Elsevier

Child Abuse & Neglect

Volume 78, April 2018, Pages 13-18
Child Abuse & Neglect

Supporting resilience in war-affected children: How differential impact theory is useful in humanitarian practice

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2017.12.010Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper examines the utility of the Differential Impact Theory for child protection practitioners who work in humanitarian settings, with a focus on war-affected children. A primary advantage of DIT is that it focuses efforts to strengthen children's resilience on improving children's social ecologies at different levels. This ecological focus is more likely to address the sources of children's suffering and resilience and also helps to avoid the problems associated with an individualized focus. It also shows how DIT provides a differentiated view of war-affected children and stimulates multiple interventions at different ecological levels, avoiding the common error of taking a one size fits all approach to intervention. In keeping with DIT, it suggests that child protection practice would benefit from addressing macro-level risks such as poverty and discrimination that are drivers of various harms to children and from more systematic linkages between macro- and micro-levels. It concludes that DIT serves as a critical lens for viewing current work on child protection in humanitarian settings and also for illuminating ways to develop more comprehensive supports for children's resilience.

Section snippets

The focus on children's social ecologies

The central emphasis of DIT is on the importance of children's social ecologies (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and the interactions that occur within and between multiple levels over time. From a practitioner's standpoint, this emphasis offers significant conceptual and practical advantages relative to other approaches that focus on processes internal to war affected children. Much of the suffering that children experience in war zones is due to radical changes in their environment such as family

The importance of macro-level factors

The first principle of DIT, which asserts that ‘Demands of higher level systems compel children to adapt', highlights the importance of macro-level risks as well as risks to children that originate at other levels. In humanitarian settings, the focus of most child protection agencies is on micro-level factors that occur close to the child, particularly at individual, family, household, and peer levels. This focus is useful since significant harms to children occur at these levels in forms such

Tailored interventions and supports

Humanitarian crises create urgent needs for protection support on a mass scale. Typically, donors who fund supports for war-affected children demand quick results on a large scale. To cope with this situation, agencies that support child protection in emergencies frequently favor interventions that can be implemented and taken to scale quickly. For example, diverse agencies establish Child Friendly Spaces (CFSs; Wessells & Kostelny, 2013) in emergency settings as a means of providing safety,

Multi-systemic interventions

DIT, particularly its third principle ('The more complex the challenges an individual faces, the more complex the systems required to improve functioning') also resonates well with the need for multi-systemic interventions in support of emergency affected populations. Over the past decade, the global child protection sector has undergone a shift away from supporting specific vulnerable groups of children (e.g., children living and working on the streets, former child soldiers, etc.) to

Conclusion

DIT serves as a critical lens for viewing current work on child protection in humanitarian settings and also for illuminating ways to develop more comprehensive supports for children's resilience. At every stage of practice–assessment, program design, intervention, and monitoring and evaluation–DIT brings practitioners back to a very fundamental point that to help individuals and collectives ranging from families to populations, we must take a more nuanced, comprehensive approach to developing

References (41)

  • Children and youth on the front line

  • U. Bronfenbrenner

    The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design

    (1979)
  • Child Protection Working Group

    Minimum standards for child protection in humanitarian action

    (2012)
  • B. Hamber et al.

    Narrowing the gap between psychosocial practice, peacebuilding and wider social change: An introduction to the Special Section in this issue

    Intervention

    (2014)
  • B. Hamber

    Transforming societies after political violence: Truth, reconciliation and mental health

    (2009)
  • Human Rights Watch

    Stolen children

    (2003)
  • Human Rights Watch

    Uganda: Child abductions skyrocket in north

    (2003)
  • Inter-Agency Standing Committee

    IASC guidelines on mental health and psychosocial support in emergency settings

    (2007)
  • K. Kostelny et al.

    What children and youth can tell us: A rapid ethnography approach to understanding harms to children in Somaliland and Puntland

  • S. McKay et al.

    Where are the girls?

    (2004)

    • Cited by (0)

    View full text
    © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.