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Summer 1995: Children's Political Violence
Children and political violence (PDF, 15 pages, 50.6 KB), by Louis-Jean Duclos
Political violence and childhood are apparently antinomic words. In fact, although a child by nature as violent as anybody else reaches a political ability quite early, the practice of it is denied to him, bound to a grown up status. Considered illegitimate by the international community – which has even tried to legislate on it – young people's violence is still an easily mobilised resource for uncaring State or intrastate powers with political purposes whose definition remains unknown to recruited children. In some advanced conditions of social destabilisation and political anarchy, children's political violence exceptionally takes on an autonomous character. However, this genuine subversion in the nature of things, risking being taken into adult hands and provoking children's ageing, is limited in time. Although young people's violence has no future, it leaves some deep impressions on general society, fills its imagination and encourages its changes.
Gavroche and his pair (PDF, 13 pages, 42.9 KB), by Frédéric Chauvaud
The 20th century's historiography has shown little interest in children's history, and even less in their political violence. Until now, mentioning Gavroche was enough to explain it. Therefore, one has to wonder how the representation of a young boy savagely killing, to which any juvenile violence still refers, has forced itself. Rediscovering how the archetype was elaborated, from a novel hero to a sentimental hero, shown among others in the last delivery of Pierre Larousse's "Grand dictionnaire universel" of the 20th century, is a necessary step that needs however to be confronted with " the density of reality ". In Lyon, during the Canuts' riots, in Paris in June 1932 on the street barricades, in February and June 1848, several statements report that children were present. However, it is only during the street barricades war, in May 1871, that a massive participation of the children is attested, first as street labourers, helping with the defence fortifications, and then as fighters. Still, if violence becomes sometimes an inevitable rite of passage, children's action remains subjected to the adults' logic.
Lost children of the Commune riots (PDF, 14 pages, 47 KB), by Thomas André
The Paris Commune riots have a specific position in the history of the Parisian riots. There are the last Jacobin riots of the 20th century. Although they still occur on the street barricades, some rioters who are not meant to take part in the political and social game do participate in the Commune events: the children. The fact is well known. Indeed, since 1830, especially the Paris riots and revolutions have generated special protagonists: the workman in his overall, the shopkeeper, the street kid, the guard siding once with the rioters, once with the power, the army and the rural people who come to the capital to crush the riot. It is necessary to be careful about the participation of children in the Commune riots and more specifically about teenagers. The poor records compared to the literary and journalistic dense statements tend to show that many questions remain unanswered. None of those who have fought left an account of the "adventure", until a proof of the contrary is produced the statements, not always firsthand information, are consequently adults' visions, men's and women's opinions concerning age groups about which they have an apparently jumbled idea: who is a child, who is a teenager at that time?
Suburban violence and young people's politicisation (PDF, 12 pages, 40.3 KB), by Angelina Peralva
It has been said that the urban scenery was disorganised and empty after the great change affecting the flagging of the industrial society and the working class. Today, in spite of the important lack of fieldwork capable of showing the diversity of meanings of young people's violence, it would be difficult to carry on upholding such an opinion. The urban scenery is not empty. It is filled with an inextricable mixture of rebellion and ordinary delinquency allowing the most different interpretations. In the common showings, the idea of violence doesn't easily stand out in an ever-increasing delinquency, practised by very young people, teenagers hardly out of childhood. In the suburbs, in the so-called «delicate " areas, there is an increasing tendency to consider violent some juvenile behaviours which were tolerated before and are now perceived as uncontrollable because some of the regulating mechanisms have disappeared. This violence shows a crisis in the relationships between generations. It is more expressive than instrumental and more a consequence of a politicised and difficult process of young people belonging to the working class, defined by the under-constitution of the sense of its protest in a changing society.
The Intifada generation (PDF, 12 pages, 41.7 KB), by Sylvie Mansour
The Palestinian children socialise in an individual and collective traumatic life. Even their games are symbolic of the assimilation of a situation in which foreign assault and discredit of the close social environment are mixed. However, these children find the way to adapt themselves to an aggressive and frustrating context through an elementary and violent political commitment. Under certain circumstances, when applied to the «right " cause, an early practice of political violence can be a good answer to the inflicted traumas and, at the end, can help peace prevail.
