Children’s agency in development – how does UNICEF present children through communication?
Anna Lundén
The University of Sussex
Knowledge, Power and Resistance (Global Studies)
Autumn 2019
Introduction
"The welfare of today’s children is inseparably linked with the peace of tomorrow’s world."
Henry Labouisse, UNICEF Executive Director
It is difficult to argue with the statement that children are the future of humankind. Due to their vulnerable position in society, the lack of tools and knowledge to live on their own in the society, the responsibility for children undisputedly falls within the adults. This holds especially for countries where children encounter many dangers and the environment isn’t capable to guarantee the actualization of children’s rights. Therefore, media has often represented children in “developing countries” as victims, the receiving part of the development aid and passive subjects relying on the international help.
Even though children have always been active members of society, it hasn’t been easy to get their voice and message through in society. On account of media’s ever growing role and capacity to reach people all over the world, also children have found their way to engage with events of the world and socialize through media, often even more efficiently than adults. In 2019, there are more than 4 billion people using the internet and more than 5 billion mobile users (Smart Insights, 2019). Due to the tools media is providing, it is easier to spread knowledge about the circumstances children are facing, but also it permits the international community to hear the thoughts and aspirations of children all over the world. But do we hear them? Regardless of the widespread usage of media and many different media platforms, do children have the possibility to be heard in the global south? Greta Thunberg is a remarkable example of the way in which it is constantly easier for non-adults to spread and manifest one’s beliefs and goals through media, and accumulate these concerns to engage people globally. But does every child have the same possibility to express actively their needs and thoughts?
Unfortunately, the digital divide has not enabled, at least yet, every child to be heard. Thus, it is even more important to support children to get their voice through and also pay attention to the way in which NGOs and international aid-institutions describe children’s needs. Especially, attention needs to be drawn on their agency in societies where they are not always able to define it themselves. According to Amartya Sen (1999) as cited by Jacobson (2016) communication strengthens the voice of the neglected and enables individuals to contribute directly to their lives. Development means the capability to choose among different functions, in other words, social change can only happen when an individual is free to choose by their self the capabilities and opportunities that one wants to fulfill.
In this essay, I discuss the agency of children in developing countries by analyzing the
ways in which The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) presents children and their agency in their media representations. One of the world’s prominent children right advocates, UNICEF is the oldest international organization that is working only for the benefit of children and it has provided humanitarian and developmental aid since the year 1946. The aim of this essay is to provide an insight on how UNICEF media platforms represent children today and the agency of a child in a modern world. I argue that organizations and media focusing on international development issues should support children’s voice to be heard, which in this way strengthens their agency in social change.
The structure of the essay is the following. First, I discuss the children’s role in society: how they have been perceived and presented in media and more generally in the field of development. In the third chapter, I focus on the history of UNICEF and analyze how it is described in UNICEF’s own website. In the fourth chapter, I shift the gaze to present day and analyze the content of UNICEF’s current website and two different social media platforms. The focus is on the impact of the visual decisions and the agency – or lack of it – that UNICEF appears to enforce. In the fifth chapter, I discuss the importance of agency and the possible methods of encouraging it.
Children, the objects of aid or individual agents of society?
To understand how children in developing countries are represented in the media, it is helpful to look into the history of communication in the development. Starting from the suggestion made by president Harry Truman after the Second World War to help the “third world countries” to improve their economies and societies through the Marshall plan until the Millennium Development Goals launched by the United Nations, the international development aid has had many different ideologies and forms of supporting. This has also affected the way in which communication for development has functioned and how the people receiving the aid have been represented in media (McAnay, 2012). During the modernization approach (1945-1965), the economic support was in a leading role in the aid field and the information spread by the media was mainly from top-down: the providing countries sharing their knowledge to developing societies. According to the world system theory put forth by Immanuel Wallerstein in 1965, the developing countries were encouraged to become self-sustained and independent from the global world order. This led to communication for development becoming more reflective and critical. McAnay describes how by the 1980’s, the international aid shifted to multiplicity approach. New movements regarding gender, environment, human rights and participatory development emerged, which also encouraged communication to become more diverse. Instead of always representing people in developing countries as passive victims, more positive and agency-driven pictures and stories started to emerge. The aim was to let people tell their own story, but the question remained: whose story had the loudest voice, who became heard and how?
