Children Learning Peace and Violence: A view from Assam, India

Ever wondered how a child learn about peace and violence? A variety of social and cultural factors play an important role in influencing children to imbibe ideas about peace and violence, but the role of family and media are perhaps the most crucial in this regard. Information about violence that is discussed in the private space of home and the media that circulates stories about violence in the public domain have a lasting effect on children's mind. One cannot regulate what is discussed at home, but the media channels influencing children about violence can and should be regulated and made children friendly. The legal system can play an important role in this regard.

‘Children Learning Peace and Violence' is an ongoing international project initiated by Dr. Yasmin Saikia, Hardt-Nickachos Chair in Peace Studies at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, Arizona State University USA. The project has four sites of research - United States, India, Pakistan, and Palestine. My involvement in this research, along with another research assistant, was for two summers, 2010 and 2011. I was a LLB student at Delhi University then. My task was to explore how children become aware of violence and cultivate ideas of peace in Delhi and Assam in India. Since this is a vast area to cover and the topic is rather large in its scope, I narrowed the research project to investigate some of the socializing factors, such as familial environment, role of parents and peers, media, and school curriculum influencing children's knowledge about peace and violence. The research led us to suggest that protective measures of law can play an important role in creating healthy and secure environment for children.

Violence: where it happens?

Delhi, being the capital city of India, it is a diverse and multicultural space where children and children from different social, economic, cultural and religious backgrounds live side by side and are exposed to a plethora of violent experiences and are informed about violence through multiple sources. Delhi is not a 'safe place' for vulnerable communities, like women and children, and many legal bodies are involved in monitoring both actual violence and the way information is disseminated about violence. Particularly, there have been a variety of discussions on violence against children in social, familial and educational institutions leading to the enactment of some important Acts such as ‘Protection of Children against Sexual Offences Act 2012, and ‘Care and Protection of Children Act 2015'. The latter specifically addresses juvenile justice issues. Assam is another critical site for the study of violence and monitoring how peace ideas can be disseminated for protecting vulnerable communities of children. Professor Saikia being a native of Assam had a particular interest in locating her research in this state.

We conducted the initial research in Assam over a period of two summers June-July 2010 and June-July 2011 after receiving IRB (Internal Review Board) clearance from Arizona State University to work with living subjects. This report is based on our findings from Assam. We selected eight children between the age group of 10-11 years to conduct this study. Our aim was to understand how young children are conditioned, taught, and learn to accept and/or reject peace/violence. Additionally, we were interested to document if children view themselves as active participants or simply as spectators in events of peace and violence. Our main concern during this early stage of documentation was to ask: how can the children's world in Assam be made more peaceful? Can the protective measures of law impact in meaningful ways to limit the reach of media and biased education that promote violence? We suggest that further research is needed in the future to productively use the system of law to effect change.

Since our aim was to explore and understand how children are socialized into learning peace and violence, we initiated our research by focusing on children's lived experiences of personal and familial activities. During the summer of 2010, we collected a variety of children's books that are used in primary and middle school curriculum. As well, we read a variety of children's literature and prepared summaries on the themes of peace and violence. Next, we prepared a questionnaire for interviewing children.  

In summer 2011, we started on the ground research work adopting the method of participant-observation. This allowed us to gain familiarity with the children in their home environment. We quickly became aware that since the first lessons on peace and violence are imparted at home through parents, family and extended social networks, they have a lasting impact on children. We focused on how the ideas of violence and peace are imparted at home and how abstract ideas are actualized in everyday interactions. Reaching beyond the influence of parents, we also included the influence of media in impacting the home environment. We asked some basic questions: what kind of topics are discussed at home? How are difficult issues of violence addressed by parents? Are warning signs of violence taught to children? How are the media representations of violence addressed or avoided by parents in their conversation with children? In short, we tried to connect the private domain of the home with the external domain of violence represented in the media.

Breaking the Ice

Our subject group ranged between the age groups of 10-11 years and they were all school going children. Being a longitudinal study, we plan to continue working with the same group of children and create new cohorts over time to document their impressions and understanding about peace and violence, and also monitor the formation and transformation of their ideas through the course of several years.

Striking a good rapport with children was of paramount importance in undertaking the research. To break the ice, we prepared a simple objective type questionnaire and presented it to the children to encourage them to share with us some basic information, like – school name, best friend, favorite color, aim in life, etc. We maintained a folder for each child. We encouraged children to tell us what they think about peace and violence; how they have learned about these concepts; what makes them afraid about violence; what kind of changes they would like to see in their lived environment; and so on. We also involved parents to interview the children by seeking their written permission. The formal interviews with the children were tape-recorded.

