Strengthening Collaborative and Dialogic Responses to Child Recruitment and Violence

When we speak about the recruitment and involvement of children and adolescents in contexts of violence, we enter a field that is complex, painful, and deeply relational. Recruitment is never one single story. It takes different forms across the world, shaped by history, territory, relationships, poverty, exclusion, displacement, organized violence, and everyday life.

This five-session Mutual Learning Thematic Series invites professionals, community actors, governments, organizations, and other stakeholders to slow down and think together. Rather than offering technical prescriptions, the series creates dialogic spaces where professional knowledge, lived experience, and community wisdom can meet.

Together, we will explore how to visualize, understand, prevent, protect, and respond collaboratively to contexts of violence and recruitment affecting children, adolescents, and young people.

Sessions

Session 1 – Friday, 20 March | 13:00–15:00 GMT
How to visualize what is happening? Listening to children’s voices and understanding lived experience

A conversation on making visible what is often invisible in children’s experiences of violence, displacement, and recruitment.

Session 2 – Tuesday, 21 April | 13:00–15:00 GMT
Observatories as Dialogic Spaces for Co-Creating Meaning and Action

A reflection on observatories not only as technical mechanisms, but as spaces for dialogue, shared meaning, and coordinated action.

Session 3 – Friday, 29 May | 13:00–15:00 GMT
How to collaborate with children, families, and communities? Prevention of recruitment through relational and community-based processes

A session on prevention, community resilience, protective relationships, and working with families and communities rather than for them.

Session 4 – Friday, 12 June | 13:00–15:00 GMT
Protection and Reintegration as Relational and Dialogic Processes

A conversation on protection, reintegration, trust-building, dignity, and community-based support in contexts marked by violence, gangs, trafficking, and exclusion.

Session 5 – Friday, 10 July | 13:00–15:00 GMT
How to work together as professionals and stakeholders? Sustaining collaborative dialogue in complex systems

A final session on professional and inter-institutional collaboration, shared responsibility, and sustaining dialogue in complex and uncertain contexts.

Across the series, we will ask: What conversations do we need, as professionals and communities, to accompany children and adolescents affected by violence in more collaborative ways? How can collaborative and dialogic practices strengthen prevention and protection efforts? And how do we sustain dialogue in contexts of recruitment, violence, and uncertainty?