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Children Take Charge: Helping Behaviors and Organized Action Among Young People After Hurricane Katrina

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Book cover Bottom-up Responses to Crisis

Part of the book series: Mercatus Studies in Political and Social Economy ((MSPSE))

Abstract

Although children and youth have often been cast as “vulnerable victims” during disasters, their actions have repeatedly demonstrated their capacity to evoke positive change in the face of an ever more turbulent natural environment. This chapter highlights a range of child- and youth-initiated efforts to reduce disaster risk and to promote more disaster resilient communities. The chapter examines the types of activities that children and youth have helped to create and lead, including disaster risk reduction (DRR) initiatives, community-based preparedness programs, and long-term recovery efforts. Both international as well as domestic efforts are compared and contrasted. It also discusses the challenges associated with sustaining such efforts as well as future opportunities for deeper inclusion of child- and youth-led coalitions in traditional emergency management programs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Oronde is a pseudonym. He was a participant in a study focused on children’s long-term recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (see Fothergill and Peek 2015).

  2. 2.

    For more information, visit http://therethinkers.org/.

  3. 3.

    For more information on the special issue, visit https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7721/chilyoutenvi.18.issue-1.

  4. 4.

    The larger dataset includes 205 news stories regarding children’s helping behaviors in response to some of the costliest and deadliest disasters of the early twenty-first century, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 2004 Hurricane Charley, 2004 Hurricane Ivan, 2004 Hurricane Wilma, 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami, 2005 Hurricane Katrina, 2005 Hurricane Rita, 2008 Hurricane Ike, 2010 Haiti Earthquake, 2010 British Petroleum (BP) Oil Spill, 2011 Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, 2011 Joplin Tornado, and 2012 Superstorm Sandy. We focus specifically on Hurricane Katrina in this chapter as the bulk of the media coverage (108 articles, or nearly 53 percent of all the articles that we found) concentrated on that disaster. Given space constraints with this chapter, we plan to complete cross-disaster and cross-national analyses of the additional media coverage in future work.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Lori Peek, Jessica Austin, Simone Domingue & Melissa Villarreal

  2. Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Lori Peek, Jessica Austin, Simone Domingue & Melissa Villarreal

  3. Department of Sociology, SUNY Cortland, Cortland, NY, USA

    Elizabeth Bittel

  4. South Asia Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Elizabeth Bittel

Authors
  1. Lori Peek
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  2. Jessica Austin
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  3. Elizabeth Bittel
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  4. Simone Domingue
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  5. Melissa Villarreal
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lori Peek .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Stefanie Haeffele

  2. F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Virgil Henry Storr

Additional information

The second, third, fourth, and fifth authors are listed in alphabetical order to denote equal contributions to this chapter. The authors would like to thank Stefanie Haeffele and Virgil Henry Storr at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University for their editorial leadership. John Boyne, while a master’s student at Colorado State University, and Nicole Mattson, while an undergraduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder, assisted with the data collection and analyses for this chapter. Allison Carlock, National Youth Preparedness Lead at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, reviewed an earlier draft of this chapter, which is gratefully acknowledged. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 1635593. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Peek, L., Austin, J., Bittel, E., Domingue, S., Villarreal, M. (2020). Children Take Charge: Helping Behaviors and Organized Action Among Young People After Hurricane Katrina. In: Haeffele, S., Storr, V. (eds) Bottom-up Responses to Crisis. Mercatus Studies in Political and Social Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39312-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39312-0_6

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