Child’s play at war memorials: insights from a social media debate

Abstract

Each year, thousands of children visit memorials and other heritage sites during family or school trips, yet heritage scholars possess little understanding of their experiences. Despite its absence from the scholarly literature, children's exploratory play at war memorials recurs frequently in the popular media. Extensive social media interest suggests that public sentiment, often emotional and vividly expressed, deserves study as a potential influence on children's experiences at these and other dark heritage sites. This paper provides new insights of behavioral expectations for children at memorials, based on content analysis of 150 comments on a viral social media post picturing children playing on the Vietnam Women's Memorial in Washington DC. Conducting a stance analysis of comments, we considered commenters' behavioral expectations, meanings they ascribed to memorials, and rationales for their intensely worded positions. Commenters shared several values: that memorials represented soldiers' sacrifice, veterans' service, general places for respect or to do what is right, or artistic value. Yet despite these shared rationales, many commenters expressed polarized opinions of children's play at memorials. Commenters also referenced memorials and battlefields worldwide. This study provides greater understanding of the cultural context of children's visits to memorials and other sites of painful heritage.

Young tourists’ experiences at dark tourism sites: Towards a conceptual framework

“…Despite the barriers, emerging studies examine young tourists’ experiences within dark tourism (Kerr and Price, 2016). Indeed, studies have begun to capture mortality moments of children in some dark tourism environments, such as 9/11 sites, Holocaust exhibits, and war memorials (Kerr et al, 2017b, Price, 2018; Price and Kerr, 2018). Israfilova and Khoo-Lattimore (2018) examine the educational importance of dark tourism, focusing on young tourists’ experiences after their exposure to dark sites.…”

“…Some visitors viewed children’s actions as annoying, disruptive and disrespectful. Indeed, notions of respect and morality are inherent at memorial tourist sites, and young tourists’ play at such sites exposes not only design and interpretation issues, but also conflicts of values, beliefs and deep-seated feelings (Price and Kerr, 2018). As Sutcliffe and Kim conclude: Research tends to examine how accompanying adults interact with children, teach children about appropriate behaviour in heritage/museum venues, or types of exhibits favoured by children.…”

Interpreting Terrorism: Learning from Children's Visitor Comments

“…Visitor comments appear in multiple forms across museums, memorials, and other tourist destinations around the world. Typical formats include handwritten visitor logs (sometimes called comment books), handwritten cards left in collection boxes or posted for public view, comments entered at a computer terminal, and online comments left on travel-oriented websites (see for example Coffee, 2011;Livingstone, Pedretti, & Soren, 2001;Macdonald, 2005;Munar & Ooi, 2012;Price & Kerr, 2017). Despite their proliferation, "comment books are certainly under-used and under-analyzed" by researchers (Coffee, 2011, p. 166).…”

The teenage gaze: Teens and tourism in belfast

“…Their later work (Kerr and Price, 2018) examined a range of research which suggested that children are regarded as reacting inappropriately at such sites including playing war games at battlefield sites, playing music at concentration camps and climbing on war memorials. Yet they argue that their analysis adds weight to the view that children and adults see the same sites through different eyes and that more child-centred methods are needed to capture and understand their views rather than seeing their behaviour through an adult lens (Price and Kerr, 2018).…”