Palestinian refugee children: Violence in school and family

Abstract

Spanish

French

This article employs a Foucauldian perspective to examine how Palestinian refugee children are governed through dominance and control strategies in social spaces, such as school and family. Each of these institutions is dedicated to the control and regulation of the development of both the body and mind of Palestinian refugee children through regimes of discipline, learning, development, maturation and skill. Such institutions exert symbolic violence, domination and manipulation on their users, to the point that even physical violence – school teachers hitting students – is embodied by the staff of these institutions.

Keywords

Education systems family relations Lebanon Palestinian refugees violence

Introduction

The forms and definition of violence constitute the main route to understanding and analysing it as a phenomenon. However, the definition of the concept, its scope and limits is problematic and disputed. The use of this concept by the political actor differs from the understanding of the human rights activist, or in the media or public debates. In the humanities as well, violence is a multi-faceted concept, in addition to being studied and analysed in different scientific fields. The treatment of violence in sociology has witnessed a remarkable development in approach and analysis. It witnessed a transition from a stagnant and deterministic view focused on the study of the structural causes and forms of violence to an interactive and dynamic view of violence through its effectiveness, its context, and its location in order to analyse the acts, meanings, symbols and representations expressed. Violence encompasses all the life, physical and symbolic actions that frame people’s lives, determines the pattern of their interactions and develops their abilities in society.

This article defines violence as any arbitrary physical or symbolic action against a human being – for instance, when a body undergoes physical violence, as well as being faced with physical and/or symbolical constraints that prevent it from developing to its full capacities and competences and when it cannot appropriate the space necessary for the development of its social actions or of its practices (Ramognino, 1997: 42). Based on this definition and an interactive approach, the case study in this article is about Palestinian refugee children who suffer violence in schools and family. The choice of these two spaces (schools and family) is based on their importance as institutionalised spaces of primary socialisation. These spaces are, generally in any state, governed through dominance and control strategies in social spaces (Foucault, 1975), while in specific situations such as asylum, dominance and control strategies are highest against refugees. This is especially so when refugees have no rights and live in a situation of legal discrimination, as is the case of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (Kortam, 2013).

Being Palestinian refugees in Lebanon

Forced to leave their territory and driven away from their native land, Palestinians arrived in Lebanon in two waves. In 1948, with the creation of the State of Israel, Palestinians lived the catastrophe, known by its Arabic name al-Nakba. From this year, the first refugees of the Levant of the XXs appeared (Gelber, 2006). In 1967, while the first refugees held onto their hope of returning to their homeland, a second wave of refugees appeared with the Arab defeat and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza: this was the Naksa (defeat).

Palestinians in Lebanon are divided into five groups. There are those groups registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) living in camps; others are registered with UNRWA and they live in gatherings, cities and villages. On the other hand, those unregistered with UNRWA live in camps or outside (Al-Natour, 1993: 14). In Lebanon, no legal text has provided a definition for a ‘Palestinian refugee’. However, from a legal perspective, Palestinians are not considered different from other foreigners defined as ‘every natural or juridical person who is not a Lebanese subject’ (Article 1, 10 July 1962). Palestinians in Lebanon are excluded from citizenship rights and are treated in the same way as foreigners, although there are some who have lived there for 70 years, i.e. four generations have been born in Lebanon. Despite this, foreigners enjoy the right to property, while Palestinians are deprived of it. Whereas on 4 January 1969, the amendment to Act No. 11614 authorised the right of ownership for all foreigners; Law No. 296 of 20 March 2001 prohibited the right of ownership only to Palestinians (UNRWA, 2016).

UNRWA was established on 8 December 1949 by the resolution of the UN General Assembly No. 302 (IV). With a special protection regime, it is in charge of humanitarian aid for refugees through the provision of direct relief and work programmes for Palestine refugees in the Near East. UNRWA is responsible for providing the necessary services, such as health, education and relief, and their management within the camp. It began operations on 1 May 1950, and, since then, has been establishing schools in camps, providing rations to Palestinians and leading projects and services to take care of Palestinians’ health and improve their living conditions.

Palestinian refugees receive humanitarian relief, but not in their social, legal or political status, given their condition as refugees. To succeed, refugees must enjoy economic, social and cultural rights. UNRWA is the first to provide services to domestic Palestinian refugees, ensuring social order in the host country and internationally. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are a productive and liable body (Foucault, 1975: 34). They are, through their bodies, the object and the main target of the strategy of power. This power acts on them, indirectly by ‘soft’ methods (Foucault, 1975: 34) via subjection to violence as well as locked away in camps. Indeed, to be sure that the discipline in the Lebanese society is practicable, the state multiplies machines to control Palestinians, to break in bodies, through legal and disciplinary power (Kortam, 2013).

