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Hi, Malika Boma, and you're listening to a podcast hosted by the Accelerating Achievement for Africa's Adolescents Hub,

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hosted by Oxford University and the University of Cape Town.

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This podcast was recorded as part of a series in Oxford in November 2019 to discuss the theme of understanding adolescence in African contexts.

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Thanks for listening! This is a podcast exploring ideas around violence and adolescence in African contexts.

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And and before we get into the, you know, the the substance of the discussion, I think it would be great if we introduced ourselves.

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So, so I'm Elke Burma, and I am together with Chris Desmond looking after work package three on the accelerating

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achievement for Africa's Adolescents Hub project and I am in my professional life,

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a professor of world literature in English with his specialism on the West African novel.

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My name's Diana Walters. I work with two hats.

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One of them is that I, a lay Anglican chaplain at the University of Plymouth.

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So working on a in a university environment,

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in a in an interfaith cross-cultural into dialogue kind of way with staff and students as part of lots of different programmes going on.

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And the other thing that I do, the other work that I do is I work in as an international heritage consultant.

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So working, particularly in post-conflict countries, a range of them former Yugoslavia, former Soviet Union, many former communist countries.

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And I've done about four to five years work in Kenya, working with heritage and looking at ways that heritage can support development.

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Thanks, Diana. My name is Patricia Daly. I am geographer here at the University of Oxford and professor of the Human Geography of Africa,

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and I am interested in African politics and particularly issues.

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I have done research on violence in Africa, but political violence in particular,

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and that led me to look at Gender-Based Violence and Sexual Violence in conflict affected areas and in particular in Burundi and Rwanda and the Congo,

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but mainly in Burundi. And I'm interested as a geographer.

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I suppose I'm interested in this multiscale relationship.

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So violence, I don't see violence. Well, I can talk about that later contact.

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Yes. Thanks, Patricia. Hello, my name is Heidi Steckel.

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I'm the director of the Gender Violence and Health Centre at the London School

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of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and I for the Oxford Hub Accelerator Hub.

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I am leading with Ilona %Q, the package number two, which is on existing data and new cohort studies.

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Thanks, Heidi. So just kind of open things up a bit.

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It's already clear from your introductions that you are interested in, have thought about,

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have considered the impacts of violence on individuals lives in particular,

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I think women's lives and on the lives of young people and also not forgetting political violence in particular.

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When we think about this of building up now to a kind of a very open question.

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When we think about interventions that might improve the lives of adolescents, whether in African countries or elsewhere,

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where we think about those interventions, we're often confronted with violence as a as a social problem impacting people's lives.

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This violence takes many forms,

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and I've in my research in the past looked at how infrastructures can often work impact on people's lives in disruptive.

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And restrictive ways.

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So, so I suppose this opening question is, how do you understand, how do we all here understand the violence that impacts the lives of young people?

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Yes, I think it's a very good question. As you already indicated, we tended to look a lot at violence against women, women and girls.

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But the big issue that we find when we look at adolescents is that in some ways they are falling between

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the cracks because from the violence against women service and the violence against women's world,

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we look at intimate partner violence. So we do include in our surveys, women and girls aged 15 and above.

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But really, the focus of these services is partner violence.

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What violence do you have from your partner and to some extent, non-partner violence at the same time?

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The more you know, the violence against children services that are out there, they focus on violence that children face in the home,

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by parents, potentially by schools, by neighbours and their closer surroundings.

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And they start looking at intimate partner violence as well. But then also they end this interviewing women and girls, children who are 18.

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So in some ways, none of these surveys really capture these multiple forms of violence that adolescents

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experience because they're in this between age where they start to have relationships,

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and at the same time, they're still living with their parents or their caregivers.

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Very also face might face violence from obviously don't necessarily.

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And then they also most of them hopefully are still in schools.

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And the more and more research that is done in schools find that there is multiple forms of physical violence by teachers through punishment,

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et cetera. But there's also increase. There's quite a lot of sexual harassment going on as well.

