Description
A life with safety, dignity and a clean environment is a precondition for sustainable protection. Yet in the most complex and challenging humanitarian emergencies, the most basic rights of affected populations are barely upheld. Children’s physical wellbeing and development is especially at risk, as humanitarian responses are often adult-focused, and fail to respond to the specific needs of children and the natural environment on which they depend. This paper contends that the uniquely complex nature of dire emergencies favours immediate protection responses at the expense of a longer-term approach needed to build a sustainable, accountable and ecologically sensitive protection of children. This paper analyses the deployment of the language of child protection in policies and practices (operational and programmatic) in complex humanitarian emergencies and mass displacement. What does sustainable and accountable protection look like? Based on discourse analysis of UN emergency response policies and primary research on the mass displacement of the Rohingya people in the mid-late 2010s, this paper illuminates the variable and short-term protection of children. We find that protection and accountability here is also obfuscated by the language of crisis that can dehumanise children and young people on the move.
