“How is it that an adult can look at a child and see an enemy?”
In the context of Children Born of War (CBOW), this question can be rephrased as: How is it possible that a whole community of people can agree that a child is to be excluded and not given communal protection? One would assume that the conclusion that a small child is unworthy of inclusion would be unacceptable to most adults. According to Philosopher Tamar Schapiro, “[t]he idea that children have a special status, one which is different from that of adults, is evident in our everyday attitudes”. She continues:
“Our basic concept of a child is that of a person who in some fundamental way is not yet developed, but who is in the process of developing. It is in virtue of children’s undeveloped condition that we feel we have special obligations to them, obligations which are of a more paternalistic nature than are our obligations to other adults. These special obligations to children include duties to protect, nurture, discipline, and educate them. They are paternalistic in nature because we feel bound to fulfill them regardless of whether the children in question consent to be protected, nurtured, disciplined, and educated. Indeed, we think of children as people who have to be raised, whether they like it or not.” (Schapiro 1999, 716)
The CBOW do not experience that adults in their community feel that such special obligations – “to protect, nurture, discipline, and educate” – are applicable to them. The reason they are given is that they are 'carrying the enemy’s genes'[1].
Read more about CBOW in the text “Lebensborn and Children Born of War” in the library.
Occupation and foreign forces
The research by Prof. Dr. Ingvill C. Ødegaard (formerly Mochmann, nee Ødegaard) documents that this communal exclusion takes place in communities that have experienced occupation by both enemy forces and foreign peace-keeping forces (Mochmann 2008). This indicates that the humiliation caused by the loss of sovereignty is a central factor, as the phenomenon is not limited to communities that were suppressed by a violent, attacking enemy. A study of the emotions of occupied Palestinians supports this, having found that “humiliation elicited support for violence while anger was not associated with such support” (Fink, Leshem, and Halperin 2022, 210). Cultural context or time in history historic time does not seem to make a difference to the treatment of these children either. The exclusion of CBOW is found in post-conflict communities regardless of area, geography, culture or religion.
It is evident that a community that has experienced occupation will hold strong antagonistic feelings towards the foreign soldiers – in some cases amounting to hatred. They are victims of an abusive use of force, infringing on their human rights. A society that has been humiliated feels the need to regain its dignity and sovereignty. It makes sense that such a process involves removing all traces of the enemy, restoring and rebuilding the community and its identity as independent and self-governing.
This process usually includes punishing individuals who collaborated with the enemies or foreign forces. These include adults who perhaps traded with the enemy, helped them with intelligence or worked for them – activities that are often considered treason in national laws. The situation is different for the women who were romantically involved with the enemy. Such relations are normally considered a private matter, but a study conducted by Professor Knut Papendorf shows how women who had romantic relationships with German soldiers during WW2 were punished more harshly than women working for the enemy’s secret police (Papendorf 2015). The latter were treated with a certain respect and reverence, while the former were abused and interned although they had broken no law. Dating or having sexual relations with the enemy were treated as if they were an illegal act of treason.
This is one of many signs that women’s sexuality becomes a public matter linked to a community’s dignity during conflict. ‘Giving away’ sexual intimacy to an enemy becomes the worst kind of disloyalty. Having been raped by the enemy – and potentially having borne children as a result – also creates a risk of exclusion. They are seen as ‘tainted’ by the violent act, although it was involuntary.
Again, humiliation seems to lie at the core of this. Research concerning the use of rape as a weapon of war offers some explanations. Professor Inger Skjelsbæk explains how women in general are targeted in order to assert militarised masculinities, and that specific groups of women are selected “to attack the perceived bearers of a group’s ethnic, religious, or political identity or to feminize and humiliate an ethnic, religious, or political group” (Skjelsbaek 2001, 215). According to Professor Megan Mackenzie, later contributions to conceptualising wartime sexual violence consider rape as a violation of ‘family honour’ rather than an individual harm (Mackenzie 2010).
The rape of women in occupied territories is thus to be seen as a direct attack on a group’s identity (partly by genetically ‘diluting’ the population through the conception of children) and not individual harm. It is intended as a humiliation of the group as a whole – violating ‘family honour’. A woman’s body and fertility are used as a battleground to attack and harm the occupied group. Research also shows that systematic rape during conflict is mostly instigated at a strategic, high level, thereby making it a conscious act of war on the part of the enemy:
“[...] whereas public discourse has often emphasized that sexual violence is perpetrated by unruly rebel groups, sexual violence is far more often reported to be perpetrated by states.” (Nordås and Cohen 2021, 198)
It should also be noted that rape as a weapon of war leads to the abuse of both men and women, the former being even more of a taboo. Nordås and Cohen add that, “nonetheless, the choice of rape and other forms of sexual violence is most certainly gendered and is shaped by structural forms of sex and gender inequality, including patriarchy. Scholars have argued persuasively that rape can have a role in ‘feminizing’ an enemy” (Nordås and Cohen 2021, 199).