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And then, you know, also on the way home,

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there are all these kind of new news stories or studies that show that adolescents when they go home or children, they also face violence.

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They are in public spaces. So I think that's quite a big range of forms of violence that adolescents face that are very particular to that,

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that age group because they face these multiple forms because they're transitioning and taking in.

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Everything we know from the life course is that adolescence also is an extremely important area and time period in adolescence in the life course,

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because this is when first relationships are formed, then you know, they might start having children.

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So it's quite quite a very tense,

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intense period where this experience might also really set the course for the future partnerships, the future life that they have.

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And and Patricia added to that very complicated spectrum that Heidi was just sketching that.

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We also have we relating to public spaces.

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We also have political violence and we also have yeah, I mean, there's been quite a bit of work that's been done on,

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say, the ways in which young men and women have, particularly young men have been drawn into political conflict,

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whether it's as child soldiers or whether forming militias at the time, you know,

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at election time and the young men who see or the adolescent seem to be vulnerable are those living in

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predominantly safe and informal settlements or in rural areas through which in which rebel groups operate?

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I, you know, I mean, I think I'm much more I suppose my interest really is more broadly in how these different forms of violence intersect.

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And as a geographer, we, you know, we see violence is being produced in the particular spaces,

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but also how particular spaces that might themselves produce violence and the relationship with those spaces at different scale.

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So I'd be interested. I suppose my work would be interested in looking at, say,

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the consequent domestic violence doesn't happen or any of the sexual violence doesn't happen in isolation from the wider society.

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So what are the violence? What you know, scholars now call slow violence?

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What forms of slow violence or low intensity violence might trigger, you know, or, you know, facilitate these other forms of violence, right?

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I mean, what is happening within the society, the wider context that that might result in?

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You know, in hunger and deprivation and stuff like that of violent violence in the places that I visited in the say in the informal settlements.

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I think for me, one of the most vivid ones was the informal settlement in Nairobi.

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And just seeing the desperation on adolescent, I was talking to young men and the desperation on their their faces for me and.

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The way in which, you know, just the living conditions there, you know, everything was structured around producing pain.

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And I think that sort of violence then feeds into other, as you say, young and it's at a critical age.

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It's when, you know, critical adolescence is a critical age.

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It's when young people are inhabiting their bodies almost for the first time and they are vulnerable in all sorts of ways.

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And they are seen, you know, it's the sort of age when the body is seeing a young person's body is seen as being out,

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but can be seen as being out of place or wherever they go. Whether it's in Britain, it's in shopping malls or in, you know, women at night,

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young women at night or in the city centres or wherever you know, they're not seen to.

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They don't have a space for them to inhabit where they're actually seen, except probably on a football ground,

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where it's also a space in which they're recruited for violence in certain in.

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And the football is one of the areas that police politicians sponsor football matches and football teams.

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And that's a space where recruitment takes place. So, you know, I'm interested in, I suppose,

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looking at these spaces where violence that may produce violent situations for young people and

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also where they might encounter violence and how that is related to the way the structures.

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And I guess they are both kind of out of place.

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And yet they feel themselves to be hyper visible in a way because, you know, as you say, they're just inhabiting their bodies for the first time.

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So they're kind of out there. And yet, you know, not not in place while being but being hyper visible.

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Does this also relate to some of what you've observed, whether in your work as a chaplain or your work in Kenya?

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Yeah, most definitely. I mean, I'm really, really interested, Patricia on your own that the spatial aspect of this,

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because I think that that's something that that absolutely resonates with the work that I did that I do in Kenya,

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which is around narratives and particularly cultural narratives and the absence of peace in those narratives,

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the kind of the inevitable focus there, the the grand narrative of conflict, which has normalised conflict in so many ways in both.

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I mean, in terms of space, spatially, in terms of architecture,

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in terms of living conditions right through to sort of peer pressure and and that sort of level of relationships as well.

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And that I'm always struck by that sense of how you have to.

