IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/aaechp/978-3-030-92474-4_34.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Making Peace with Children: Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report for the Children of Sierra Leone

In: Peace Studies for Sustainable Development in Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Helen Bond

    (Howard University)

Abstract

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions look to the past to envision a better future. After years (1991–2002) of brutal conflict in Sierra Leone, there existed a need to confront a war that was characterized by widespread atrocities. The nation wanted to know what precipitated the war, but also how did it engulf its most precious resource, children, and youth?. At the start of the conflict, Sierra Leone was a nation of the young, with nearly half of its population composed of children and young adults. How can their energy and aspirations help the nation chart a new way forward? These questions gave birth to this chapter and to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report for the Children of Sierra Leone. No truth commission in the past had ever produced such a report making it a relatively new and understudied phenomenon. Children are increasingly becoming a focus of truth commissions as societies with large youth populations seek more sustainable solutions to peace and development. This chapter describes how the child-friendly version of Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report came about and how it gave special attention to the experiences of children and youth within the armed conflict. The second section examined how large marginalized youth populations can become key participants in the peace and reconciliation process. The third section examines how centering the needs and aspirations of young people are critical to societies with youth majorities.

Suggested Citation

  • Helen Bond, 2022. "Making Peace with Children: Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report for the Children of Sierra Leone," Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development, in: Egon Spiegel & George Mutalemwa & Cheng Liu & Lester R. Kurtz (ed.), Peace Studies for Sustainable Development in Africa, pages 419-432, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:aaechp:978-3-030-92474-4_34
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-92474-4_34
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:aaechp:978-3-030-92474-4_34. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.