There were some obstacles that we faced in conducting interviews. We found that when a parent was present in our discussion, he/she would frequently intervene and direct the child to answer in a particular manner. So some answers were actually conditioned by the parents and this was an inevitable part in the interviews. In one particular case, a child was overwhelmed by the interview process and we faced difficulty in continuing the interview. The presence of the parent, we understood, was the cause of her distress and a reason for her not being able to answer the questions we had asked her.

Since our focus was on relatively young children, between the age group of 10-11 years, they had no experience of being interviewed before. We therefore thought it was important to take the extra step and become involved with their families and their peer groups to put the children at ease. In some instances, the interview process became more social and we were invited to meals with the family. We were often invited to join the children and their parents for outings in the city. This helped us to familiarize ourselves with the children and close the gap between us. It also provided us with the opportunity to 'see' how parents and children interacted with each other. Further, we are able to appreciate the 'bigger' picture of children's understanding of violence and the possibility of peace as seen through their eyes.

The discussions and interviews in Assam were conducted in both English and Assamese. Children answered the questions related to their school, favorite subjects, co-curricular activities, best friend, favorite color, comics/books, magazines, TV shows, role model, and favorite hero without any hesitation and there was a great deal of consistency in their answers. Although these questions were not directly related to the issue of peace and violence, they helped us understand the environment that the children grew up in and the social life they were exposed to. We found that the question about the figure of the hero generated a wide variety of responses. Business men, Bill Gates and Lakshmi Mittal, Mahatma Gandhi, and actor Salman Khan emerged as heroes in children's responses. It appeared that children valued material success as a mark of worth. Mahatma Gandhi was favored as a hero because of his non-violent principles and 'as a deliverer of Indians' from British colonial rule.

Television watching is very popular among children and they favored the familiar genre of comedy and cartoon shows in their responses. Children's favorite hobbies were drawing, singing, and playing video games. In this segment, an important issue that emerged was the interest to play video games. They favored 'action based'' games. For example, violent shooting games and military tactics seemed to be very popular. This clearly indicated an early exposure to violence and normalizing violence as a sport for children, which, we believe, can have a negative outcome in the future. As students of law, we were compelled to ask can there be legal measures to restrict the sale and exposure to violent sporting video games?  Would such restrictions inhibit violence? How would these restrictions impinge on children's rights? We were not certain what the role of law can be and how far legal measures should be invoked to create an environment of peace for children through games, but we definitely see there is a need to address this issue.

The children seemed less inclined to the print media of newspapers, except for the pictures and comics that are published in the dailies. They loved to read comics and story books and contrary to their choice of video games, in their reading they preferred moral based stories or mystery fictions. For example, they were thrilled with the children's adventure series of the ‘Famous Five' and ‘Tinkle' comics. It appeared that the male children preferred the color blue, while the young girls preferred red. The children expressed the desire to become scientists, businessmen, singers, and doctors in the future. A small minority group also expressed the desire to become taxi drivers and detectives. The choice of becoming a detective was not unusual given that they are interested in crime based video games and read mystery novels and comics, but the choice of becoming a taxi driver greatly puzzled us. We later found out that this particular child loved travelling, so he thought that becoming a taxi driver would enable him to travel the world in a taxi.

In our informal conversations with the children, we were not expecting definitive responses regarding the concept of peace and violence. To them these concepts were ambiguous and unclear. Generally, the discussion of peace made them feel happy and they expressed a sense of well-being. Children referred to peace as shanti, an expression used in India to refer to peace. Violence was perceived as a negative thing. Though most of them were exposed to first-hand violence in school or in their neighborhood, they were opposed to the idea of violence. In a few cases, we found some deviance from this general response. There were situations in which some children approved violence; for example, beating up a person who was caught stealing. But they also punctuated this dire measure of punishment with a reminder that we need to find out why the person committed the theft. This dual approach was very intriguing. Children did not seem to have a concept of legal remedies to address this problem.

The children shared with us their paintings, drawings and poems in which they tried to depict what peace means and looks like to them. They expressed happiness in doing this exercise. They shared with us their drawing/coloring books and we observed that most of their drawing/sketches depicted peaceful sceneries of villages near mountains, rivers, animals, members of family, Independence Day celebrations, popular cartoon characters and action super-heroes. Poems based on general topics such as their pets, family outings to the zoo and science museum, and essays on best friends were common, which they enjoyed talking about even during our interviews. One child even sang his favorite song called 'Manuhe manuhor bawe' (human for humans/humanization) –a popular Assamese song composed by Dr. Bhupen Hazarika, which we recorded.         

