Jonathan Todres, Mainstreaming Children?s Rights in Post-disaster Settings

• Citation: Vol. 25 No. 3
• Publication year: 2010
• topic: Civil Rights

MAINSTREAMING CHILDREN’S RIGHTS IN POST-DISASTER SETTINGS

Jonathan Todres*

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, major natural disasters—ranging from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to the 2010 Haiti earthquake1—have challenged the global community to ensure the survival and well-being of millions of individuals under the most difficult circumstances. Each of these natural disasters has

created crisis spots with huge numbers of displaced persons, including high numbers of children. The international community has struggled to deliver the resources needed to ensure the prompt and full recovery of the affected populations. In these settings, the challenges confronting children are particularly acute.

Children, due to their young age and developmental status, are typically more vulnerable than adults.2 In post-disaster settings, nearly all the rights of children are implicated, ranging from basic survival, to freedom from abuse and exploitation, to access to health care and education.3 It is during this time that crucial decisions are made regarding plans for reconstruction and prioritization of resources. Too often, at this critical juncture following a major natural disaster, children are relegated to the margins.

Children are held up as the face of suffering in disaster settings, yet, despite the progress made in advancing children’s rights in the past twenty years, in post-disaster settings children frequently are seen but not heard—an approach

* Associate Professor of Law, Georgia State University College of Law. The Author would like to thank

Risa Kaufman and Elizabeth Sepper for their helpful suggestions and Michael Baumrind for his outstanding research assistance.

1. The 2010 floods in Pakistan affected more than 13 million people, more than the combined total

   number of people affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Floods in Pakistan Worse than Tsunami, Haiti, GULF NEWS, Aug. 10, 2010, http://gulfnews. com/news/world/pakistan/floods-in-pakistan-worse-than-tsunami-haiti-1.666221.

2. GERALDINE VAN BUEREN, THE INTERNATIONAL LAW ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD, at xx (1995).

3. See WORLD VISION, PROTECTING CHILDREN POST-DISASTERS, available at http://wvasiapacific.org/ downloads/child_protection_v3.pdf; Associated Press, Kidnap Fears Spark Haiti ‘Children’s Emergency,’

   MSNBC.COM, Feb. 10, 2010, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35325390/ns/world_news-haiti/t/kidnap-fears- spark-haiti-childrens-emergency.

   that echoes nineteenth-century thinking.4 The result of this approach is that children’s rights and needs are frequently under-addressed, with adverse long- term consequences for children, their communities, and their countries. This Article seeks to draw attention to the lack of accounting for children’s rights and suggests a framework for overcoming this failure—children’s rights mainstreaming.

   
   

   Securing rights in post-disaster settings is made more difficult by the fact that, in disaster-affected areas, financial, human, and informational resources have been depleted, and the infrastructure needed to deliver services to and protect children has been damaged or destroyed.5 At the same time, children’s

   needs are heightened and more immediate. For global efforts aimed at ensuring child well-being and development, the task is made more urgent by the long- term repercussions of relatively short delays in the reconstruction effort. For example, though recovery and reconstruction can take years, even on an expedited basis, for children, unmet health needs or interrupted schooling for

   any period of time can have life-long consequences.6

   
   

   This Article examines the special circumstances facing children in post- disaster settings and the legal protections in place to ensure their rights and well-being. Part I examines the dominant portrayals of children in post-disaster settings, finding that while children are often highlighted as the face of human suffering in the aftermath of major disasters, they frequently are marginalized

   
   

4. See, e.g., Daniel Walden & Kelly Hawrylyshyn, Smart and Just: Involving Children and Young People in Post Disaster Needs Assessment, 48 HUMANITARIAN EXCH. MAG. 15 (2010) (finding that in post-disaster reconstruction efforts, “it is rare that children and young people—who often comprise more than half of an affected population—are consulted”); BARBARA BENNETT WOODHOUSE, HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: THE TRAGEDY OF CHILDREN’S RIGHTS FROM BEN FRANKLIN TO LIONEL TATE 114 (2008) (“As a rule, children and

   youths figure in history as objects of others’ actions rather than subjects in their own right, or as passive victims rather than feeling and thinking agents who shape their own and others’ lives.”); STEVEN MINTZ, HUCK’S RAFT: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN CHILDHOOD 154–60 (2004) (analyzing the nineteenth-century American portrayal of children as victims needing rescue).

