Agency and Vulnerability, An Intertwined Experience in Refugee Children
During our conversations with our NGO partner Clowns Without Borders a concern that often raised from the clowns’ perspective was managing emotions that would come up after the interactions with the children and after coming in contact with the reality and the challenges within the refugee camps. In preparation of a toolbox that will help CWB navigate the challenges that they come across when performing in such setups I was interested in looking into the children’s experiences through a power-oriented lens.
The recent article Recognizing Relational Interactions with Social Institutions in Refugee Children’s Experiences of Intertwining Vulnerability and Agency (Lawrence et al., 2023) provides an approach to understanding refugee children’s actions in relation to the adult dominated situations and structures that they are being subjected to. It proposes that children are active contributors to power-oriented interactions and that their agency co-occurs and is intertwined with vulnerability in their interactions with adult institutions. Children’s agency often tends to be overlooked or misinterpreted when viewed through a “vulnerable victim” narrative as it is tightly connected with vulnerability in adult dominated and institutional situations. In exposure to threat people (adults and children) have the adaptive capacity to serve their own interests and cope with what they cannot control. In such instances, children constantly negotiate their openness to relations that allow for autonomy and agency but they simultaneously expose them to potential harm leaving them vulnerable. With refugee camps, that are inherently oppressive environments, children find themselves in positions of exercising unusual forms of control in the midst of collective vulnerability and chaos. A few examples would be liaising between organizations and community, family caring and political activism. These agentic role reversal situations are the same that leave them vulnerable to significant mental health consequences. The article argues that in adversity children’s agency is only visible by virtue of their vulnerability and that their agentic and vulnerable experiences are intertwined. For example refugee children will often hide their agency and choose to only display their vulnerability in order to protect themselves and their families from exposure, deportation or social exclusion. It concludes that children’s interpretations and manipulation of adult power is normal childhood behavior including refugee children behavior and that abnormality arises in the refugee condition.
Considering the versatility children display in moving from vulnerability to agency depending on their immediate context it may be useful to think of the ways children may interact with play received within crisis management organizational structures. A few questions came up as I was reading the article and as I had in mind our work with CWB. Questions of approaching trauma informed play within the refugee condition, where children have been forced to an awareness of their vulnerabilities that they are tied to their ability for moments of agency and survival. How would this approach be different in refugee children than in more extensively researched set ups. Lastly, how do we enhance the CWB understanding of those moments of vulnerable agency and resilience that can potentially ease their experience when confronted with the hardship in the communities they are performing for.
References:
Lawrence, J., Dobbs, A., Kaplan, I., Tucci, M. (2023) Recognizing relational interactions with social institutions in refugee children’s experiences of intertwining vulnerability and agency, Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023, 20(19), 6815; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20196815