Especially children in developing countries are often represented in the media as victims of the circumstances, helpless individuals who need to be saved and in need of support from outside their own community. Regardless to say, often in areas facing a humanitarian crisis or poverty, children do need international aid, but this doesn’t imply that they don’t have a voice of their own. Children have often been seen as subjects of the society that need to be protected and guided, sometimes even considered as passive members of the society before they reach the official age of “adulthood” (Corsaro, 1997). It wasn’t until the 1990’s that children were considered in social sciences to be
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active members of the society. The Declaration of Children’s Rights in 1959 helped children to become more acknowledged in the development field. Further advances were made in 1990, when Children’s Rights Convention, launched by the UN, became the most universally agreed treaty in history. All countries but two, were committed to work for Children’s Rights – children had globally become acknowledged and respected, at least in theory. (Unicef, 2019.)
The UN Convention on the Rights of Children guarantee the freedom of speech and the possibility to participate in their own lives, including the article 12, respect for the views of the child, and the article 13, freedom of expression. “Every child has the right to express their views, feelings and wishes in all matters affecting them, and to have their views considered and taken seriously. Every child must be free to express their thoughts and opinions and to access all kinds of information, as long as it is within the law.” The circumstances a child is facing in her everyday life determines if she genuinely has an opportunity to express herself or become heard. (Unicef United Kingdom, 2020.) According to Roger A. Hart (UNICEF, 1992) there is still a lot of discussion whether the children are too naïve to get to choose the direction of their own lives and lacking the decision-making ability or if the question actually is about protecting them from the involvement and responsibility in the problems of society and allow them to live as carefree childhood as possible. But wouldn’t both approaches locate children back to a passive position in society? Hart states that there is often a strong tendency to underestimate the competence of children, while building a false agency for them through media, events, discussions, which may cause a patronizing effect. “Children are undoubtedly the most photographed and the least listened to members of society.” (Ibid. 9.)
The history of a child aid through the lens of UNICEF
I focus on the digital information found in UNICEF websites, since I believe it is one of the most efficient ways to reach audience in the present day, which makes it the most meaningful tool to represent the children in developing countries. UNICEF describes thoroughly its foundation and history in its website. After the Second World War,
Europe was at the edge of mass starvation, and especially children were in a severely vulnerable position. UNICEF was founded in 1946, and its primary aim was to provide short term emergency relief such as milk rations, vitamins and cod-liver oil. “There are no enemy children, policies have been put aside to fulfill children’s needs” (Unicef Ireland, 2019). One of the main principles of UNICEF was that there should never be any discrimination due to race, nationality, religious or political belief. Soon after its foundation, UNICEF realized that many children face daily, ongoing and silent emergencies all around the world and therefore UNICEF moved into a long-range benefit approach. UNICEF started to provide support in forms of family planning, nutrition, clean water and most of all, education.
UNICEF expanded its work with children extremely rapidly: after five years UNICEF was already working in more than 100 countries, and it became necessary to start fundraising from the public as well as governments. After twenty years of operation, UNICEF had doubled its funding, and almost half of its means was dedicated to education, specially in countries that had recently gained independence. Although UNICEF was focusing on a long lasting aid structure, UNICEF also had to act fast for a large number of children who were still living in an immediate emergency due to ongoing civil wars, genocides, poverty and aggressive epidemics. In order to raise more awareness of children’s living conditions around the world, UNICEF published State of the World’s Children report, and according to UNICEF, this “signature UNICEF innovation” soon became “development agency standard”. UNICEF’s became active in the development field extremely fast and with treaties such as the Children's Rights Convention and the launch of the global Millennium Development Goals, which gathered more world leaders than ever before, UNICEF had attained its status in the field of development. UNICEF first started to work for the benefit of the war children in Europe, but after 70 years since its foundation, UNICEF is already working in over 190 countries and is the largest child aid organization in the world. (Unicef Ireland 2019, Unicef 2020.) UNICEF describes its foundation and history in many ways in its international and national websites, using text, videos, photo essays. As expected, children are presented in almost every picture, but the actual main character of the story is no one less than UNICEF itself. The way the discourse of history is described seems to implicate that UNICEF has very direct and strong relation with children: whenever or whatever the problem was, UNICEF was the one to rescue.
”From the smoke and ashes of World War II, a refugee crisis emerged unlike any the world had seen. Out of this destruction, UNICEF was created to ease the burden of the world’s most vulnerable children.”
(Unicef Ireland, 2019.)
