The impact of civil conflict on child health: Evidence from Colombia

Internal armed conflicts have become more common and more physically destructive since the mid-20th century, with devastating consequences for health and development in low- and middle-income countries. This paper investigates the causal impacts of the long-term internal conflict on child health in Colombia, following an identification strategy based on the temporal and geographic variation of conflict intensity. We estimate the effect of different levels of conflict intensity on height-for-age (HAZ), weight-for-age (WAZ), and weight-for-height z-scores among children under five years old, and explore the underlying potential mechanisms, through maternal health behavior and health care utilization. We find a harmful effect of exposure to conflict violence in utero and in early childhood for HAZ and WAZ, in the full sample and even more strongly in the rural sample, yet these estimates are smaller than those found for shorter term conflicts. The underlying pathways appear to operate around the time of the pregnancy and birth (in the form of maternal alcohol use, use of antenatal care and skilled birth attendance), rather than during the post-birth period (via breastfeeding or vaccination), and the impacts accumulate over the childhood. The most adverse impacts of conflict violence on child health and utilization of maternal healthcare were observed in municipalities which suffered from intermittent presence of armed groups.     

Villains,Victims, and Conservationists? Representational Frameworks and Sustainable Development on the Transamazon Highway

Literature on conservation and land reform politics concentrates on how local actors are characterized dualistically as either environmental villains or heroes. Here I present three different frames as exemplary of the multiple narratives at stake as actors create environmental subjectivities in relation to political opportunity, based primarily on ethnographic field research in a case study of Projects for Sustainable Development (PDSs) located in the Transamazon highway region of the Brazilian Amazon. I argue that local identities are mediated by their shifting relationships with other interested actors. Through a historical analysis of different frames of identity and land use, I examine how and why representation struggles occurred and shifted, based upon the ways in which powerful actors took advantage of political opportunities. This led to indeterminate outcomes in different local struggles across the region. In the process, local voices were often undermined in favor of interests of more powerful outsiders. The political process through which such struggles occur yield geographically and socially uneven effects contingent upon key events and contestation from disparate groups.     

Spill-over effect in media framing: Representations of wildlife conservation in Zimbabwean and international media, 1989–2010

Myths and metaphors that occur in media frames play an important role in influencing public perceptions of an issue in times of war, political conflict, crisis and disaster. This, in turn, influences policy makers and (inter)national assistance and aid programmes. We investigated whether a metaphoric spill-over of frames used in connection with political events could explain the misrepresentation in the framing of wildlife conservation. Zimbabwe experienced a severe political conflict and economic downturn in 2000 when land reforms took place. We analyzed newspaper articles on Zimbabwe's wildlife conservation published between 1989 and 2010 from newspapers in Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. We selected three issues about wildlife conservation in Zimbabwe in the local and international media, namely, the ivory ban, rhino protection, and Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources to investigate the spill-over effect. Our results show that in the 1990s, the majority of newspaper articles highlighted that wildlife conservation in Zimbabwe was largely successful. However, two major changes occurred after 2000 following the land reforms in Zimbabwe. First, the international media showed little interest in wildlife conservation in Zimbabwe as evidenced by a sharp decline in published articles and second, the frames changed in the international media with the “political unrest and land reform” blame frame becoming more dominant. This transition in reporting, frames, and low frame parity shows that there was a spill-over effect of political frames into wildlife conservation following Zimbabwe's land reforms in 2000. Metaphoric spill-over effects may thus create myths in the readership, in turn influencing policy-derived actions in a sector that is not or poorly related to the actual disaster.     

Trauma, dreaming, and psychological distress among Kurdish children.

The authors examined (a) how traumatic events are associated with children's dream structure and content and (b) which dream characteristics might moderate the negative impact of traumatic events on mental health. Participants were 122 Kurdish children (9-17 years old, M = 13.02, SD = 1.66). Their dreams were collected during 1 week using a semistructured dream diary and scored according to the dream atmosphere, the role of the dreamer, bizarreness, narrative quality, fragmentation and resolution, and content such as themes of death, persecution and rejection, hostility, and anxiety. The results substantiated the hypothesis that children exposed to a high level of traumatic events would report dreams characterized by unpleasant atmosphere, fragmented flow, and low levels of bizarre narrative quality. Pleasant dreams containing complete narratives and happy endings moderated the negative impact of traumatic events on children's mental health. The authors argue that dreaming allows cognitive-emotional processing of traumatic events and may thus enhance child well-being in war conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Achievement and social mobility: Relationships among IQ score,education, and occupation in two generations