Theoretical framework and methodology

Individuals pass through centres of local authority, dispersed micro-powers (family, school, factories, prison, social institutions, etc.) and disciplinary techniques that articulate each other (Foucault, 1975). Some of these institutions, mainly family and school, form an objective social structure (Dubet and Martuccelli, 1996). In such a scenario, an individual is born, and initially internalises social attitudes and roles; this is primary socialisation (Berger and Luckmann, 1986/1996). However, socialisation is never final and it would be illusory to want to predict this or that type of behaviour or act solely based on the knowledge, reconstructed, of the process of socialisation of an individual or a group often limited to primary socialisation only.

This article argues that it is important to put more emphasis on schools and family as a social space where children pass most of their time in camps. It is also important not to interpret these places as a failure of primary socialisation, or a bad internalisation of social codes and practices, but as a space where violence exists and the fulfilment of children is limited.

The guarantors of social order are numerous and diverse (Foucault, 1975). A failure of social order is defined by what is abnormal or considered a disorder. The power will seek to manage this disorder, specifically to domesticate it through control mechanisms (Foucault, 1975), and this is where schools play a role (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964). By managing this order, a set of standards are in place. In this sense, this control is the foundation of social order. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that this control has been put in place through power relations and, therefore, has not only served to ensure the survival of the social group, but also to ensure the perpetuation of the power of social groups that determine such control (Foucault, 1975).

Taking this into consideration, this article will analyse schools and families as social space where children in the camps pass most of their time.

Focusing on the education and socialisation inside the family and school does not imply adopting a determinist or a functionalist approach – reality is more complex than child socialisation in school and family. As mentioned before, it means to put in the spotlight two important child socialisation spaces, specifically in refugee camps, in addition to the role that family and peers could play in preventing violent radicalisation. An examination of these potentially influential factors on the individual tendency to violence must take into account the important mediating influences of domains outside the family that play a role in the formation of behavioural patterns.

My work is therefore based on fieldwork carried out between September and December 2008, and a follow-up field trip during the summer of 2015. Its findings draw on a qualitative methodology involving observation, participation in camp activities, interviews and focus groups with 30 young men and women, married and single, from different socio-professional profiles, aged between 20 and 30 years old, interested in the research subject and suffering from different forms of violence.

School as a space of control and growth

The school system, on the one hand, ‘from birth to this day … has consistently contributed to producing and reproducing manual/non-manual, manual/intellectual opposition in one form or another. It is one of its constants. Its greatest victories are to have imposed the devaluation of oral culture and the supremacy of writing, the inferiority of the hand and the superiority of the mind, whereby it contributes to produce and reproduce changing relationships of domination’ (Petitat, 1982: 346). On the other hand, ‘the educational institution has often contributed to the historical movement, to the evolution of civilizations, school and writing upset the logic of cultural and social production-reproduction’ (Petitat, 1982: 466). Thus, the school institution liberalises and participates in social changes through its reproductive power; however, by its power, it reproduces social inequality and exercises social control at the same time (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970).

Schools trigger social changes through their production–reproduction logic (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970). With this, however, it also reproduces social inequality and exercises social control. Such social inequalities translate into selection inequality, enabling what Bourdieu calls ‘the logic of stigma’; it expresses judgements of attribution; school failure is presented as an attribute or indictment of the popular classes: these children are uneducated, incompetent, difficult, deficient, maladjusted (Bourdieu, 1979: 554).

Schools in themselves exert a symbolic violence on students by arbitrarily teaching a sense of society and imposing a habitus¹ in line with the hierarchy of groups. This symbolic violence leads to different forms of ‘legitimised’ domination, that is to say, domination recognised as ‘natural’. Thus, those dominated adhere to the order of the dominant in complete ignorance of the arbitrary nature of these mechanisms and operations (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964). Many difficulties in the education system refer to this violence, which limits the development of children and shows school as a space where violence is a tool of expression among students and between teachers and students.

Palestinian refugee children and the right to education in Lebanon

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are, de facto, living this inequality and undergo domination. They face exclusion from the Lebanese public education system and private schools are unaffordable to them. Indeed, in Lebanon, Law No. 686 of 1998 provides that only Lebanese children be entitled to free primary education. However, the Lebanese authorities are required to abide by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child to guarantee the right to education of all children in their territory. In particular, this means that all children living in Lebanon should benefit from free and compulsory primary education, without discrimination based on their legal status, particularly their status as refugees or asylum seekers, or on the status of their parents or tutors.

