Child Bombs
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The main discussion of the article I have chosen is that of how terrorists are now using children to carry out bombings. The issue at hand is one that will turn heads around the world since it is a modern moral panic – it poses a profound threat to societys well being.
A sociologist, in applying understanding to any issue, would do so firstly by analyzing a particular social phenomenon. He would then attempt to apply social imagination to it, to grasp the interplay of man and society (C.W.Mills, (1970), pp.10-11). Similarly, the issue here will be analysed by first looking at how, and then further examining why, children are now being used as weapons of terrorism. Terrorism as a form of crime and deviance, its causes, and the family in todays society will be discussed as well.
According to Durkheims functional approach to deviance (Brym and Lie, (2007), pp. 195-196), terrorism carries the function of deviance, which is to prompt society to identify these actions as unethical or immoral, allowing society to draw the line between right and wrong, thus reinforcing conformity among the rest of society. Looking at the bigger picture, terrorism leads to suffering, but it was largely due to the September 11 attacks that many countries in the world have now come together to counter the threat of terrorism.
The strain theory (Brym and Lie, (2007), p.196) states that due to a lack of opportunities to succeed in a society, minority groups will thrive on deviance so as to succeed. This offers a possible explanation as to how terrorists groups are formed. Similarly, terrorists want to be heard and thus, they commit brutal acts as in the article.
In the article, it is unclear whether the children were themselves terrorists or if they were used as terrorist weapons unwittingly. The control theory (Brym and Lie, (2007), pp. 198-199) states that people naturally are not righteous and to keep people in check, strong bonds, which make deviance costly, are required. The control theory, in highlighting the importance of strong bonds for a low-crime society, also sheds new light on the importance of the family in any society, perhaps more so in Iraq. Many males in Iraq take up arms and this results in many single parent families. These families tend to be less stable and cannot form strong enough bonds to keep the child from venturing into terrorist groups, which in turn leads to bolder terrorism in Iraq.
In addition, functionalists believe that the nuclear family performs 5 main functions, two of which are socialization and emotional support (Brym and Lie, (2007), p.438). Families are there as an agent of socialization and have the responsibility to instill discipline, righteousness, justice and virtue in the child. They also soothe the child when he goes through disappointment and hurt, and with love, the child can come through his disappointments unscathed. This is lacking in a place like Iraq, where the family network is ever so often broken with the passing away of love ones, which is so commonplace.
Since there is a lack of the family bond, similar to “foraging societies” (Brym and Lie, (2007), p.439), socialization of children takes place in bands, not families. In Iraq, these bands sometimes include terrorist groups, and eventually, these children are instilled with terrorist values. This allows terrorist to manipulate children and put authorities on the back-foot by bringing children into the picture, as in the article, where having children in the backseat of a car makes the authorities less suspicious and allows terrorists to carry out their acts of terrorism more easily.
Conflict theories, on the other hand, state that the nuclear family is often “a site of frustration and conflict” due to clashes between husband and wife (Brym and Lie, (2007), p.443) and this could be one reason why a family might instead be harmful to a child. In Iraq, with many fathers away at war, such discord is now eliminated and more peace can thus be found at home to allow children to be nurtured properly.
Yet in this instance, taking into account the symbolic interactionism approach to deviance, which is the theory of differential association, the child may stand to suffer more than gain, with his father away at war. The main problem is that the child may adopt the mindset that it is not deviant to take up arms and go to war. As such, although it may be true that there is less conflict, the child may instead learn to value a deviant lifestyle of crime and terrorism, and this leads