5 Conclusion

This unit has concentrated on three main environments for violence and the roles that children play within these environments: victim, perpetrator, witness, colluder and peacemaker. It has looked at individual and social experiences of violence, examining what is normal and abnormal child behaviour and whether violence is innate or learned. It has also broadened out these discussions to look at the ways child violence is differently understood in a range of cultural contexts. What is clear from this examination is that children at both a local and a global level experience multiple and complex forms of violence which shape their experiences of childhood, and which constitute, for many, an extreme form of adversity.
This unit and the previous two have looked at three different forms of adversity as they affect children. Clearly there is an overlap between them: children suffer health consequences as a result of war and they may become impoverished if they are forced to flee their homes as a result of armed conflict. Similarly, poverty can lead to civil unrest and uprising which in turn place children at risk from armed conflict.