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And I'm going to say something really sort of contradictory in that you have to fight for spaces of peace,

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actually, you have to fight to counter that. And adolescence is, you know, I think we are so quick to, possibly because we remember it and all.

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We witness it in our own children, our own families.

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But you know, it is that place of turmoil and the negative connotations around that seem to manifest somehow in so many different ways.

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So the work that we're you know, that we've been doing with peace museums, which are predominantly across Kenya and Uganda,

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and they are often very often in the rural communities, which are very susceptible to political persuasions of finance,

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particularly around election time and sort of layers with with issues around drugs and and

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and guns and so on that that sense of the loss really of any other alternative narratives.

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And as if somehow we we expect them to when we go into those spaces as well, it's it's taken for granted.

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How do we reclaim that, I guess? Or how do we actually give those voice because they are so easily?

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Mm-Hmm. And I suppose what what you've all highlighted is that it's not only that that if you like,

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I don't know life or politics or or even the formation of militias impact violently on these adolescents lives.

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It's also that they themselves in part in consequence, in part because they're transitioning between life forms, if you like.

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As Heidi was saying, it's also that they themselves are agents of violence.

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I mean, you know, I think it was a it was a phrase that you use Patricia.

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They producing pain. You know, they they I guess they understand that there's a kind of power to be to be had through producing pain.

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I mean, that's very problematic, right? So that within so that these young people who are encountering, you know, different multiple forms of.

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Violence, you know, if you like immediate violence. Public violence, intimate violence.

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At the same time, reacting perhaps violently through this.

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Is this is this something that relates to do your research at all in any way?

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We don't need to go around in the country. I think there's a lot of evidence.

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Well, you probably know most of the, you know, look at that sort of, you know,

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people who have been abused and their propensity for, you know, reproducing the abuse in their adult lives.

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And I'm, you know, I heard we recorded.

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I mean, I listen to it at all not so long ago about abuse in homosexual relationship.

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And the figure was that there was a sort of 80 percent chance of people, you know,

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carrying out abuse if they'd been abused as a child or, you know, young person.

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And that was really, you know, I was struck by that figure and I suppose suspect it's the same in other areas.

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It's as high in other, you know. But but there is and the part and then I was thinking about, you know,

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a young person who's in a homosexual who's who is coming out or is hiding how much abuse they must go through in schools and in a home, probably.

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And how you know how it must be difficult to move beyond that.

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And then that led me to think also about some of the young men, young people I've met, say, in Burundi,

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where you know, they they their memories, their intergenerational memories of their parents,

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you know, members of their family who've been extended family who have been killed and then how many of them,

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if they if the relative was close, they want retribution. And I'm going to talk personally, although it's been recorded.

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I had a very violent mother when I was growing. When I wasn't, when I was growing up, it was when I was 10.

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I came to Britain to live with my mom, but I grew up at my grandparents and aunts and uncles, and I had a fairly loving to know.

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And then my mother, who was actually a very difficult situation and suddenly, as I got older,

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realised and for reasons that she never mentioned until I found out after she died, it was very brutal to my brother and I very, very frightened.

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We couldn't do anything without her, you know, whacking us, getting the belt out and so on.

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And I was trying to figure out, you know, and I obviously realising myself as an adult and a parent, I could actually become like that.

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I started to think about what I could do to make myself not be consciously think about how I should behave.

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You know, like when my if something my son did something, I'd get up, you know, I would start to get upset.

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And then I realised, Oh my God, you know, I can't be married. I love it.

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And there's no way I should go down that route for, you know, whatever.

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So I think at some point we do make those choices as to whether we continue or not.

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I think the context helps.

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Going back to context, you know, I mean, I was slightly I was slightly economically more salient than my mother, for example.

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You know, the pressures that, you know, it's different. And I think that economics, you know, the context,

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whether it's you could be in a wider family context about the other people around to mitigate against that sort of violence on TV.

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Or you might be on your own and you're much more, you know?

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And it's not just talking about Africans, it could be any anyone.