This research tests the hypothesis that change over time in women’s status leads to improvements in their children’s health. Specifically, we examine whether change in resources and empowerment in mother’s roles as biological mothers, caregivers, and providers and social contexts that promote the rights and representation of and investment in women are associated with better nutritional status and survival of young children. Analysis is based on a broad sample of countries (n = 28), with data at two or more points in time to enable examination of change. Key indicators of child health show improvement in the last 13 years in developing nations. Much of this improvement—90 percent of the increase in nutritional status and 47 percent of the reduction in mortality—is associated with improving status of women. Increased maternal education, control over reproduction, freedom from violence, access to health care, legislation and enforcement of women’s rights, greater political representation, equality in the education system, and lower maternal mortality are improving children’s health. These results imply that further advancement of women’s position in society would be beneficial.     

Kesum-body and the places of the gods: the politics of children's masking and second-world realities in OKU (cameroon)

As emerging nation-states in sub-Saharan Africa engender warfare and rapid socio-political change that increasingly affect children, this article examines the ways in which child masking may represent a means for children in Oku, a kingdom in the Cameroon Grassfields, to incorporate references to exogenous forms of modernist violence in their fantasy-play. The means by which children overcome their fear of adult masks and the forest spirits they represent by becoming maskers themselves is first examined. Two new children's masquerades, one representing a white man and the other referring to the SDF opposition political party, then serve as a focus to illustrate how children now extend their use of masking to incorporate the exogenous forces of the state, transforming the fragmentation of social ties and local cosmologies these forces threaten into new trans-local models of social cohesion.     

Resources and reproductive success in women with an example from the Kipsigis of Kenya

Contradictory results regarding the relationship between resources and reproductive success of women have led some social scientists to conclude that evolutionary biological models are inappropriate to the study of human social behavior. This paper suggests instead that the variability across societies in this relationship reflects an inadequate specification of the nature and availability of the resources critical to reproduction as well as a failure to understand the mechanisms whereby resources confer reproductive success in traditional, developing, preindustrial, and modern societies. These methodological and conceptual issues are illustrated through use of data on the association between wealth and reproductive success from the Kipsigis, a polygynous agropastoralist population in southwestern Kenya. In this society, land is owned by men, and women gain access to land through marriage. In 3 of the 5 marriage cohorts studied, women with access to larger land plots had higher lifelong reproductive success than their poorer counterparts both in terms of enhanced fertility and survivorship of offspring. This association was independent of confounding factors such as education, age at menarche, husband's age, or occupation. Moreover, wealthy women were found not to make greater use of modern medical child health services when their children were sick than poor women. The Kipsigis data indicate that wealthy women had more nutritional resources than poor women and were able to introduce more suitable weaning foods, leading to a lower incidence of episodes of illness in offspring. Overall, the findings suggest that wealth-related differences in the nutrition and health of mothers and children are important factors in reproductive differentials in Kipsigis society.     

When Silence Becomes Law: Moral Constructions of the Violent Individual

Western law constructs the individual as an agent who can assume responsibility for action independently of context, thus creating an accessible place for hiding systemic political violence. This article considers how individual surrogates of political violence who silence the messages of a Oaxacan assassination emerge from reflexivity as a self-discipline that creates individual agency, law's notion of individual responsibility, and the personalizing processes of bodily violence. Thirty-two years after the assassination, its ethnographer confronts unwelcome knowledge revealed when the silence is broken. Reexamination of his own experiences the night of the murder uncovers ideological levers through which those who become the ‘individuals’ of events are led to detach their behaviors from experience to accept legal constructions of societal relationships.     

Implications of Advancing Paternal Age: Does It Affect Offspring School Performance?

Average paternal age is increasing in many high income countries, but the implications of this demographic shift for child health and welfare are poorly understood. There is equivocal evidence that children of older fathers are at increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders and reduced IQ. We therefore report here on the relationship between paternal age and a composite indicator of scholastic achievement during adolescence, i.e. compulsory school leaving grades, among recent birth cohorts in Stockholm County where delayed paternity is notably common. We performed a record-linkage study comprising all individuals in Stockholm County who finished 9 years of compulsory school from 2000 through 2007 (n = 155,875). Data on school leaving grades and parental characteristics were retrieved from administrative and health service registers and analyzed using multiple linear regression. Advancing paternal age at birth was not associated with a decrease in school leaving grades in adolescent offspring. After adjustment for year of graduation, maternal age and parental education, country of birth and parental mental health service use, offspring of fathers aged 50 years or older had on average 0.3 (95% CI −3.8, 4.4) points higher grades than those of fathers aged 30–34 years. In conclusion, advancing paternal age is not associated with poorer school performance in adolescence. Adverse effects of delayed paternity on offspring cognitive function, if any, may be counterbalanced by other potential advantages for children born to older fathers.     