Amnesty International’s 2007 report on the conditions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon revealed to the Committee on the Rights of the Child that the Lebanese government has openly acknowledged the very unsatisfactory situation of Palestinian children in the area of education. The following was noted:

The educational levels of Palestinian [refugees] are not comparable to those of Lebanese children or even to Palestinian children [refugees] living in neighbouring Arab countries. In Lebanon, 1 in 3 Palestinian children over 10 years of age leaves school before the end of his or her primary or intermediate years. The dropout rate is 39%, 10 times higher than that of Lebanese students, both boys and girls. In addition, the number of Palestinian youth with a diploma of secondary or higher education is very low and less than half of that of Lebanese students. … Those who choose to continue their studies – and they are only a few – try to enrol in free public schools. However, the number of places available in these schools is limited, and priority is given to Lebanese students. (Amnesty International, 2007)

As noted earlier, UNRWA offers education services to Palestinian refugees in its country mandate (Occupied Territory and Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon). However, Lebanon is the only country in which UNRWA runs secondary schools – the reason being that Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have limited access to public secondary education and cannot afford the high cost of private secondary education, as noted above. However, this study reveals two challenges that UNRWA is faced with in Lebanon. The first one is an external issue related to the economic and political crises, and it is UNRWA’s general and education budgets which are at the base of its weak educational provision for refugees. The second challenge is specific to the fieldwork, which revealed some poor teacher skills, as described by interviewees.

Decline of the education system

Some interviewees were working as teachers at UNRWA schools. By analysing their interviews we can conclude the following.

First, UNRWA’s budget shrinks year-by-year, putting schools under more and more pressure to work with a limited budget.² While the Lebanese state stipulates a maximum of 25 students in a class in public schools, UNRWA has a policy that increases the class size while providing lower salaries to teachers to save on costs. Because of this, there are 45 students on average in each class of 40 minutes’ duration, giving each student an average of one minute with the teacher.

Second, the problem of education in UNRWA begins during the first three years in the primary education of children (which covers children aged 6–9). In this period, going to the next level of education is automatic to make way for a new batch of students every time. Because of this, many arrive at the end of elementary school almost illiterate or without knowledge of any foreign language. Then, in the case of high school students, their classes are also managed automatically to make room for others. At the same time, the only true assessment systems for students are the two formal exams of the Lebanese state: lower secondary school certificate and secondary school certificate. Without these, students cannot advance to the next cycle.

Despite the fact that financial and technical resources are constraints in the education system, UNRWA only provides books to students and these students have to pay a nominal price for schooling and a deposit on the books. Because there are some courses that students are required to pursue in school libraries, the library is a vital location for their learning. However, it is difficult for students to concentrate given that most libraries have noisy halls and seating without back support, making the students more prone to fatigue. Furthermore, libraries are not accessible all the time, for example, one library serves the seven schools in Baddawi camp; but it is not open most of the time. Moreover, the schools’ IT equipment is inadequate and often of low quality. In this setting, students spend six hours at school without a space they can rest in during their breaks. Aside from this, classes are dilapidated and there is little proper shelter from the rain and sun, giving the children no motivation at all to spend time at school.

Furthermore, there is no health monitoring for children or proper first aid in case they get hurt: teachers have to help the students on their own. There are also no hygiene measures in schools. For instance, those with toilets are usually left dirty with a stench that permeates the site. In addition, the water in the schools’ open tanks becomes a breeding ground for a large number of insects.

Schools are meant to be a place suitable for children. However, in the majority of schools, there is no playground or any form of entertainment or recreation available for children, which forces them to play on the streets. It is on these streets where games often lead to violence by imitating what they experience and re-enacting war in their own way. They reproduce in games the reality in which they are born: a fact rooted in their life and imagination. Hana, a teacher, described the normal scenario at school: ‘They re-enact war, choke and kick each other and fight with knives, sticks and stones. It is as if they are not children. They do it everywhere: in the classroom, in the courtyard and outside of school.’

In school fights may involve knives, and teachers suffer from injuries in their attempts to resolve conflicts. These fights often end in severe punishment and are sometimes managed by the camp’s committee, which represents the administrative authority of the camp. However, these fights do not just involve students, as teachers can sometimes be involved, as targets or as mediators instead of teaching.

The decreasing budget weakens both the education system and educational staff, who themselves are already coming from a debilitated community of refugees. Working at UNRWA for Palestinian refugees is the best work they can get to assure a good salary, insurance and upward mobility.

