Name: Miles Friedman

Social Justice Group: Child Soldiers

Date of Fieldwork: February 21, 2018

Name of Organization: OPAC

Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: Hiba Qaraman, Senior Advocacy Advisor

Type of Fieldwork: Event

What I did:

We went to the OPAC Turns 18 Conference at the UN. OPAC is the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. They work with the UN, UNICEF, Child Soldiers International, and different governments to create action plans and mandate troops for peacekeeping sake from the UN security council. We observed panels where different experts in the field talked about action plans and next steps. It was a very interesting experience.

What I learned:

During this fieldwork, I learned tons of facts but almost none of them had follow up. Some statics I learned were, 375 million children live in countries with armed conflict. Since 2000 over 130,000 children have been released.10s of thousands of boys and girls are known to be in government forces. 200 children were used as suicide bombers in Nigeria last year, and most were girls. An estimated 10,000 child soldiers were used during their war in Sierra Leone. All these statics need to be changed except one. these numbers are way to big and they need to go down. Another big thing we learned about was the Paris Principles. The Paris Principles lies give guidelines for reintegration, 108 governments have signed on and the goal is to have every government to sign it.

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

I learned that you don’t always have to be on the filed to make a change. In this case, the people at the UN were making a change because they were convincing governments to make changes which results in things changing on the field. This is the trickle effect and it all started form one office.