Gendered Dynamics of Child Protection in UN Peacekeeping

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, the United Nations (UN) has developed a substantial chil-dren and armed conflict (CAAC) agenda, aimed at preventing and responding to the Six Grave Violations of children’s rights: killing and maiming, child soldier-ing, abductions, sexual violence, attacks on schools and hospitals, and denial of humanitarian access. UN Peacekeeping missions, particularly its large multi-di-mensional missions that are or were deployed across five central African states, are important implementers of this agenda through their child protection practices. These practices depend on and reproduce certain conceptions of childhood and assumptions about gender dynamics between peacekeepers and children which this thesis investigates.

In this thesis I analyze child protection guidance documents including policies, training materials, and manuals, and interviews with peacekeepers and humanitar-ian workers to understand how gender, childhood, and protection are constructed through UN peacekeeping child protection practices. I do this through a compila-tion of four journal articles, which discuss how UN documents portray children and gender dynamics in child protection, how gendered subject positions of women peacekeepers are produced and challenged through community engage-ment practices, tensions between the complexities of children’s agency during war versus how it is understood by peacekeepers, and the logics of protection that help structure child protection.

Three key aspects of child protection in UN peacekeeping were illuminated in this analysis. First, logics of protection that inform the portrayals of and relationships between peacekeepers, children, and threats to children primarily rely on gendered stereotypes about peacekeepers and conceptions of children as only vulnerable and lacking agency, though there are shifts and implicit disruptions in these and more explicit challenges to these logics from peacekeepers themselves. Second, gen-dered subject positions of peacekeepers also draw on these stereotypes and as-sumptions, but peacekeepers’ experiences of the complexities of gender dynamics in child protection and shifts in UN policy indicate openings for these to be trans-formed. Third, children continue to be understood in limited and narrow ways, focused on their vulnerability and without acknowledgement of their agency, by peacekeepers and in UN policy, which may foreclose more effective practices for preventing harm to children. Taken together, this analysis helps to reveal some of the intricacies of how gender, childhood, and conceptions of protection interact in peacekeeping practice.