Everyday Violence and Social Recognition

Abstract

This book is about violence in the everyday lives of children and young people living in poverty. It explores children’s experiences of violence in four contexts: early childhood, orphanages, homelessness and war. With the exception of the chapters on early childhood, none of these contexts might appear to readers as ordinary or quotidian spaces and events. However, what is evident from each of these chapters is that many children are living in extremely difficult situations of terror and insecurity where violence is a routine part of everyday life at different scales from the individual to the nation. It is in this sense that we are using the term ‘everyday’ violence — violence which, in the contexts in which children live, is routine, inescapable and mundane. In contrast to many other books on children and violence, we are not focusing on those forms of violence that, again in the specific sociocultural context within which a child lives, are considered exceptional and abusive. This focus on the quotidian allows us to ask, ‘what is the purpose of violence’, and given that the experience of living in deep poverty and living with war and political insecurity is harsh and often terrifying for adults as well as children, we ask ‘what difference does it make to be a child’? In this chapter, we suggest that ‘social recognition’ is an important concept that makes sense of the contradiction between the recognition of children as vulnerable persons and the levels of violence that they are subjected to.