This ‘feminizing’ is therefore a wilful act to humiliate, oppress and traumatise an occupied society, demonstrating their weakness and inability to protect their own citizens. The occupiers are also strategically aiming to dilute the occupied group’s ethnic identity by inserting their genes and attacking their honour and dignity.
Seen in this light, the CBOW become a living symbol of the attack on a community’s honour and future. The community can be considered to be weakened by the enemy’s forceful insertion into the gene pool, or by women choosing the enemy over the community.
This could explain why people traumatised by war might see the CBOW as reminders of an enemy’s attack on their identity, and why the children’s link to the enemy seems to outweigh the otherwise moral responsibility that adults have towards children.
They are basically considered to be ‘more enemy than child’ – dehumanised, so that the moral responsibility towards children doesn’t apply to them. This objectification has severe consequences. According to Brock Bastian and Nick Haslam, dehumanisation is linked to social disconnection, and denying others membership in a community of interconnected individuals is a central aspect of treating them as less than human. Dehumanisation also involves moral disengagement – “a process by which people are placed outside the ‘moral circle’ where the rights and consideration attached to being human apply” (Bastian and Haslam 2010, 107).
As the CBOW are seen more as objects than humans, it becomes possible for a person to feel like a morally upstanding individual while at the same time excluding and mistreating the CBOW. A community in which all agree to objectify a specific group can, in this, way remain comfortable with the fact that this group is mistreated in plain sight. They are essentially ‘blind’ to this treatment.
The consequences of exclusion are severe, especially for a child in its formative years. “The need to belong is a fundamental human motive whose frustration has destructive consequences”, according to Bastian and Haslam, who describe social ostracism as undermining people’s sense of belonging, control, self-esteem and meaning. It increases aggression, reduces pro-social behaviour and impairs self-regulation. “The impact of ostracism is profound, and it is also surprisingly general. Ostracism is highly aversive even when it is perpetrated by distant or despised others” (Bastian and Haslam 2010, 107).
It also leads to the children being denied protection and human rights such as citizenship, education or healthcare (Mochmann 2008). As reported by the Norwegian CBOW, it leads to children being used and abused, with the knowledge of other adults who still choose to not interfere (Ericsson 2005).
From objectification to unconscious bias
Most of what is described above can be seen as the negative results of unconscious, ‘primal’ decision-making. An enemy’s use of rape as a weapon of war is based on an instinctive understanding of the damage it can inflict on the occupied community. Recent research has produced more detailed analyses of the psychological and societal consequences of rape as a weapon of war.
The objectification and consequent dehumanisation is a mostly automated process. With reference to Kahneman’s description of human decision-making as consisting of System 1 and System 2, we humans unconsciously identify and categorise our surroundings using System 1. A topic that is emotionally charged is even less likely to being processed by what we think is our ‘rational mind’ (Kahneman 2013).
Read more about the dual-process theory in the text “Empathy and Simulation” in the library.
It is easy to imagine one person stating that children carrying the enemy’s genes should not have been born and should ideally be removed from the community. One needs only to visit comment sections on social media to find individuals spreading similar hateful messages. History shows us, however, that this objectification has a tendency to spread. There were CBOW who did not experience any exclusion, growing up in communities where they were not objectified. They were seen as regular children, and their genes were not considered to be a feature that warranted objectification. Other communities treated their CBOW with total social ostracism, and the objectification was shared by a majority of members of these children’s community.
The views that might be formed by individuals are adopted by others. Pierre Bourdieu calls this the result of symbolic violence. Jenkins offers a clarification of the concept in his description of Bourdieu’s definition of symbolic violence:
“The imposition of systems of symbolism and meaning (i.e. culture) upon groups or classes in such a way that they are experienced as legitimate. This legitimacy obscures the power relations which permit that imposition to be successful. Insofar as it is accepted as legitimate, culture adds its own force to those power relations, contributing to their systematic reproduction. This is achieved through a process of misrecognition: ‘the process whereby power relations are perceived not for what they objectively are but in a form which renders them legitimate in the eyes of the beholder’. […] Culture is arbitrary in two senses, in its imposition and in its content. What the notion of arbitrariness denotes here is that, other than as the result of an empirically traceable history, culture cannot be deduced or derived from any notions of appropriateness or relative value. All cultures are equally arbitrary – this is an implied critique of the notion of ‘culture with a capital C’ – and, in the final analysis, behind all culture lies the arbitrary sanction of ‘pure de facto power’.” (Jenkins 1992, 66)
It follows that, according to Bourdieu, a culture cannot be said to be ‘good’ – it is formed by power structures that define systems of symbols and meaning that become experienced as legitimate. If the power structures in a culture define CBOW as being unworthy of protection, then this might be adopted and also systematically reproduced in that culture. If a person in a position of power objectifies a group (based on a shared feature), this also legitimises physical violence towards this group by persons in the community. The exclusion of CBOW can, in this way, become part of the culture and identity of a community, and something that is not questioned or challenged. Objectification thereby becomes an unconscious bias that is systematically reproduced. One example of this mechanism is how even children and grandchildren of CBOW experience bullying.