Evidence on the impact of child labor on child health in Indonesia, 1993–2000

Despite an abundant literature on child labor in developing countries, few papers have attempted to investigate the consequences of child labor on health. This paper explores whether child labor affects child health using data from the Indonesian Socio-Economic Surveys during the 1990s. For our empirical analysis, we restrict our attention to children currently enrolled in school and we use several discrete indicators for health. Our results show that child labor is associated negatively with health. We obtain this result by introducing labor participation as an exogenous covariate in the different health equations. Similar results are found once the work decision is instrumented.     

Medical Humanitarianism Under Atmospheric Violence: Health Professionals in the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey

During the 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey, volunteering health professionals provided on-site medical assistance to protesters faced with police violence characterized by the extensive use of riot control agents. This led to a government crackdown on the medical community and the criminalization of “unauthorized” first aid amidst international criticisms over violations of medical neutrality. Drawing from ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews with health care professionals, and archival research, this article ethnographically analyzes the polarized encounter between the Turkish government and medical professionals aligned with social protest. I demonstrate how the context of “atmospheric violence”—the extensive use of riot control agents like tear gas—brings about new politico-ethical spaces and dilemmas for healthcare professionals. I then analyze how Turkish health professionals framed their provision of health services to protestors in the language of medical humanitarianism, and how the state dismissed their claims to humanitarian neutrality by criminalizing emergency care. Exploring the vexed role that health workers and medical organizations played in the Gezi protests and the consequent political contestations over doctors’ ethical, professional, and political responsibilities, this article examines challenges to medical humanitarianism and neutrality at times of social protest in and beyond the Middle East.     

Transnational childhood and adolescence: mobilizing Sahrawi identity and politics across time and space

This paper proposes the importance of examining not only how and when diasporas are mobilized by political brokers, but also which members of diasporic populations are strategically engaged both according to their own characteristics (including their age) and the nature of their diasporic hosting context. It explores how Sahrawi refugee children and youth in the Algeria-based Sahrawi refugee camps, Cuba, Syria and in Spain have been mobilized by their political representatives (Polisario), asking why particular cohorts of youth have been actively encouraged to promote and protect ‘the Sahrawi cause’, while other members of the diaspora have not. Drawing on a framework that facilitates comparison both within and across cases, the paper argues that a combination of factors influence the extent to which the Polisario is able and interested in activating the support of Sahrawi children and youth, including the characteristics of the students themselves, their position within the respective host contexts, and the space and resources available to the Polisario/SADR in each location.     

Developmental psychopathology: recent advances and future challenges

The integrative field of developmental psychopathology is having a huge impact on our understanding of human health and behavior. In this paper, I use the example of children's early stress exposure to illustrate how developmental psychopathologists now tend to deemphasize diagnostic categories and, instead, emphasize the social and biological contexts, events and circumstances that have created opportunities for maladaptive responses and health problems in youth. This example shows that developmental psychopathology is increasing understanding of how children develop the abilities that allow them to cope effectively with challenges and what leads to failures in development of these abilities. Integrating research about the neurobiology of learning may prove to be a powerful future direction to understand how the environment regulates behavior. Learning processes become increasingly intricate and fine‐tuned as relevant neuroanatomical systems develop, and as the range, complexity and amount of environmental information increases for the developing child. A focus on these processes allows psychopathologists to formulate questions about which neural mechanisms children use to process information, how these mechanisms are themselves shaped by social context, why adverse social environments confer risk for children, and, perhaps, what sorts of neutrally informed interventions might remediate the deficits in self‐regulation that underlie common psychopathologies.     

Egypt’s Popular Uprising and the Stakes of Medical Neutrality

Amidst the recent political uprisings in the Arab region, physicians and other healthcare workers have found themselves in the crossfire. This paper focuses on Egypt’s doctors, paying special attention to how many have both appealed to and practiced medical neutrality as its own potent and contested political stance, particularly since the period of military rule following Mubarak’s removal from power. Our paper draws on interviews with physicians who served as volunteers in the field hospitals in the days of unrest and violence, and with others who played a major role in documenting protesters’ injuries, police brutality, and other forms of state violence against unarmed citizens. Based on interviews with doctors who belong to organizations such as “Tahrir Doctors” and “Doctors Without Rights,” our paper reveals how these doctors’ commitment to professional ethics put them at odds with the orders of military personnel, rendering their appeal to “medical neutrality” a weighty political act in and of itself.     

