Children have a right to have their views sought and given due weight on all matters affecting them, including at times of emergency and crisis. This article describes the process and findings of the ground-breaking CovidUnder19 survey (“Life Under Coronavirus”) which was co-designed with children for children, capturing the experiences of over 26,000 children in 137 countries as to the realisation of their human rights during the first six months of the covid-19 pandemic. Key findings are discussed through the lens of the crc’ s four general principles, read alongside children’s rights, inter alia, to education, play and to be protected from harm. It argues that governments and public bodies should have sought children’s views – not just because they were under an obligation to do so – but because such engagement, now and in crises to come, provides an early warning system that enables decision-makers to mitigate some of the adverse consequences of their responses for children and their rights.
International evidence has increasingly highlighted the necessity to understand the impact of conflict on the lives of girls and women and the importance of addressing gender equality as part of peace processes. This article argues that women, and especially young women, have been left out of much of the conflict discourse within Northern Ireland and there is little understanding of how the conflict has affected them. Analysis of in-depth interviews with young women reveals how their opportunities and choices in many areas of their life have been restricted by growing up in a divided society. There is a high level of disillusionment with politics and politicians with many identifying what they see as continuing sectarianism in Northern Ireland politics. Yet the "invisibility" of young women is unlikely to be addressed, or their confidence in politics strengthened, unless they are given the space, freedom, and encouragement to begin to articulate their thoughts and concerns.
Despite a growth in analysis of women and conflict, this has tended to overlook the specific experiences of young women. Likewise, in research on youth, conflict and peace, the term 'youth' is often short-hand for young men. Young women's experiences are regularly absent from research and policy discourse, and as a consequence, also absent from public understanding and practice responses. In this paper, we prioritise the views of and on young women to forefront their experiences of one specific form of conflict-related violenceparamilitary violence. We demonstrate that forefronting young women's experiences, and adopting an understanding of violence beyond that which privileges physical violence, unearths the multiple ways in which conflict-related violence is experienced. We further demonstrate how adopting an intersectional lens that prioritises age and gender can surface the specific experiences of young women, and the various ways in which these become silenced by cultures that omit, coerce, reduce and minimise.
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