According to Tarek, a young teacher in Baddawi camp, the education system itself is weak, which results in the poor performance of teachers and poor attendance of students. Tarek expressed his desire to have just 25 students in the classroom to be more equitable with his time. However, with the obligation to achieve results and numbers, he has to finish his programme by the end of the year for his own performance to be evaluated. Under this system, all teachers, including Tarek, are obliged to work under constraints and limitations. His own teaching style is to give each student a chance to advance and learn at the beginning of the year. After the first three months, Tarek evaluates the capabilities of his students and their desire to learn. For example, if there is a student with failing grades, he will offer help in the first instance and understand why it is happening to the student. However, if the student’s performance shows no signs of improvement, he will consider the student as lacking motivation and categorise him or her based on that. Tarek will then focus his energy and time on those whom he considers as motivated. He directs those he considers disruptive and lacking motivation to the socio-educational counsellor who can guide students to a psychotherapist for psychological counselling if needed.

With this mindset, the teacher’s goal is set to safeguard the class from disruptive students and move forward with the others. Thus, many students drop out during their early years of education (Al-Hroub, 2011).

Until the 1980s, a dropout problem did not exist among Palestinians (Al-Husseini, 2008). In fact, they were widely recognised worldwide for their high level of education, forming part of their struggle in the movement of liberation and resistance. In addition, students believed there would be a bright future after schooling with the institutions of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), with most receiving scholarships in the former USSR. Today, however, the dropout rate is high, as children see studying as a waste of time given that the Lebanese authorities do not offer career prospects for the Palestinians and they are often subjected to discrimination (Al-Hroub, 2011).

Teacher–student relationship

According to Caouette (1984), the highest level of youth violence occurs in school. Four types of factors influence the emergence of this violence: educational values and educational regimes; attitudes and behaviour of school staff; the school as a physical and social environment; and the composition of the school population.

With regard to educational values and pedagogical regimes, the author accuses the school of viewing the pupil as an object to be moulded according to the expectations and norms of society, whereas the school should rather meet the intrinsic needs of the children. In fact, it is, for example, competition, elitist values (the challenge of excellence) and the emphasis on productivity within the education system that hinders the valorisation and recognition of the personal and emotional experiences of the student.

On the one hand, certain behaviours or attitudes on the part of school staff can lead to revolt and violence among young people. Failure to keep up with the pace of learning, abusive disciplinary measures, depersonalisation of teacher–student relationships and management style are all elements that can contribute, in their own way, to creating a climate conducive to the development of violent interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, a change in the composition of the school population and the marked individual differences within a group of students make cohesion more fragile.

Finally, school as a physical and social environment must offer an acceptable quality of life. So it is important to respect the need for living space. Inadequate conditions (interpersonal and external, such as cold weather, poor lighting, heating and ventilation, overcrowding, inappropriate size of premises, rigid schedules, etc.) can greatly alter the quality of life in an environment and cause stress. In addition, excessive stress can lead to symptomatic reactions such as violence or dropping out of school.

These factors are clearly obvious in Palestinian schools as fieldwork shows. Maria, a former student of UNRWA, describes the attitudes and behaviours of school staff. According to her, there is little to no integrity in teacher–student relationships; teachers do not have respect for their own mission and teachers do not care about the pedagogy or students’ understanding. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters to teachers is their monthly salary. With this in mind, it is worth pointing out that the working conditions of teachers are poor. They experience stress and frustrations while doing tasks beyond their usual responsibilities in a stressful environment, with the obligation to produce results. In addition, these teachers are part of the Palestinian population themselves exposed to all kinds of violence.

Some teachers, in turn, exert violence on their students. On the other hand, when teachers or school staff enjoy a privileged status and a guaranteed salary, there is the fear that this status will make them forget that they, themselves, belong to the refugee population. These teachers demonstrate in their discourse during interviews, as we note, several disturbing factors with regard to the way they treat students. Evidence from interviews with teachers and professors are presented below.

Public objectification

This trend appears in the tone of the staff’s discourse when talking about the actors in a particular situation, which can include the students, their parents and the teachers themselves. In an interview, a school director explains, ‘I have 12 classes, 14 teachers and 340 students. I have no problems and complaints. If student-related problems emerge, I send for their parents, take their bags, and send them home. I support the teachers.’ A person in charge of youth activities noted the following: ‘We see a continual decline of education’, ‘The Shatila refugee camp has lost its identity’ and ‘Healthy communication among young people does not exist in our society’.

