Session Abstract

For millions of children, armed conflict is a daily reality.  Imperiled by civil war, international conflict, guerilla insurgency or ethnic cleansing, children are often war’s youngest casualties and chillingly sometimes too its youngest participants.  Perhaps the most vulnerable victims of war and genocide, children face the prospect of death, disability, and sexual abuse; they may become refugees or displaced persons, while particularly territorial and ethnic conflict might leave them orphaned or separated from their families. The exigencies of war expose youngsters to illegal recruitment in organized or irregular armed forces, as well as to other forms of brutal exploitation.  Children experience violence, flight, and displacement just as their parents do, but encounter and contend with these experiences in a markedly different way than their adult contemporaries. This panel’s presenters examine the reactions and responses of children to war and persecution within an historical framework.  In a discourse on the conceptualization of crisis, Neni Panourgía explores the “small acts” of resistance and dissidence carried out by young children in Axis-occupied Greece during World War II.  Simone Gigliotti describes the forced removals of aboriginal and “mixed race” children from their homes and communities in twentieth-century Australia, and how the examination of this policy in 1997 opened a volatile debate about the nature of cultural genocide.  Finally,  Johannes-Dieter Steinert presents a rare look at the nature of child Soviet civilian forced laborers set against the backdrop of Nazi racial policy.