Urban–rural disparities of child health and nutritional status in China from 1989 to 2006

This paper analyzes urban–rural disparities of China's child health and nutritional status using the China Health and Nutrition Survey data from 1989 to 2006. We investigate degrees of health and nutritional disparities between urban and rural children in China as well as how such disparities have changed during the period 1989–2006. The results show that on average urban children have 0.29 higher height-for-age z-scores and 0.19 greater weight-for-age z-scores than rural children. Urban children are approximately 40% less likely to be stunted (OR = 0.62; p < 0.01) or underweight (OR = 0.62; p < 0.05) during the period 1989–2006. We also find that the urban–rural health and nutritional disparities have been declining significantly from 1989 to 2006. Both urban and rural children have increased consumption of high protein and fat foods from 1989 to 2006, but the urban–rural difference decreased over time. Moreover, the urban–rural gap in child preventive health care access was also reduced during this period.     

The resurgence in resource nationalism and private protected areas: Through the lens of Save Valley Conservancy's indigenisation

It has been observed that the resurgence in resource nationalism in the past decade worldwide has profound implications for all economic sectors including protected areas. However, a review of the international protected area literature reveals a paucity of studies that make use of the construct of resource nationalism as an analytical framework. This paper addresses this gap by bringing to the fore how Zimbabwe's ZANU PF (the political party that brought the country's independence in 1980) has deployed and extended this construct from the 2000 land reform programme to one of the world's largest private wildlife sanctuaries, namely the Save Valley Conservancy (SVC). In doing so, the paper relies extensively on the narratives, debates and legitimations of the ruling elite and other stakeholders around the recent ‘indigenisation’ of the SVC. It was found that a range of actors attempted to use resource nationalism as a ‘resource’ to further their own private economic and political interests whilst others resorted to the conservation discourse. One of the main conclusions of this paper is that managers of protected areas need to be sensitive to the resurgence in resource nationalism. In this connection, it is argued that the ability to negotiate the resurgence in resource nationalism will determine the fate of some private protected areas. The study suggests possible solutions around the indigenisation of SVC and points to future research priorities.     

The impact of heat waves on children’s health: a systematic review

Young children are thought to be particularly sensitive to heat waves, but relatively less research attention has been paid to this field to date. A systematic review was conducted to elucidate the relationship between heat waves and children’s health. Literature published up to August 2012 were identified using the following MeSH terms and keywords: “heatwave”, “heat wave”, “child health”, “morbidity”, “hospital admission”, “emergency department visit”, “family practice”, “primary health care”, “death” and “mortality”. Of the 628 publications identified, 12 met the selection criteria. The existing literature does not consistently suggest that mortality among children increases significantly during heat waves, even though infants were associated with more heat-related deaths. Exposure to heat waves in the perinatal period may pose a threat to children’s health. Pediatric diseases or conditions associated with heat waves include renal disease, respiratory disease, electrolyte imbalance and fever. Future research should focus on how to develop a consistent definition of a heat wave from a children’s health perspective, identifying the best measure of children’s exposure to heat waves, exploring sensitive outcome measures to quantify the impact of heat waves on children, evaluating the possible impacts of heat waves on children’s birth outcomes, and understanding the differences in vulnerability to heat waves among children of different ages and from different income countries. Projection of the children’s disease burden caused by heat waves under climate change scenarios, and development of effective heat wave mitigation and adaptation strategies that incorporate other child protective health measures, are also strongly recommended.     

Physical growth in a transitional economy: the aftermath of South African apartheid

The economic transition in developing countries is not always the result of the change from a centrally-planned to a free-market economy, but may be found within an already existing free-market economy as a result of profound political change, as in South Africa. The release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 heralded an end both to the political system of apartheid and to the concomitant social, political, and economic disenfranchisement of 30 million non-White people in South Africa. The first freely elected non-White government came to power in 1994 and initiated a number of social and economic reforms aimed at alleviating the worst consequences of apartheid. This paper examines the effect of post-apartheid economic and social transition on the growth and development of urban children. Over 4000 children born in Soweto and Johannesburg were enrolled in the Birth to Ten (BTT) birth-cohort study in 1990. Whilst these children were born with lower birth weights than in developed countries, they did grow strongly in infancy, particularly in weight, to reflect normal reference values for body mass index (BMI) by 1 year of age. While post-apartheid social and economic changes were expected to take some time to affect child growth and development, the rate of change has been slower than expected. Data from the BTT study demonstrate that the growth of White children continues to be superior to that of their non-White peers and differences that existed at birth and during infancy have not diminished during childhood and early adolescence. Whatever factors are changed at the national or community levels during economic (and social) transition in South Africa appear not yet to have resulted in improved child physical growth.