The misrecognition that is part of the systematic reproduction also leads to values being projected onto the objectified group. A study of (mostly white) adults’ perceptions of black boys compared with white boys gives some interesting insights into how the adult-child relationship is affected. Goff et al. (2014) found that black boys are perceived as older and less innocent than white boys: ”they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers. Further, our findings demonstrate that the Black/ape association predicted actual racial disparities in police violence toward children” (Goff et al. 2014, 526).
This association is linked to the unconscious bias, and is reproduced with it. On a subconscious level, the black boys were held to be more accountable for their actions, and they were seen as being more guilty than white boys. The bias linked to CBOW might be coloured by similar values, as there are several anecdotes from the Lebensborn about how they were seen as being guilty of their parents actions[2].
The adoption and spreading of judgemental views can also be linked to viral spread, which has become a well-known phenomenon on social media. It is part of what Kahneman describes as the human tendency to ration the use of System 2 in decision-making processes. When we need to decide a personal view on a topic that we know and care little about, we humans might skip the demanding process of learning and reflecting. Instead, we may adopt the views of people we trust, relying on their decision-making process. This is again a mostly automated process, and it is executed quickly. Such mechanisms explain how people can like and share content on social media, giving its spread exponential growth. Many of us have experienced sharing content that we later find problematic, not quite understanding how we could have ‘liked’ or shared it in the first place.
As human beings, we tend to coordinate our actions in a process called entrainment, which can be defined as “the ubiquitous tendency of physical and biological systems to coordinate to autonomous, spatially or temporally structured events or rhythmic movements” (Brinck 2018, 207). It is a process of coordination that “usually is implicit, subconscious, and automatic and causes mutually constraining, stabilizing behaviour by alignment and matching, e.g. motor mimicry when a speaker assumes the same accent or tone of voice as another speaker during conversation, movement coordination when two persons fall into the same pace while walking side by side or spontaneously make a certain gesture at the same time” .
Entrainment serves to create an implicit common ground between people, and causes stability, reliability and predictability. It is also pervasive and mandatory: “Because entrainment comes naturally and the inclination to entrain is strong and requires effort to control, people can be expected to synchronize to the rhythm of any stimulus, animate or not” Brinck 2018, 207).
This not only applies to movement, but also to ideas and ideology: “The sense of belonging arising from moving together is conducive towards pro-social behaviours; yet, it also makes the individual more susceptible to adopting the ideology of the group without critical thinking”(Cross, Turgeon, and Atherton 2019).
The reasons for ethical blindness – for adopting ideologies unconsciously – is rooted in our fundamental decision-making processes. Adults see enemies instead of children because of unconscious biases that are reproduced in culture, repeated by their networks, and accepted as legitimate behaviour by the community.
The tragedy for the CBOW is that persons in positions of power in post-war societies point them out, defining them as a group and declaring them unwanted. There is hope that we are getting better at fighting this mechanism. In the press coverage concerning children of ISIS soldiers, many news agencies took care to not use the term ‘ISIS children’, calling them instead ‘the children of ISIS soldiers’. This might seem to be only a small difference, but it can mean a world of difference for children who can avoid being labelled.
Creating reflection on hidden biases
Adults are creating war victims after the war has ended. People who think of themselves as ‘the good guys’ or the victors take their hatred out on small children – without consciously realising that this is what they are doing. This shapes biases that are unconsciously passed on to new generations through their/our shared culture.
The most threatening aspect of the mechanisms described here is that they are mostly hidden from us. They are driven by instincts, hidden biases and unconscious decision-making. How can hidden processes be faced and challenged?
At the core of this artistic research project is the belief that most people will change their views if they are made to reflect on the ethical considerations of unconscious biases and objectification. It is a premise of this artistic research project that informing people through telling is not sufficiently effective when it comes to creating reflection and new insights. The combination of fake news, trolls on social media and viral spread leads to many of us filtering out what we perceive as noise, only listening to trusted persons or organisations. It becomes so complicated to validate the information sources around us that, too often, we give up, allowing the unconscious decision-making processes of System 1 to guide us instead.
We therefore need to take System 1 into consideration when we communicate. In order to reach out, communication needs to appear to be trustworthy and have a form that makes System 1 take notice, and ideally promote the content to active reflection by System 2.
Elements that form part of these mechanisms can also be used to fight them. Viral spread can be stopped and even reversed. It takes one person who doesn’t just like and share a post, but takes the time to reflect and then push back with a different view. The backlash can achieve the same spread as the original message, even being distributed by the same persons who shared the initial post.
There are lessons to be learned from entrainment. A well-known example of entrainment is the passivity of bystanders if a person collapses in the street. It is not uncommon for a group of witnesses to stand around, passively watching – the decision not to act spreads subconsciously among them. In such cases, the way to break the passivity is to single out one person and address them directly. This makes the situation personal and triggers the bystanders’ conscious decision-making processes.
Communicating individually and making the content personal can trigger reflection and decision-making that have the potential to spread and create change.
