Say Yes, Spring 2003: War Games
War is no fun at all, yet for centuries it has been a popular theme in the make-believe world of children’s games.
Photograph by Clement Mok/Photodisc © 1999
UNICEF was originally created to help children recover in the aftermath of World War II and protecting children in the midst of armed conflict and natural disaster continues to be one of our most vital objectives. In this media-saturated world of the twenty-first century, however, the task of protecting children from war is not only a matter of preserving them from physical danger but also of guiding their perceptions of the reality of war and violence in general.
Almost every evening we see a hero (of the Hollywood or home-grown variety) lay waste to tens, sometimes hundreds, of bad guys on television. The bad guys are easily identified since their point-of-view and characterisation is often nebulous and their leader is usually downright evil. He always gets what he deserves in the end. The hero gets the girl.
We have always been entertained by such exploits: the ancient poets sang of one battle after another in their epics and plays, thrashing the bad guys. They had plenty of material to work from since most nations have been built out of, or revolutionised from, the ashes of a war. Even the Holy books read like battle histories in places.
While the valid point has been made that War is not a biological necessity
, it is a sad fact that conflict between rival cultures and nations will not become obsolete overnight.
So it’s difficult to explain to children that war is not a good thing when it is plainly endorsed on occasions by religion, cultural history, world leaders and the media. Anyone who has been cross-examined by a curious infant will understand that the subject is a mine-field of contradictions.
Children develop their world-view through playing with toys and interacting with their peers. Many toy-boxes feature fake guns and scale models of the armaments of war -- tanks, jets and jeeps -- often complete with a few platoons of miniature troops in painfully realistic battle-poses. Unsurprisingly, sales of toy guns and military vehicles increased dramatically in Turkey and the world over during the Gulf War of 1991. A similar trend is already apparent in the present climate of aggression.
By letting our children play with such toys we implicitly condone the concept of armed conflict and, when a child pretends to shoot another dead or disposes of a score of toy soldiers, it is easy to argue that they are only playing because they are. However the difference between reality and make-believe in the mind of a child can easily become obscured and that is where the seeds of uncertainty lie: such games train us to see opposing nations and armies in superficial terms of ‘units’ like toy soldiers or bad guys in the movies, despite the reality that they are people also.
This distortion of the reality of war has been further compounded during recent decades with the advent of video games. Today’s children interact with graphic images of slaughter and destruction which are again all too easily dismissed as computerised play.
Images of war presented daily on television are likely to create a pseudo-heroic impression on the child, distorting his world-view: graphic displays of military hardware deployed in Iraq resemble clips from video games while the media claims to bring this new war ‘live’ by satellite into our livingrooms, televising the bombardment of Baghdad. Yet we remain largely ignorant of what is really happening.
Last year, one in four Turkish people signed the Global Movement for Children’s (GMFC) Say Yes for Children pledge which listed Protect children from war -- no child should experience the horrors of armed conflict
as one of the ten essential actions.
More than ever, we need to look very closely at how the realities of war are presented to our children and how they subsequently deal with those realities.
Children need to understand that this is not a video game or an international tournament like the World Cup; they need to know that it is not about heroes and that the ones who stand to lose most are the ordinary families of that beleaguered country -- particularly their peers.
Read how Say Yes for Children really took off in Turkey in the February 2002 issue of Say Yes.
Read all ten actions of Say Yes for Children.
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SAY YES, SPRING 2003
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