Name: Oliver Eig
Social Justice Group: Child Soldiers
Date of Fieldwork: February 14, 2018
Name of Organization: UNICEF
Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: Tasha Gill, Senior Advisor, Child Protection in Emergencies at UNICEF
Type of Fieldwork: Interview
What I did:
I went to the UNICEF headquarters in New York City, and interviewed Tasha Gill about her work with children affected by armed conflict.
What I learned:
We learned things about children in armed conflict through her hands on work in UNICEF. This is different than the UN’s information because UNICEF handles a lot of details, while the UN mainly focuses on the legal and political aspect of things. We learned things like, 25,000 children were abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, in North Uganda they have a ceremony that villages do to former child soldiers to cleanse them of what they did by stepping over an egg, Violent experiences affect different children in different ways, UNICEF gives psycho social support, and that an issue surrounding children in armed conflict that is often ignored is girls. Girls have a harder time reintegrating because if they are raped and have a child there is social pressure and stigma to keep it. In some societies it is also assumed that the child will have the mind of the bad father and the child and girl will be left out. We also learned more reasons why children would become soldiers. These include, family pressure, financial pressure, psychological manipulation, or they get kidnapped. She also talked a lot about how the child is always the victim, and not the criminal. The adults are the people held responsible.
What I learned about Social Justice “work” and/or Civil and Human rights “work” from this fieldwork:
Through this fieldwork I learned that (as mentioned before), UNICEF does smaller scale work than the UN, who focuses on the large scheme of things. I also learned that through one resource (Marie-Angie Vassallo), you can get two fieldworks (UNICEF and UN interviews) on the same day.