The lack of empathy

In the same interview, the school director said, ‘I think there are parents who hit their children. … These are abused children … I do not know why … I cannot really do anything like that.’ She added, ‘Parent–child relations are characterised by negligence and ignorance. … This generation has lost the power to properly discipline their children and respond to their needs as well as those of other young people.’

The blurring of identity

Here, adult actors appear as external observers, more or less lamenting the failed state they are faced with (most of them are those in charge; the director at least clearly wants to make a good impression by sugar-coating the difficulties in her school). At no time does the pronoun ‘we’ appear that would signal their belonging of this group. The act of reflecting a fuzzy identity exists among them as well as among their young students in which ‘they’, the third person pronoun, the absent third, designate children and their parents.

The disclaimer

Adult discourse was marked by a denial of individual responsibility as opposed to institutional responsibility. The director denies the existence of problems or puts the blame on social workers, parents, and the directives of UNRWA or the technical training of teachers. The head of youth activities capitulates to the excessive diversity of the youngsters in his charge. He accuses UNRWA of receiving other refugees aside from the Palestinians in the camps, which only multiplies the problems faced by the refugees.

The lack of an objective political analysis

No one seems to be willing or able to make an objective analysis of the socio-political situation. Regarding the director, she could be suspected of enacting the political will, of ‘talking the talk’ regardless of having no trust in the authorities. For her, the authorities have seemingly erased in their minds all the problems of the camp population, which include organisation, training, learning and decisions on automatic success with regard to advancing to the next level of education. The youth leader, on the other hand, made a subjective and biased analysis, blaming negative decisions on the failed political party such as Fatah, as well as on the actions of organisations, whether humanitarian or religious. The discourse is deprecating, conveys disappointment, and finally, the vision of the future is negative. The director, in particular, sees the future as a time of corruption, drugs, immorality and violence.

None of these interviewees invokes a possible educational alliance with parents or even teachers, who are considered as mere executors of the institutional budgets. It is even more unlikely for them to consider an alliance with the young people themselves, who appear only as a group of people to control, as stated by the director, or to submit to an authoritarian force essentially religious or political. None of them has any vision of building an education with consideration of people’s rights or development.

Against this violent atmosphere in schools, Palestinian children are suffering from a lack of space to grow up in a peaceful and serene environment. In particular, the majority of Palestinian families live in bad and difficult conditions due to a lack of protection and a loss of hope. The following section shows how socialisation is affected by violence within the family and by the vulnerability experienced by Palestinian children.

Family of exile: Between protection and stress

In an ecosystem analysis, the family is a meso factor, located between macro (society, international) and micro (the individual) (Anderson and Sabatelli, 1999; Cox and Paley, 1997, 2003; McHale and Grolnick, 2002). It interacts, influences and is influenced by these two systems. In addition, the family is a socialising institution, interacting with other areas, including both the social group and the school, that form and influence individual behaviour. By socialisation, according to Akoun (1999: 481), I mean the factors that intervene intimately in individuals’ lives, affecting their psychological disposition for action in society. The family plays a big role in the socialisation of children because it shapes the personality, attitudes, behaviours and ways of thinking of everyone (Michel, 1972). Family structure also functions partly through cultural, community and socio-ecological influences. These macro-level forces (local and global) have an underlying influence on family structure and processes.

Influences can be shown on a macro-level by changes in the social, cultural and economic spheres of society which have led to the emergence of new forms of family (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2003: 204). These transformations have influenced factors within the family, such as domestic violence and conflict, and parenting skills (Geismar and Wood, 1986).

Palestinian families in refugee camps are also affected by these changes and transformations, as observed in the fieldwork, even as family structure itself varies according to history, cultures and eras. Nonetheless, changes and transformations could affect families positively or harmfully, but in this article I focus on the correlation between transformations and violent behaviour.

Research shows that individual sensitivity to violent behaviour originates from particular family variables which take form in a particular socio-cultural climate, especially behavioural models contributing to violence (Le Blanc and Ouimet, 1988), as depicted in the socialising environment of the family (Walker, 1986). Nevertheless, there are also three important structural factors or pathways theoretically related to the aetiology of violent behaviour and which can adversely affect children’s environment: marital conflict and instability; domestic violence (woman and child abuse); parenting skills, attachment and affiliation (Van Voorhis et al., 1988; Yoshikawa, 1994).

Socio-cultural climate and violent behaviour

The afore-mentioned factors appear in the study as essential in the development of Palestinian children’s violent behaviour. Also, a survey on domestic violence in 4000 Palestinian households conducted by UNICEF in April 2010 gives statistical evidence related to adverse structural factors and violent behaviour. The survey included 17,838 people, 12,164 of whom responded (5798 aged 10–24, 3117 women and 3249 children aged 2–9). It focused on the UNRWA’s 12 mandated camps and five major communities from five regions in Lebanon: North, Beirut, Saida, Bekaa and Tyre.

