Conscription of children in armed conflict—a form of child abuse. A study of 19 former child soldiers

Armed combat in childhood is a form of child abuse. It may lead to serious consequences, including post‐traumatic stress disorder. The inherent emotional abuse and acts or omissions by caregivers may cause behavioural, cognitive, emotional or mental disorder in the child. Nineteen former child soldiers were interviewed in a rehabilitation centre using a standard questionnaire. Reasons for recruitment included: volunteered (18), hatred of enemy (revenge) (5), virtue of being a freedom fighter (martyrdom) (9), as a means of supporting their family (economic) (3). One child was abducted, 7 joined for fear of the ‘enemy’ abducting them, and in 5 a family member was killed by ‘enemy’ or own group. The children were involved in manual labour (15), guard duty (15), front‐line fighting (7), bomb manufacture (5), setting sea/land mines (5) and radio and communication (2). Fifteen were trained in firearms and 14 in self‐destruction. Twelve children attempted to or did run away and 11 refused to obey orders or argued. This led to various punishments, including kitchen duty, beatings, imprisonment, blackmail or death threats. A majority of the children felt sad and emotionally upset when they remembered their mother and family. Children's involvement in war, whatever the ‘justifications’ may be, should always be considered as forced, as they cannot truly comprehend their action in war. The responsibility must be taken by the adult caregivers. The following definition of the abuse of children in armed conflict is proposed: ‘The involvement of dependent, developmentally immature children and adolescents in armed conflict they do not truly comprehend, to which they are unable to give informed consent, and which adversely affects the child's right to unhindered growth and identity as a child’. Firm international agreement on guidelines for the lower age limit of recruitment of children into armed forces is required. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The fourth age and the concept of a ‘social imaginary’: A theoretical excursus

This paper explores the idea of the ‘fourth age’ as a form of social imaginary. During the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, the cultural framing of old age and its modern institutionalisation within society began to lose some of its former chronological coherence. The ‘pre-modern’ distinction made between the status of ‘the elder’ and the state of ‘senility’ has re-emerged in the ‘late modern’ distinction between the ‘third’ and the ‘fourth’ age. The centuries-old distaste for and fear of old age as ‘senility’ has been compounded by the growing medicalization of later life, the emergence and expansion of competing narratives associated with the third age, and the progressive ‘densification’ of the disabilities within the older institutionalised population. The result can be seen as the emergence of a ‘late modern’ social imaginary deemed as the fourth age. This paper outlines the theoretical evolution of the concept of a social imaginary and demonstrates its relevance to aging studies and its applicability to the fourth age.     

Global standards for social work education and training

This paper explores the ways in which social workers can be helped to acquire the wider understanding of relevant legal frameworks which is currently necessary for child-centred practice, given the influence of an ecological perspective on such practice. It arises from the development of a module on child care social work and the community for the Post Qualifying Child Care Award by members of the Law and Social Work Departments at Brunel University. The authors believe that to reach beyond a tokenistic acknowledgement of the ecological perspective requires an understanding and experience of the complex layers which make up the widening and complex social worlds of the child. The paper explains how social workers were encouraged to appreciate both the ever-widening circles of potentially relevant law and the different roles through which law operates. It concludes that a deeper engagement with the legal implications of an ecological dimension to practice would make such practice more effective and would also help combat social exclusion and discrimination.     

Child Abuse on the Internet: Ending the Silence

The Melbourne Health (MH) Social Work Residential Care Team (RCT) was established in 2002 as a new and innovative approach to aged care. The service employs three full-time social workers and an Allied Health assistant with previous experience in aged care. The RCT works across the MH continuum of care with inpatients recommended for residential care. The service is predominantly patient- and family-focused, but is also consultative to meet the education needs of MH staff and the community. This paper discusses the MH Social Work Residential Care model, reviews data collected since RCT implementation and the benefits shown for patients, their families and interdisciplinary staff. This paper discusses pressures and factors that impinge on the ability to discharge patients to residential care and explores recommendations for ongoing clinical practice as well as recommendations that the RCT has submitted to management for further consideration.     

The problem of justification in social work

Abstract

In this paper we argue that the real test of professional social work practice is whether it can be plausibly, effectively and defensibly justified. Since the early 1950s social work in Australia has engaged in a strategy of professionalisation. This strategy and its implications were described by McDonald and Jones in 2000. This paper supports the concerns expressed. We argue that the way out of our profession's dilemma is by focusing on the problem of justification. The main questions addressed by McDonald and Jones appear to be: What is professional social work practice? Does the concept of professionalism serve us and our clients well now? What form should social work take in the future? Their answer is ‘that the “strategy of professionalisation”, as conventionally conceived by Australian social work, is no longer viable in the emerging milieu.’ We build on that answer by exploring the notion of justification in terms of the concepts Foundationalism, Coherentism and Reliabilism. We conclude by suggesting that the immediate task for social work in this new century is to solve the problem of justification.     

Atos Healthcare withdraws from the Work Capability Assessment: a comment

In March 2014 Atos Healthcare withdrew a year early from its contract to provide the UK’s health assessment – the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) – that is supposed to sort disabled people into administrative categories according to their adjudged capability to do paid work. This move was welcomed by political elites, with, for example, UK Coalition Government Minister for Disabled People Mike Penning using it to criticise previous Labour governments for the contractual arrangements they put in place – although while the Coalition may have been concerned with the contractual arrangements soon after being formed, it extended the contract for five years. For the UK disability movement, the withdrawal of Atos Healthcare early from the WCA contract was a victory and, at least in part, a consequence of disabled activists’ resistance to the Employment and Support Allowance generally, and the WCA in particular.     

Don't mention Stonehenge!

It rises massive and magnificent above Salisbury Plain. The extraordinary monoliths of Stonehenge leave us as impressed today as ever—and as baffled. Archaeologists argue about how it was made. Can statisticians tell the answer? Chris Jones thinks they can be of considerable assistance.     

Improved bridge constructs for stochastic differential equations

We consider the task of generating discrete-time realisations of a nonlinear multivariate diffusion process satisfying an Itô stochastic differential equation conditional on an observation taken at a fixed future time-point. Such realisations are typically termed diffusion bridges. Since, in general, no closed form expression exists for the transition densities of the process of interest, a widely adopted solution works with the Euler–Maruyama approximation, by replacing the intractable transition densities with Gaussian approximations. However, the density of the conditioned discrete-time process remains intractable, necessitating the use of computationally intensive methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo. Designing an efficient proposal mechanism which can be applied to a noisy and partially observed system that exhibits nonlinear dynamics is a challenging problem, and is the focus of this paper. By partitioning the process into two parts, one that accounts for nonlinear dynamics in a deterministic way, and another as a residual stochastic process, we develop a class of novel constructs that bridge the residual process via a linear approximation. In addition, we adapt a recently proposed construct to a partial and noisy observation regime. We compare the performance of each new construct with a number of existing approaches, using three applications.