The discourse used in the websites can easily create an impression that whether the problem was war, malnutrition, diseases or education, UNICEF was the one who arrived to help the anonymous, vulnerable, helpless children. In every picture there is a child either being helped, happy after being helped or children in somehow uncomfortable or dangerous situations. The situation doesn’t seem reciprocal, children are always the receiving, quiet subject in these presentations. The same way to address the situation carries on throughout the decades. For example, depicting the 1980s, one of the videos of “UNICEF history” (Unicef Ireland, 2019) describes how children were facing globally many tragedies, such as civil wars and poverty, but “fortunately for the world’s children, extremely good news from UNICEF were around the corner”. Even though the storyline underlines the importance of the International Convention of Children Rights and all the international laws that were constituted for the safety of children, the children in the 1990s were still presented mainly as passive and silent participants of the structure. It isn’t before the decade 2000 that children are presented for the first time to be able to do something for themselves, to have some sort of agency in the process of aid. In a special session of the United Nations General Assembly, which was the first dedicated exclusively to children, there is a picture of young child addressing the United Nations General Assembly.
The third executive director of UNICEF, James P. Grant, stated in the early 1980s that “development has to have a human face, face of a child” (Unicef Ireland, 2019). In this aim, UNICEF has surely succeeded, unfortunately maybe even too excessively. The passive, either positive or negative, presentation of the object of help, creates far too often a misrecognition and strengthens power-relations between the giver and receiver (Chouliaraki, 2011). It seems to be crucial to present a child as a victim so that UNICEF’s own role would come across as the strong, equal, global helper for all the children in the world. This kind of discourse strengthens UNICEF’s own agency in development field, legitimizing all its actions and unquestionable ways of communicating about the object of help. Ultimately, UNICEF has a truly powerful and universal claim to its work – who could argue against the helping of helpless victims? At least in public.
Children of UNICEF today
As I have stated above, the communication for development has changed and evolved through the decades and become somewhat more reflective and reciprocal – or has it? Visiting the UNICEF ́s website gives an overlook on how the organization is presenting its work and children in present day. Pictures of children are again in an important role, and big pictures of smiling and laughing children are the first thing that probably catch the audience’s attention and slogans such as “for every child, fair chance”, “Find out how UNICEF drives change for children and young people every day, across the globe” and “Beyond the headlines, every child has a story”. What is peculiar in their website is the fact that apparently these chosen pictures are presenting the global range of children they are supporting, and they are seemingly from different regions of the world. Still, the individuals in the pictures seem to be all from the global south. One might even find it as ethnically selective, since there seems to be no pictures of children from western societies. It is easy to find information about UNICEF’s work, statistics, different ways to engage with the work of UNICEF, but again, little is said about children’s own agency and aspirations.
Viewing the social media platforms of UNICEF, the same pattern is occurring. Facebook and Instagram are often regarded as slightly more “easygoing” platforms of communication, where visuality plays an important role. In the UNICEF Facebook page, multiple videos and pictures of children appear. In some of them, the child’s nationality and name are mentioned and there might be even a short interview or quote from the child. UNICEF’s Instagram, a communication platform that is based on pictures and videos, is again full of children’s faces, most of them looking happy, playing, studying or receiving some sort of aid. In some pictures, in addition to their name and nationality, there is a short quote from them, which might reflect a little bit the thoughts of the child themselves. Most of the pictures and videos in these platforms share some sort of statistics or description of the child’s life. Even though there would appear a short quote or interview of the child, very rarely the viewer gets to hear what children themselves think about the situation, the possible economic support their pictures are trying to provoke or what they would like to do or be done to their own situation. In some short videos, you can see children giving a speech as National Ambassadors or actors such as Orlando Bloom or Millie Bobby Brown speaking about the “identifiable” struggles of childhood. However, the voice of the actual child who is being helped through the work of UNICEF, is unfortunately remarkably silent.
Agency has become an essential part of the development discourse (Wilson, 2011) and, while trying to reinforce this agenda through communication, the focus gets easily shifted from the existing power relations to the apparent agency of the child. I argue that it takes more than a picture of a child, a name or a quote to present children as active individuals. This is the case especially when the name of the organization and its action is shown as the active part of the society and therefore getting far more recognition in the field of development than the children or their communities. One way to analyze
this presented power-relation is the fact that UNICEF might need to create a happy and grateful public image, in order to gain funding and supporters all around the world. According to Wilson (2011) images that reinforce the old power-relations between the “global north and south”, are also necessary for the organizations which need to function in a neo-liberal development field.