The first factor is marital conflict and instability. UNICEF’s survey shows that about 56% of household heads are in conflict with family members and/or neighbours; 10.6% of women suffered physical abuse from their husbands, and 20% of women exposed to violence suffer from physical (26%) or psychological (47.5%) problems.

Concerning the second factor, domestic violence, it shows that three-quarters of young people between the ages of 10 and 24 face issues of economic problems, overcrowding and abuse by parents. A quarter of them were threatened: 28% were insulted in public, while 21.7% were forbidden to leave the house as a form of punishment. A quarter of these youth had been exposed to physical abuse during the year preceding the study (35% by the father, 25.2% by the mother and 22.7% by school staff); 21.45% of abused children suffer from physiological (36.7%) and psychological (7%) problems; 8.8% of children end up facing extreme physiological violence.

The above two factors affect parenting skills, children’s attachment and affiliation. It appears that education is primarily a personal initiative taken by the young people in most of the families in camps. In fact, there is no education policy in place to ensure the healthy psychosocial development of children, making each family act according to their own will. It is here where parents can either prove competent or ignorant with regard to the development of the foundation of their children’s personality.

Socio-economic stress and families

Historically, the family is a symbol of peace and protection, serving as a shield against the violent and turbulent forces of the outside world. However, too often the reality of violence breaks this seemingly peaceful image, which is in itself already broken by socio-economic and political stress factors (Vondra, 1986) as in the case of Palestinian refugee families, where resistance against the national and international context of exile becomes impossible.

The relationship between socio-economic stress and the functionality of families may also affect the perceived quality of family life. It is clear that a lack of financial resources places tension on a family’s functionality, and the effect on education is determined by individual or family perceptions and the assessment of prevailing circumstances. Thus, practices and educational attitudes are closely related to parental employment and economic resources (Vondra, 1986). Between 260,000 and 280,000 Palestinian refugees are currently estimated to reside in Lebanon, in camps, gatherings and cities. Palestinians feel rejected by the Lebanese society: they suffer unemployment, precariousness and work discrimination. Thirty-six professions remain prohibited to them, including: lawyers, public services, dentistry, general medicine, pharmaceutical services, opticians and optic sales, health workers, public accountants, or coastal navigation and fishing on Lebanese coasts.³ Certainly, the 2005 and 2010 changes in the Lebanese law have improved the access of Palestinian refugees to the labour market, giving them partial access to the National Social Security Fund (NSSF), and work permits are now free of charge. However, these laws are badly implemented, or not respected by Lebanese institutions and companies.⁴ Palestinian refugees are still prevented from legally acquiring property in Lebanon, according to Law 296/2001. Thus, subjective experiences play an important role in the juncture between socio-economic stress, the quality of education and violence (Vondra, 1986).

The stress associated with economic insecurity and poverty can cause family breakdowns, including divorce or separation, and limited parenting skills. In this context, children soon realise the necessity to meet their own needs and those of their family, to the point of doing so through illegal means. In this way, children become a financial resource for a family who is in need, and this desire to meet their needs makes it impossible to hold the children solely accountable for their actions.

Most interviewees have been victims of violence in their family, to varying degrees, some find it useful, and even necessary to establish authority. However, in childhood, parents’ behaviours serve as role models for children. Children may understand parents’ violent behaviour as a normal and acceptable way to deal with anger, conflict and problems (Strauss, 1991). Physical violence in children’s education divided the Palestinian youth interviewed into two parts, those who are for and those who are against. For the first group, a call to order, by giving a small slap, or spanking, is not considered to be abusive: the purpose is to educate the child. The limits of this kind of violence are manifested by its purpose and the good it provides to the child. Isaac’s mother hit him when he was doing something stupid; due to this, he believes he has become an independent adult. Others claim this mode of education, for them, is always necessary:

To hit the children in education is necessary; to educate them but not to violently attack them is to make them more respectful in this sense, to scare them from repeating bad things. Physical violence that happened in childhood was corrective. The new education that prohibits blows that I do not agree [with]. I am to hit the child but not hurt him. You must guide the child, you cannot leave him, if you do, he does not evolve.