Juvenile participation in the Nigeria political violence (PDF, 26 pages, 78.5 KB), by Guy Nicolas
One can currently observe the development of a juvenile violence, which quite alters the image of childhood and adolescence itself. The image of the torturer child substituted to or is compared with the absolute victimised child, whose inflicted violence provokes a general emotion. The first, symbolised by the picture of the «Biafran " child, the famished victim of a genocide, has been spread out around the world during the civil war and regularly provokes compassion and solidarity, especially against the police force or criminals guilty of infanticide. However, it is partly spoilt by other pictures showing an armed child taking part in violence equally inadmissible. In Nigeria, the young ones are far from forming a coherent group at any level. In fact, they take part in different groups that show an identity of community. Those groups request all the citizens of the country and this demand leads the kids to fight and to mix with the crowd of citizens or with their specific communities. In most of the cases, the communities' mobilisations are issued from spontaneous crowd uprisings, linked with unpredictable reactions or situations. These generally attract children and teenagers who join the protagonists and take part in the fights. In other cases, the juvenile organisations themselves take the initiative of launching an attack, especially with the police force, bringing about some reactions of solidarity among the adults. Sometimes too, the agitators try to interpose the children between themselves and the police force. Many children also take part in street riots in a marginal but efficient way. Also, when in touch with some activist students, they actively take part in street demonstrations provoked by some economical or political decisions, which are considered unbearable. We find them in front during the hybrid and xenophobe pogroms that set the autochthonous against the immigrants, at any level of the federal organisation of the country, on the basis of regional, ethnic, confessional as well as historical and communal oppositions. The activist students' groups take an essential part in the uprisings. Also, the confessional organisations frequently use the children with a provocative view.
"Bassidje ", the juvenile help of the Iranian revolution (PDF, 13 pages, 44.9 KB), Interview with Farhad Khoroskhavar
The Bassidje organisation was created shortly after the Shah had been expelled by the new revolutionary power in order to use the young ones for a revolutionary purpose. This organisation then joined the Pasdarans army, another military organisation created after the revolution, to protect it against the Monarchists. The Pasdarans army decided to become an armed force, independent from the traditional army corps. During the war against Iraq, the Bassidje organisation including nearly half a million of members supervised the new volunteers. The young Bassidjis (the Bassidje organisation new member), between twelve and twenty years old, were noticed by their total dedication and lack of fear in front of death. They were often used as cannon fodder against the Iraq army. The Bassidje organisation used to take advantage of the inability to live of those young teenagers, buoyed with revolutionary hope, unrealisable in life. By getting tangled up in the Bassidje organisation, these young people ready for martyrdom were escaping from real society and disillusion resulting from the vanishing of their dreams. The Bassidje organisation protected the revolutionary dream from its change into a nightmare and prevented the collapse of the short-lived identity of its young members; because of that, it had a huge success during the first years, when the revolution was still keeping its aura.
The Red Guards: some rebels under influence (PDF, 40 pages, 122.5 KB), by Jacques Andrieu
The Cultural Revolution plunged China into some disorders and riots which main part was played by the educated urban young people recruited in the Red Guards organisation. They were mobilised after some incitements and manoeuvres from President Mao and his close circle. However, even though they often gained from the support of the army and the political police, they had a real autonomy. But they totally gave it up by using it to imitate the revolutionary model which school and propaganda had taught them during violent riots and savage acts towards the Establishment. In such a context where the biological fathers had been marginalised by the totalitarian system, they used to solicit a super-father's recognition, President Mao.
Children soldiers and uses of violence in Mozambique (PDF, 15 pages, 49 KB), by Jean-Claude Legrand and Fabrice Weissman
All through the Mozambican conflict and more particularly in the second half of the 1980s, the RENAMO kidnapped young children on an irregular basis according to the areas. It used to subject a certain amount of them to a military training and to a process of war socialisation which purpose was to turn them into good fighters. Introduced to a culture of violence and guerrilla as well as to its magic and religious representation of the world and action, the children-soldiers had access to a new identity of "cast warrior" which entirely integrated them into the organisation. This practice was partly justified by the RENAMO recruitment problems and its strategy of terrorising the civilians in which the young soldiers had an important part to play. However, it especially referred to the logic of the guerrilla general way of operating which, as a war organisation directed to its own reproduction, seems to have tried to institute a military aristocracy able to represent the values of its social war project and to guarantee its perpetuation. This way of acting is very similar to some historical and local experiences.
The problematical space of the children political violence (PDF, 15 pages, 49.8 KB), by Daniel Hermant
The young people category is generally developed through a parental relationship, and does not represent a social class or group, but a logical support to the official statements. This rhetorical attitude implicitly subjects the political analysis to distant limits including the whole society. That way, it allows a uni-dimensional comprehension where the sense of child violence is reduced to the instrumentalisation or underhand manoeuvre by adults on children. On the contrary, it is necessary to explain some situations of violent and war socialisation of groups of children, as the result of particular circumstances (China, Iran, Mozambique...). The process of growing up is the thread where is written any juvenile act. One can as well perceive in it part of the failure in the social reproduction or even the metaphor of society's suicide. It is probably the obscure conscience of the symbolic importance represented for everybody, from the point of view of sense, by this contribution of structural events in the leading behaviours - going from the specific to the general - which explains the obscure fascination of the juvenile violence and consequently the quasi general lack of it in the statements.