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So, you know, what's what context are they growing up in that might enable, you know, that my facilitate or not the reproduction of that violence?

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That's what that's what I'm interested in. And you know what?

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You know what the context that facilitate the reproduction on one hand, but that that also facilitate the kind of diffusion or the kind of removal?

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Yeah, all of those those violent consequences and how people think through, you know,

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consciously or so, you know, consciously do that, you know, because I'm sure,

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you know, a lot of people actually think through, you know, or even adolescence at that time,

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do whether they become violent or not and what you see that drive, you know?

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So, you know, it just immediately speaks to something. So I did my Ph.D. research on violence and pregnancy in Germany.

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And I found, quite interestingly, for a lot of women, it just continues during pregnancy.

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But there was some very fear over the violence stopped, and they said it's because the men actually said, I don't want to be like my father.

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And it was a very conscious decision.

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And then I think in terms of evidence and, you know, this intergenerational transmission of violence when you had violent parents there,

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I mean, your likelihood is higher to be violent towards your partner experienced violence when you had it.

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But actually, you're more likely. But it doesn't mean that it is like that for all.

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Actually, most of the people show resilience and show that they actually they are not violent towards it.

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So and then it depends really on the factors around it is. You know, did you have a mentor or did you have a person who, you know,

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helped you through this difficult time as your family who showed you other types of, you know, resolving a conflict?

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So I think there are a lot of these mediating factors that actually can break it.

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And as you said, you know, there's very strong consciousness of, I don't want to be like that.

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And I, you know, I will try to find out the strategies. So I talked a lot.

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This young also very young parents, and one of them just said, Oh, as soon as I saw the conflict coming,

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I would just go out of the house and taking this one because from the outside,

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he can't hit me because others observe the same way of making sure the conflict doesn't go that far.

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So I think this context is extremely important. Yeah.

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Have you also encountered sort of certain mediating factors, too?

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Yes, absolutely. I think this is, you know,

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these sort of how how one either encounters or can create or support spaces of transformation or all spaces of choice or whatever it may be,

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whatever kind of words are appropriate, I think is is a is is a question that is not often looked at.

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And I think that's a real shame because I mean,

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that's that was exactly what we were trying to do with working with the with the peace museums, which is the the programme.

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The sort of the basis of that philosophy was that was that, you know,

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regardless of the fact that communities have these sort of years and generations of,

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you know, violence and conflict and disputes largely over land or water or whatever, you know, sort of very, very, very fundamental things.

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There was no inevitability about that. When you start to actually look at the sort of the coming at it from the perspective of cultural heritage,

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when you start to look at the material culture or the or even more so the intangible culture.

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So the memories, the landscapes, the plants, the you know, the things that are shared across.

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And this applies, you know, in every context that I've worked.

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Once you start to begin to to sort of find those kinds of and they become like transmitters, really, they play a role.

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But it's oh, they have the potential to, let's say, to play a role that that gives some kind of, you know, small voice more alternative.

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And it might just be that stirring within the individual.

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But of course, you know, the reality of the context, the reality of the economic situation, you know, the agitator or the rest of it.

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I mean that we mustn't we, you know, we really must recognise that as being absolutely crucial.

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But for sorry, just to go to Patricia's story that she shared, I think her grandparents did show, you know, a kind of a how should a family?

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How should children be raised in family talk? And, you know, so the groundwork was actually probably made by them that showed your strategies.

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How, you know, how should I be doing this? How should I handle myself if my child overwhelms me, which all children do fine?

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But, you know, so you kind of have this contrasting thing like, you know, and this might not be a former mentor of anyway,

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but just one relative that shows an interest or shows different ways of dealing with conflicts that are non-violence.

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So or friends? I mean, I had a verbally very violent father who is dealing with a lot of war trauma himself.

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And, you know, I escaped to the houses of friends and was particularly drawn to if I now look back on me and didn't see at the time,

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it was particularly drawn to friends who had families that were very kind of, I don't know, less hierarchical than what I was used to.