Violence and the Immigrant issue in Assam

Assam has been known over centuries to be a relatively peaceful state. However, in the recent past Assam has been exposed to militant insurgency that has created an environment of violence; it is both routine and systemic. In consequence, children and adults in Assam have become exposed to incredible violence that seem to go on unabated and the clashes between the insurgents and counter-insurgency forces have brought violence to the doorsteps of people's homes. The children were fully aware of this problem, which was evident in their response. Although children expressed their dislike of the violent means adopted by the insurgents and they opposed it, they were also aware of the insecurity that is part of Assam's lived environment. They were particularly fearful of being out in public places with family or friends due to bomb blasts or shootouts and confrontation between the security forces, police, and the militants. Despite this lived insecurity, children expressed hope of living in a peaceful environment, someday.

Assam is also exposed to the issue of' illegal immigrants' from neighboring countries. The question of legal and illegal is a matter of law to debate and decide, but, in Assam, people have taken the law in their hands and have created a state of panic and extra-legal measures are adopted to solve the problem of 'illegal immigrants', through violence. The public is often violent toward suspected immigrants and treat them as dehumanized subjects. The immigrants are accused of being responsible for creating imbalance in the socio-economic equilibrium of the state. Children seemed aware of this problem when we discussed the issue with them. Few of them thought that the immigrants should be asked to leave without the use of violent means. The naive approach of children was refreshing, but it was also disconcerting that legal approaches are not under consideration for solving societal problems. The lack of a concerted legal approach for redressing the problem of immigration both for the receiving community in Assam and the migrants to Assam was of concern to us as students of Law. We realized that the cultivation of a legal approach to solve problems should be encouraged and developed for reaching long term peaceful solutions.

Leveling the playing ground

Our research made us deeply aware that peace and violence are two sides of the same coin; they cannot be understood in the absence of the other. For children, these two issues are intimately interwoven and they could not separate them, but spoke of peace as an absence of violence. Violence, however, was not the absence of peace. Violence seemed to be the more dominant concern because children understood that peace is impeded by violence, hence reducing violence is important to move toward peace, they suggested.

The research has definitely helped us to enter into a world of children and learn first-hand the factors that inform children about peace and violence. We were able to reflect on our own childhood and revisit the influences that have shaped our knowledge of peace and violence and how they impact us, as young adults. From this preliminary research, it became evident to us that the role of socializing factors – parents, education, lived environment, political conditions and media are primary forces that shape children's mind and enable the development of a conscientious and responsible individual. Hence it is very important that socially acceptable values and the feeling of empathy should be encouraged in school curriculum and at home. Media - whether print, visual or electronic, that are available to children, should be responsible for its content and ensure that suitable and amiable material are promoted.

Government should introduce legislations to monitor the content of media and electronic games that are available to children and should pay attention to their effects, while also educating parents about the long term impact on children's minds. Parents are the primary socializing agents and it boils down to their approach in responsibly nurturing their children. Additionally, it is important to investigate how Law and the legal practice can facilitate and provide additional support to parents to foster positive development of peace and impact healthy and wholesome childhood for their children.

Though this research was a challenging one it was a satisfying experience for us because it seemed like we were contributing to a larger project to think and imagine a peaceful society for children in India. Children are and will always be the building block of any society. We also become deeply aware of the lacuna in our society for protecting children from exposure to violence and also the lack of awareness in instilling in children the importance of legal measures for resolving disputes. The Eighty-sixth amendment act, 2002 has amended Article 21 of the constitution and inserted Article 21-A providing for right to education while dealing with compulsory and free education to all children of the age of six to fourteen year, development of childhood, non-discrimination in educational spheres, and prohibition of their employment in factories, mines and hazardous industries. There have been initiatives in the past for addressing the issues of redefining the functions of the Central Advisory Board of Education and for regulating and monitoring the curriculum provided by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) for making the educational system value-based. The Indian Legislature has introduced important legislations like the Protection of Children from Sexual offenses Act in 2012. Also, it has deliberated on child labour and welfare issues. These are important steps, but the Judiciary has not delved into exploring the need for providing or creating peaceful spaces and conditions for children to be able to enjoy and understand the importance of peace. This void must be legislated upon with due sincerity as children are the investment of society. We suggest a more robust and children friendly law in India to create a peaceful environment. We plan to continue this research in the following years with the same group of children to monitor their perceptions and the changes in their understanding of peace and violence as they grow older. As well, we will build new cohorts over the years to expand the research.