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Children associated with terrorism often motivated by love, not hate, says UN think tank

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United Nations University

Children and Terrorism

image: Study finds Children Associated with Terrorism Often Motivated by Love, Not Hate. view more 

Credit: UN Photo / Tobin Jones

Counter-terror efforts are hindered by widely-held false assumptions about the motivations of children associating with terrorist activities, suggests new work released today by the United Nations University (UNU), a UN think-tank.

"Children primarily have positive and prosocial motivations for joining armed groups, including a love for their family and community, a need to be part of meaningful groups, and a desire for a sense of significance in their life," says Dr Siobhan O'Neil, Project Lead for the 'Children and Extreme Violence' project at UNU. "These insights challenge conventional perceptions that children and young people are driven into the arms of terrorists by hatred for another group or other manifestations of antisocial behaviour."

These counterintuitive insights from psychological and political science research, elaborated in "Insights from Social Science on Child Trajectories into and out of Non-state Armed Groups", have significant implications for policies and programmes aimed at preventing or countering violent extremism.

"Some efforts to counter the recruitment of children into extremist groups may miss the mark," says Dr James Cockayne, Head of the UN University Office in New York. "Many of these programmes assume that children are behaving anti-socially. This important new research suggests something quite different: they may be behaving prosocially. Our interventions may need to harness children's pro-social tendencies to empower them to be active participants in resilience building and recovery."

"Rather than cast them as a threat, the international community should recognize children and youth are an asset to building a stronger, more secure future," says O'Neil.

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The State of Research Brief Series are available for download at https://unu.edu/children-and-extreme-violence

The Children and Extreme Violence Project will also launch of an analytical report synthesising original research from case studies in Syria/Iraq, Mali, and Nigeria in early 2018.

About UNU

The United Nations University (UNU) is an international community of scholars engaged in policy-relevant research on pressing global issues, specialised postgraduate training and capacity building, and the dissemination of knowledge. UNU functions as a think-tank for the United Nations system. It operates as a global network of institutes and programmes, coordinated by UNU Centre in Tokyo.

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