The first group supports physical violence only if it is necessary to set limits for the child when words are no longer effective and practised in conditions of dignity and respect; it is not useful if the child is humiliated in front of his or her group, or if used as a means for parents to vent their anger on children. They condemn parents who beat and humiliate their children on the street in front of everyone under any pretext. This situation is unfortunately common in the camp; the violence in this case is destructive and destroys the child’s confidence. Many parents practise it in a wild way that causes young people to wonder if the parents really are the parents of the battered child.

Nour, a young mother, is aware that she is violent with her daughters, she hits them a lot and she is very demanding with her eldest daughter. To relieve herself of the family responsibilities, Nour places a lot of the responsibility on her eldest daughter: she does not consider her as a child, she said. Nour cannot manage to build another model of life; she counts on her daughter as her mother counted on her when she was child; she gives her the same responsibilities that she had assumed at her age.

Nour reproduces the family pattern, because she was the eldest sibling in her family and her mother made her take on responsibilities very early. When Nour hits her daughter, she is not happy, but she feels a need to do it; after that she feels angry with herself. Nour is like many mothers, she noticed, who feel the need to vent their anger and find the easiest way is to hit their children. The children become the outlet for the violence experienced by parents. Nevertheless, she differs from other parents in her awareness of the state of violence she is imparting to her children, or her suffering, her stress that she wants to vent and share; it is the only way she can find:

It is because of the accumulation, of the things we did not say, that we did not express. Sometimes I get tired of work, if someone at home speaks to me; I feel that I want to kill them. However, I do not speak to them; in fact, I project on them the image of the person who hurt me at work. But if we do [such] things in our relationship it will be better, but we cannot do it all the time and it [leads to] violence, because I do not have the power elsewhere I come to find my little girl as an outlet to my violence because she is weaker than me. (Nour)

Nour’s violence is translated as aggression: it is an uncontrolled response but learned, reactive, to a situation of humiliation, through violence. She outsources her suffering, and she shifts her negative feelings, experienced in her inferior situation at work, outward, in face-to-face confrontation with her children. Nour does not accept humiliation or inferiority as legitimate, but she suffers because she finds herself in an unequal balance of power, which provokes a feeling of hatred towards herself, her husband or her director. Her verbal and physical violence is released in a situation of face-to-face interaction with the weakest she can dominate, her children. This behaviour becomes a mode of action, a vicious circle in which Nour has been trapped and can no longer escape: ‘I am too much of a victim of violence and I am violent but I cannot behave like that.’ These are ‘habits I took to release my energy in such a way’. Her relationship with her husband too is in some way managed by this mode of violent behaviour:

The habit is that you do not understand anything more other than with violence, as a way of expression, for example I am currently accustomed with my husband to do that, when he gets angry, [although] he can express himself calmly. But if he does not get upset or start using insults and cries, I do not think he is really upset. (Nour).

Another young mother, Samira, complains during the interview about her younger child, whom she describes as very violent.

I have a very violent child, he concedes nothing, he is ready for everything, he does not steal, he does not break things, he does not insult, he strikes, and he lets nothing pass. If a child insults him, he will reply like the wind to defend himself, you have no time to hold him back; even at home he strikes his brothers.

This statement uttered aloud prompted Samira to put forward an analysis of her child’s behaviour: ‘I think because since very young his father hit him a lot, he treated him badly, and he stigmatised him a lot in all the words [he used].’ Reversing this sense of stigma, the son’s entourage empowers him by communicating with him as a man: ‘You are a man, we count on you, and when he hears that, he is very happy, he loses control, he is tall, he must not be touched at this moment, he wants to present himself.’ This child, to win and keep the love of his loved ones and get a sense of well-being from his environment, adopts behaviours in accordance with or in response to the wishes of those around him. Early on, he internalised an image of himself through his relationship to others, built by others and he passed it back to others. This is the image which he projected on himself, developed through the pressures of his entourage. He is ‘wild’, ‘violent’ and ‘gentle at the same time’. This contradictory personality for his mother is unique; it is part of the level of social organisation. The child conforms to the general pattern of his society to take his place. Desiring his happiness, the father wanted to take care of his education with the hope of seeing him take a different place in the world from that of his older brother. The father wanted a child who resembles the ideal image he makes of himself; disappointed by the first child, he decided to take over the second.

In both situations, we notice that the family members connect through dependency or submission. The father’s dominance over other family members and the parents’ deferral to their children contribute, along with other societal factors, to structuring a dominance system from an early age. These long-term domination structures of the only family system that influences the child are enabled in a non-evolving or regressive community.