The positive and anonymous pictures of children may also create a misleading interpretation of the relation between child and the viewer and also of their agency in two different ways, (see figure 1). First, according to Lilie Chouliaraki (2011, 8) “-- the personalization of the sufferer (in the photos of smiling children, in the sentimental texts of child sponsorship or in the eye witness accounts of aid workers) articulate such sense of fine-tuning between the donor and the receiver of aid.” Chouliaraki argues that the smile and passive role of the child presented in pictures may let the viewer or donor to think, that due to the financial support one is giving, it is possible to change the course of the life of the child, and instead of empowering the child, the aid in fact reinforces the agency of the audience. Second, since it is often unclear who the children in the pictures are or how do they feel, it alienates the child even more from the audience and therefore creates clear distance between the audience and child. The child becomes an “other”, someone different to us. The otherness is born not due to the lack of information, but because we are aware that the person is not part of “us”, but instead part of the “other people” (Ahmed, 2000).
Discussion
Why do we have to recognize children’s changing role and agency in the field of development? Why should children participate more and strengthen their agency? And why is it important that the agency of a child is communicated onwards? First, the way we perceive the world around us is all the time more dependent on the media and the way we recognize people outside of our everyday lives. On the other hand, communication through media has become more accessible to people than ever before and a way to address and support the global changes that individuals and societies long for. Roger A. Hart argues (1992) that children are the least listened to members of the society and in order to children to grow up as active members of society, as individuals who believe they are able to be involved in decision making and taking responsibility from their own lives, it is crucial for them to learn from an early age, that these kind of possibilities do exist. Adults and institutions should be able to provide these opportunities and motivate children to speak for themselves, just as it was stated in the Convention of Children’s Rights. According to Hart, “tokenism”, the practice to make a symbolic effort to certain individual or marginalized group feel included, describes well the power relations between children and big organizations such as UNICEF: “charming children are selected by adults to sit on a panel with little or no substantive preparation on the subject and no consultation with their peers who, it is implied, they represent” (ibid. 10).
Hart encourages children to be taken more seriously and participate more in the field of development aid and social changes. Not only because it is important for the children, but also because every culture and situation are different, and so depending on the particular context which is supported by international development aid. Participatory communication (Scott, 2014) is a possible approach to the strengthening of children’s agency. Participatory communication should be understood as bottom-up process, where the social change embarks from the needs and aspirations of the people who are in need of social change. Scott argues that “communication is not seen as simply as a tool for achieving a particular objective, but as a means of empowering all members of the community to have their voices heard” (ibid. 49).
Paulo Freire, argues in his famous theory of “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (1970) that the free dialogue is the only way to break the structure of oppressed and oppressors. Through the reflective dialogue it is possible to advance critical consciousness and create social change, which is thrived from the individual or community itself. It appears that UNICEF is trying to create this kind of dialogue in some level in its organization. A subpage found in UNICEF’s website, “Voices of Youth” describes offering “inspiring, original insight and opinion from across the globe – by young people, for young people”. The site consists of different blogs, instructions on how to take action, surveys and stories of children making an impact and sharing ideas. Also, in UNICEF’s main page, after a little bit of a search, one can find “Communication for Development” subpage, where UNICEF describes its principles for communicating with children, strong history in amplifying the voices of children and communities and how they are “engaging communities and listening to adults and children as they identify problems, propose solutions and act upon them”.
Through the participatory communication we are able to build a more sustainable social change, since children will learn from a young age to participate and engage with the world around them. It might be that UNICEF is in fact engaging with participatory communication methods, but how this action is presented in its communication is unfortunately rather brief and this way the audience easily pays more attention to the agency of UNICEF itself than to the children they are helping.
Conclusion
In this essay I have discussed about the importance of children’s agency and how it has been addressed in the communication of UNICEF. My main argument is that the way children are presented in the media affects the way they are treated in public as well: the more possibilities they have to themselves and showing their agency and act on it, the better qualified and ready they are to act in the world as adults as well. In my view, UNICEF does underline the importance of every child in its work, but instead of empowering children to have an impact own lives, it seems they are strengthening their own role as an aid providers. Because UNICEF has such a long history in supporting children in the international development field, the organization also maintains lot of symbolic power. With this symbolic power, UNICEF is able to maintain a certain structure of communication, which again recreates the roles of active helper and passive receiver. As mentioned earlier, some forms of the participatory communication does exist, but at least in UNICEF’s communication, that does not constitute a visible part. Maybe the idea of UNICEF is actually more about supporting and spreading knowledge, than supporting the children to create their own agency in society. But since our perception of the world is affected by the news and information we receive every day from all over the world, it is not indifferent how we present the world around us. Both to the children and to the audience, it would be of high importance to understand that the smiling, receiving and passive child is actually a full member of the society, full of aspirations, opinions and ideas.
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