Generational Norms of Reporting Violence in Nyarugusu Refugees Camp

Abstract

Many of the over two million children living in refugee camps worldwide have escaped violent conflict in their country, but remain vulnerable to violence in camps. Little is known about children’s perception and reactions to this violence. We examine the issue of reporting violence using a sample of over 300 child–parent pairs of Burundian and Congolese refugees residing in Nyarugusu camp in Tanzania. To elicit social norms around reporting violence, we use fictional vignettes of violent situations with randomized characteristics against a hypothetical child to measure parents’ and children’s perceptions of when children will report violence. The goal of the analysis is to better understand the conditions under which highly vulnerable children in refugee camps will report violence and how this action may be influenced by their parents. Parents and children have similar beliefs that victims are more likely to report violence in school than in other locations, but parents believe victims are more likely to report sexual violence than other types of violence while children do not. Additionally, we find a strong relationship between a parent and their child’s beliefs.

Resumen

Parmi les plus de deux millions d'enfants vivant dans des camps de réfugiés dans le monde, nombre d’entre eux ont échappé au conflit violent dans leur pays, mais demeurent vulnérables à la violence dans les camps. On sait peu de choses sur la perception et les réactions des enfants face à cette violence. Nous explorons la question du signalement des violences à l'aide d'un échantillon de plus de 300 couples enfants-parents parmi des réfugié·es burundais·es et congolais·es résidant dans le camp de Nyarugusu en Tanzanie. Pour faire ressortir les normes sociales concernant le signalement de la violence, nous utilisons des vignettes fictives de situations violentes avec des caractéristiques aléatoires attribuées à un enfant hypothétique pour mesurer les perceptions des parents et des enfants quant au moment où les enfants vont signaler la violence. L'objectif de l'analyse est de mieux comprendre dans quelles conditions les enfants très vulnérables dans les camps de réfugiés vont signaler la violence et de quelle façon cette action peut être influencée par les parents. Les parents et les enfants ont la même conviction, celle que les victimes sont plus susceptibles de signaler la violence à l'école qu'ailleurs, mais les parents pensent que les victimes sont plus susceptibles de signaler la violence sexuelle par rapport à d'autres types de violence, contrairement aux enfants. De plus, nous notons une forte corrélation entre les croyances d’un parent et celles de son enfant.

Appendix A: Heterogeneity Analysis

This appendix discusses the heterogeneity of the results by gender and nationality for Tables 4, 5 and 6. Overall most of the results are robust to subgroup analysis. Two key difference emerge. Burundi children’s responses are less correlated with their parents. DRC respondents are more influenced by the gender of their own child who takes the survey.

Adult responses shown in Table 4 show little heterogeneity across nationality or gender in terms of location of violence and reporting sexual violence. Women are also likely to think a girl would report violence by almost 10 percentage points. Some minor difference emerge men and those from the DRC believe the victim is less likely to report in the case the perpetrator is an authority figure. Finally, those in Burundi are more likely to think that victims will report high violence by almost 10 percentage points. The difference between DRC and Burundi could indicate that the longer experience of those from the DRC in the camp makes them less likely to believe that violence will be reported in difficult circumstances when the authority is the perpetrator or the violence is severe.

Children’s response and the relationship to their parents is shown in Table 5 with Models 2–5 and 7–10 examine subgroups by gender and nationally. Children from Burundi do not show a statistically significant correlation with their parents’ beliefs in either approach using unadjusted (Table 5 model 5) or adjusted responses from their parents (Table 5 model 10). This suggest children’s and adults experience may be different and norms have not developed yet. In the case of gender, the relationship between parent and child responses is similar for boys and girls. The result is robust for subsamples of boys and girls. We find no major difference between male and female adult respondents in their belief the victim would report.

In Table 6 we test if the gender of the child respondent influences their parents. The core result is robust across all four subgroups (models 2–5) that when their sons respond to the survey and the victim is male the adult is more likely to believe the hypothetical victim will report. One difference we do see is that in the DRC adults are less likely to believe the victim would report if their daughter was in the survey and the adults vignette was about a hypothetical girl.