5. Some estimates suggest that the 2004 tsunami resulted in more than $6.6 billion in recovery costs in

   Indonesia and Sri Lanka alone, and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti resulted in between $7.2 and $8.1 billion in damage. Eduardo A. Cavallo et al., Estimating the Direct Economic Damage of the Earthquake in Haiti 4 (Inter Am. Dev. Bank, Working Paper No. IDB-WP-163, 2010), available at http://idbdocs.iadb.org/wsdocs/ getdocument.aspx?docnum=35074108. The U.S. government estimates that, assessing property damage only, Hurricane Katrina cost nearly $100 billion. FRANCES FRAGOS TOWNSEND, THE FEDERAL RESPONSE TO HURRICANE KATRINA: LESSONS LEARNED 7 (2006), available at http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS67263.

6. See PHILLIP J. LAZARUS ET AL., NAT’L ASS’N OF SCH. PSYCHOLOGISTS, RESPONDING TO NATURAL

   DISASTERS: HELPING CHILDREN AND FAMILIES 1 (2003), http://www.nasponline.org/resources/crisis_safety/ naturaldisaster_teams_ho.pdf; Natl. Ctr. for PTSD, Effects of Disasters: Risk and Resilience Factors, U.S. DEP’T OF VETERAN’S AFF., http://www.ptsd.va.gov/public/pages/effects_of_disasters_risk_and_resilience_ factors.asp (last updated Dec. 20, 2011).

   in reconstruction efforts. In Part II, the Article reviews the existing legal framework to protect children and to ensure their needs are accounted for following a natural disaster. This examination of current law unveils significant gaps in protections for children when they most need assistance: humanitarian law does not apply in the absence of armed conflict, human rights law has important limitations, and international disaster relief law is in a nascent stage. Although these limitations might suggest the need for additional law, more can be done first with existing law. Part II ends by suggesting that human rights law is the best starting point for a more effective response to natural disasters.

   
   

   Part III proposes a framework for more effectively accounting for and realizing children’s rights in post-disaster settings—children’s rights mainstreaming. Part III draws upon gender mainstreaming literature and practice, with a view to examining whether mainstreaming principles can help advance the rights and well-being of children in these most difficult circumstances. It concludes that there is much to be learned from prior efforts at gender mainstreaming that can contribute to ensuring the survival, well- being, and development of children following natural disasters.

   
   

   1. CHILDREN AS THE FACE OF DISASTERS

      
      

      Media images transported around the world following a major disaster often focus on children. The plight of children in post-disaster settings is heart wrenching, and those images are used frequently to mobilize the international community and civil society to support relief efforts. In these settings, children are portrayed as small, frail, helpless beings in need of rescue and emergency

      relief.7 Rescue and relief are relevant in post-disaster settings; they are the first

      
      

7. See PLAN INT’L, CHILDREN AND THE TSUNAMI: ENGAGING WITH CHILDREN IN DISASTER RESPONSE, RECOVERY AND RISK REDUCTION: LEARNING FROM CHILDREN’S PARTICIPATION IN THE TSUNAMI RESPONSE 10

   (2005), available at http://plan-international.org/files/global/publications/emergencies/childrentsunami.pdf (“To the extent children did receive attention [in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami], they were identified as defenceless victims of the disaster who deserved external assistance and protection against potential abusers. Many agencies and the media deliberately mobilised children to draw sympathy, attention and humanitarian assistance towards affected communities.”); Roger Bennett & Martin Daniel, Media Reporting of Third World Disasters: The Journalist’s Perspective, 11 DISASTER PREVENTION & MGMT. 33, 34 (2002) (“As regards starving children, etc., much as the charities have official policies to avoid this type of advertisement, it’s still what opens the wallets of the public.” (internal quotation marks omitted)). These images persist despite international codes of conduct disapproving of such portrayals. Cf. THE CODE OF CONDUCT FOR THE INTERNATIONAL RED CROSS AND RED CRESCENT MOVEMENT AND THE NGOS IN DISASTER RELIEF § 10

   (1996), available at http://www.ifrc.org/Docs/idrl/I259EN.pdf (“In our information, publicity and advertising activities, we shall recognize disaster victims as dignified humans, not hopeless objects.”).

   stage of any post-disaster response.8 No one questions the urgent need for emergency relief following a major earthquake, flood, or hurricane. However, such an approach can lead to a particular framework for responding to the plight of survivors of a natural disaster that goes well beyond emergency relief programming. Frequently, such a framework reinforces the notion that aid is undertaken as a charitable endeavor, overlooking the rights and agency of survivors, including, but not limited to, children, and failing to acknowledge

   children and other vulnerable populations in mainstream reconstruction plans.9

   A narrow construction of “rescue” creates limitations and unintended adverse consequences.

   
   

8. See FRANCES A. MAURER & CLAUDIA M. SMITH...