Due to all the vulnerabilities Palestinian refugee families suffer through exile, they live in the present and in a future of an exiled identity through the past and the return. They are unable to define themselves precisely because their past and their origin have been confiscated (Améry, 1966/1995). ‘The loss of citizenship deprives people not only of protection, but also of all clearly established, officially recognized identity’ (Arendt, 1951: 266). ‘The loss of their homes … meant the loss of the entire social texture into which they were born and in which they established themselves in a distinct place in the world. … [The trauma] is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one.’ She adds, ‘Nobody had been aware that mankind for so long a time considered under the image of a family of nations, had reached the stage where whoever was thrown out of one of these tightly organized close communities found himself thrown out of the family of nations all together’ (Arendt, 1951: 276).

The territorial and symbolic extirpation of refugees today has broken both the time and the link of the subject to the world. This discontinuity is exactly what differentiates the stateless from the exiles, in which the fantasy of a possible return is the very mark of a psychic continuity of self in space and time. Stateless people are denied their land, their belonging and their cultural matrix. Among these Palestinian refugees, an exile inherited will emerge in a generational transmission (Kortam, 2001).

The transmission in education does not go without this pain, as the child unconsciously integrates it. This pain then influences his or her personal and social identities. The family is one of the most symbolic institutions. It determines behaviour and channels as well ‘performances, aspirations, injunctions and incentives. This enables one to choose a particular way to behave in a certain way’ (De Gaulejac, in Mercier and Rheaume, 2007: 51). Frustration can be born or developed in children when they realise that their parents are dominated or invalidated because of their poverty. Confronted by other children who are better off, these children’s ways of being or speaking (their habitus) are used by others to belittle them, causing decline in their sense of self (De Gaulejac, in Mercier and Rheaume, 2007: 51).

Conclusion

The aim of this article was to bring forth a better understanding of the environment where Palestinian children live. It took into consideration a general overview of the discriminatory Lebanese context against Palestinian refugees and more specifically the impact it has on children’s socialisation in school and family. It is notable that children who undergo physical and symbolical violence tend to be limited in terms of skills development in stressful and violent spaces: schools and family. In schools setting, four types of factors influence the emergence of violence: educational values and pedagogical regimes; attitudes and behaviour of school staff; school as physical and social environment; and the composition of the school population. With regard to educational values and pedagogical regimes, schools see students as objects to be moulded to fit into the expectations and norms of society; this is exactly opposite to schools’ obligations to meet the children’s intrinsic needs. The quest for productivity prevents the satisfaction of the needs for valorisation and recognition of students’ personal and emotional experience.

Some behaviours or attitudes of school staff may seem to promote violence. Failure to keep up with the pace of learning, abusive disciplinary measures, depersonalisation of teacher–student relationships and management style are all elements that can contribute, in their own way, to creating a climate conducive to the development of violent interpersonal relationships.

Furthermore, the change in the composition of the school population and the marked individual differences within a group of students make cohesion more fragile. Finally, school as a physical and social environment must offer an acceptable quality of life. Therefore, it is important to respect the need for living space. Inadequate conditions (interpersonal conditions, bad weather, poor lighting, heating and ventilation, overcrowding, inappropriate size of premises, rigid schedules, etc.) can greatly alter the quality of life in an environment and cause severe stress. The latter can in turn cause symptomatic reactions such as violence or dropping out of school.

As a family, the choice of educational methods for the child establishes the quality of the relationship between parents and children. However, the living conditions put parents in difficulty. They cannot provide adequate supervision, coherence between their behaviours and verbalisation, effective modes of communication, education based on emotional relationships or fair rules for all family members.

School, domination and family conflict contribute to the isolation and marginalisation of some children. The difficult socio-economic conditions of many of these families are other objective conditions that reinforce the isolation of young people. It is this domination, marginalisation and isolation that explain the attitude of mistrust of certain individuals and the need for them to fall back on groups of belonging. These groups offer them all that society does not offer, that is to say, models, valorisation, a feeling of solidarity and belonging – hence the current risk of young people to switch to violent radicalisation if they encounter leaders who offer them this alternative in an atmosphere that offers a space of power and expression.

In order to prevent violence, it is necessary to intervene on several levels (with parents, young people, schools, the media, etc.) to propose models of peaceful and egalitarian coexistence ensuring the autonomy and freedom of all individuals, which allow their full development. Preventative actions should become an intervention priority, in consultation with the various partners working with children.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

ORCID iD

Marie Kortam

Author biography

Marie Kortam is a sociologist, member of the Arab Council for Social Sciences and an Associate Researcher at the French Institute of the Near-East (IFPO – Beirut). She holds a PhD in Sociology. She is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on violence, conflicts, inequalities, social movements, radicalization process, Palestinian refugees and segregation.

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