Name: Marlo Hulnick

Social Justice Group: Child Soldiers

Date of Fieldwork: January 12, 2018

Name of Organization: United Nations; UNICEF

Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: Ms. Fabienne Vinet, Communications Officer at Office of the SRSG for Children and Armed Conflict. Ms. Stephanie, Tremblay, Communications at the UN SRSG for Children and Armed Conflict

Type of Fieldwork: Briefing about our topic.

What I did:

We went to the UN Headquarters where we met Ms. Vinet, who we had been talking to for weeks. Once there, she took us to a briefing that her colleague (Ms. Tremblay) was having for a group of 25 college students from Florida, which we were invited to. The briefing consisted of Ms. Tremblay teaching us about the UN’s continued effort of ending Children and Armed Conflict.

What I learned:

Ms. Tremblay showed us lots of material by the UN to teach us about the topic. She showed us recourses on the UN site and a video that the UN made. She gave us literature with stats about how many countries were complying with the UN and stats about how many soldiers had been released so far. Then she taught us about the UN campaign #ChildrenNotSoldiers. The campaign has something called the Six Grave Violations which is six rules that all armies have to follow. They are rules about violations involving kids in war.

What I learned about Social Justice “work” and/or Civil and Human rights “work” from this fieldwork:

Through this fieldwork I learned not only about the topic, but I learned lots of other things. I learned that it is not easy to get other governments to comply, and even if they comply, it is hard to get them to follow through with what they said. I also learned about that at the Global Citizen lecture. I also learned that for this topic the hardest part isn’t getting people to help, it’s raising awareness. Lots of people think that Child Soldiers are a thing of the past, but in reality it isn’t.