed Conflict, Fabienne Vinet – Communications Officer at the Office of the SRSG for Children in Armed Conflict
Type of Fieldwork: briefing
What I did:
We went to the United Nations headquarters and attended a briefing about our topic set up by Fabienne Vinet, and lead by Stephanie Tremblay. Alongside a group of Floridan college students and their chatty professor, we learned about what the UN is doing about the issue through Q/A’s, videos, and lectures.
What I learned:
I learned so many things that day that it is hard to recall off of the top of my head. One of the more notable things is how they stressed that reintegration is an extremely prevalent issue. They talked about how child soldiers deal with PTSD just like US army veterans, how physical injuries caused by the time in action affected them in their lives going forward, etc. They said how if we don’t help the child soldiers while they are young than they will not grow up to be productive members of society. We also learned that Kony’s group now exists in the African Republic Of The Congo, and a little bit in South Sudan. We learned about their action plan/campaign, Children Not Soldiers, which consists of six ways to end recruitment of child soldiers. They went over these in detail. They consist of Issuing military command orders prohibiting the recruitment and use of children, releasing all children identified in the ranks of security forces, ensuring children’s reintegration into civilian life, criminalizing the recruitment and use of children, and integrating age-verification mechanisms in recruitment procedures. We learned that people think of the issue of Child Soldiers as done with, and solved, when that really is not the truth.
What I learned about Social Justice “work” and/or Civil and Human rights “work” from this fieldwork:
I learned that while doing social justice activism work it is important to have your issue be broad, but have detailed information in your campaign. For example, the issue being Children Not Soldiers, and the level of detail put into their simple list that consists of their action plan. how I learned that it is important to advertise your campaign in order to raise awareness, and that with a lot of social justice issue, the hard part is raising awareness that this is a problem, and that the easy part is actually the process of helping the victims of the issue. For example raising money for better humanitarian aid for children in war prone areas of the world is harder and is, in a sense, more important than the actual process of giving the humanitarian aid to the people that need it.