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So, so it's I think friendship groups also also quite important there.

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It's interesting that we're all using the language of space, though.

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Aren't we all using that sort of sense of withdrawing or moving or or moving it to a different emotional or relational space?

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I mean, it is really spatial. But I think just from my contacts, one of the things that saved me was the library.

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Yes, it's another space. I know it's quiet.

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Books. We've got entertainment. Yeah. Well, yeah.

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And that's, you know. And so, you know, having the library spaces where young people can go to libraries,

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places where they, you know, you've club, but more so the library books library was open.

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I mean, you look at us, you know, we're taking these spaces away.

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It is actually criminal. I think in terms of, you know, where are we supposed to go?

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Really? Yeah. And especially when you don't have money and when you're young, you know, you can't go and buy a coffee, a coffee for three.

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£3. And especially where the to from the kind of really serious to this like these frivolous

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bribery where the weather isn't isn't exactly great for hanging out on the street anyway.

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But yeah, having spaces where they can go and actually envisage in an imagined being in another world, you know, I think is really, really important.

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I mean, I often wonder and this does take it a bit further.

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So I'm saying we have all these big interventions that we are running.

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And I think in the heart of these structural interventions and these big programmes that are run and in terms of finance,

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I'm very keen to find out if actually talking to someone else about it is something that doesn't prove it.

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And we don't have the evidence yet, so it might actually be harmful as well. So I don't know.

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But I think in some ways, you know, we also have to think a little bit different how we tackle violence.

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And maybe just, you know, I think it does relate to your chaplaincy,

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like being able to go somewhere and just telling your story and having someone to listen,

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you know, being practical kind of not judging that already might have kind of people to, you know, react differently the next time.

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There is some amazing work going on around storytelling and encounter in particularly

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a wonderful organisation in Northern Ireland called Healing Through Remembering.

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And they are just doing the most amazing work, which is all based on that.

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It's the it's it's recognising the power of the individual story and the opportunity to and it follows very, very strict ethical guidelines.

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I mean, it's really, really, really well thought through. And an organisation called Diversity Challenges does this a lot.

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And they, for example,

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have brought together former members of the RUC of the Royal Ulster Constabulary with former members or supporters of the IRA in the same space.

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Hearing each other and the the research or the evidence is coming out of those kinds of initiatives is really impressive, really impressive.

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I mean, Brexit may throw all that back into that back into the air, but you know this.

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I totally agree with you, Heidi. The sense of this is that of the individual story in the space to and but also the learning,

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the skills being equipped and supported to listen to something that is really intensely difficult.

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And, you know, that counters everything that you may have been told and sharing stories as in different perspectives to that may be your story.

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But actually, this was my role on the day. This is where I was.

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This was my perspective on that particular situation.

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I've been doing research, obviously with refugees as well, and one of the things that seems to happen all the time and you know, I suppose,

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you know, researchers have talked about how we how do we factor this into our research is that refugees like to tell their stories.

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And I mean, they often it can be traumatic because they often have to tell them in difficult

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spaces in courts that in Britain or in front of an immigration tribunal.

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Those are horrible, traumatising spaces, but also they want to tell them when they meet an interview.

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We are saying, is it because that's the narrative they are told or they expect us to want to hear?

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We're trying to decide or whether it's it's just, you know, we're a way of coping.

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Yeah. In your work, Heidi,

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have you observed that adolescents are more comfortable telling their stories in certain

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contexts than others or in relation to certain with certain people rather than other others?

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I'm not sure if I can completely answered. One of the recent studies we've done wasn't sexual harassment in schools in Tanzania.

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And I was extremely surprised how open these girls and boys talked about their experiences.

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And because I would have assumed that it's something that, you know, it's a bit more hidden, but apparently it seems to be so frequent that,

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you know, a teacher would make comments on a girl's figure in the whole classroom as everyone present.

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And I was also surprised how much boys really picked out on that and how uncomfortable

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it made them and how much to actually judge the teachers kind of comments.

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So they didn't really did not like it, but. And how much to actually realised that and vocalised this as well?

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So I think sometimes you would be surprised some kind of a bit coming back from the previous discussions.

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I do wonder about, you know, adolescent boys.

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And if we're hearing them enough actually without really thinking about experience of violence and all these traumatic,

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difficult things, because I think girls have it a bit easier to talk about it than boys who kind of have.

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Behave as men, and they are more constrained by all these expectations that are put on them or they themselves put on them.

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So in some ways, I think it's one of the things we really should be focussing on more is how to,

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you know, hear their their voices a lot more because it is so us kind of going back to the beginning.

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It's so important because they are the, you know, the partners of the future.

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As the fathers of the future, they are going to be in positions of power or, you know, anything.

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And I think we've drawn out some very, very interesting threads. But is there anything that anyone would like to kind of close with or some things

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you think we might have if we had another go we might talk about next time?

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I've got one, which is I mean,

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I think that in such interesting reflections on space and context and safe space and

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transformative contexts and and football fields as places of possible violence,

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you know, all these, you know, spaces both open and closed that impact people's lives in in particular ways, sometimes violent ways.

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That was that was, to me, very, very interesting. But anyway, we have a few more moments just to think aloud if we like.

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And then I mean, just thinking about space. You know, that's what I mean.

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For example, I mean, the police are more likely to round up young man on the streets to the streets unless the you know,

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the you know, they like people, too, unless they I mean, historically, if you look at, you know, young men as street traders,

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you know, they've been formed, you know, they've been gangs, they're organised. They can.

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But I suppose we're not talking about adolescence because again, you know, as you see, yeah, it's these young men are in their 20s or even older.

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I mean, you know, you know, I was interviewing this, this young man, and I'm sure he was in his 40s or he looked well,

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it was really difficult because he just looked so much older than he probably was, and he was saying he was talking about retirement.

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But he he still still saw himself as a young, you know, a young man.

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And I just felt that. Well, I mean, I think there'd been research done on this.

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You just haven't fulfil any of these dreams. And he has not, as far as he was concerned, reach adulthood.

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So they're much more vulnerable towards violence in cities. I mean, girls tend to be indoors or expected to be indoors,

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but many young men are expected to go out and find work or be on the street, you know, irrespective of their age and do something.

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And that's nothing to do. So that one, you know, so it's not just in vulnerability in terms of being drawn into political violence,

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but also in terms of just being, as you say, being out. You know, that's a really interesting observation.

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You know, that set me thinking very much about what you how you started that, Patricia,

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when you talked about your example of the old, slightly older man who's who?

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And I'm just thinking, you know, there's a kind of set of emotions that we automatically associate with adolescence.

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And if it's the kind of the inability to fulfil dreams, you know, in that sense, it feels like a place where you get stuck.

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Yeah, yeah. And yet it's meant to be a time of I'm thinking of Heidi's word transitioning.

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It's meant to be a time of great promise of kind of fulfilling, realising, fulfilling your potential.

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Finding your role in life, you know, all those sort of open ended things.

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And then when it, you know, when none of that, you just played so much longer.

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Yeah, there is a postdoc, actually. Really? Yeah, but young man and run.

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So I think I have a nice closing on that plan, which is that, you know, the violence it's you know,

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it obviously is a human rights issue for both men and women, but it's also really an adolescence.

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But it really is a developmental issue.

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So regardless of where they, you know, experience violence, we have to prevent that because, yeah, it kind of spreads.

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So does one individual experience as violence, as an adolescent, it might sort of over to the relationship, to the children they have.

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And it might, you know,

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go into all this political violence and the public violence in the public spaces because it's not just contained as we often still think about it,

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it really goes through. It spreads. Yes, not the virus, but we can end it and we can prevent it.

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Fabulous. And that's what we're going to do. Thanks very much, all three of you.

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Thanks to. Thanks very much for listening to this podcast.

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Do you have a listen to the others in this series on understanding adolescence in African contexts?