Failures, Challenges and Possibilities of working with Community Structures.

One of the main challenges of the organisations working with community structures was the approach to community structures. This was perhaps the most important element in the process and functioning of the community structures. The social workers had to ensure that they used good community entry skills and they had to make several visits to the community to understand existing community structures, as to how they were working. There might be no need to form other structures if existing ones can be strengthened to take on care and protection of children.

The social worker had to understand the power structures within the community, identity resources within the community, especially human resources such as teachers, community health workers, religious leaders, youth leaders, women groups and self- help groups. It should be established who the opinion leaders were as these could be both useful or problematic, what kind of services are already existing in the community and who the services providers were and how the community accessed these services, or if they did not, tried to understand why.

As a result of the prolonged conflict in Liberia social services were completely destroyed, so there was a danger that the community structures sometimes turned into social services in the village and started trying to sort the problems affecting children

191 themselves, instead of mobilizing the community and community resources to respond to children in need of care and protection.

The Child Welfare Committees were formed at the lowest level of an administrative division, which is referred to as the village in Liberia. The reason for this was that in the village everybody knows everyone and so they would also know the children and their situations, for instance they would know which families have orphans, how many families are struggling to make ends meet. The community members will definitely know more and care more about the children in their midst as these are their children. This meant that they would be more willing to work for their children. Of course, the lesson learnt is that this was most applicable to the rural areas where communities are still somehow close-knit. It was much more of a challenge to get this concept working in larger towns, where people from different ethnic groups have come to live together. Generally, they have difficulties in forming or developing viable community structures in towns.

It is also advantageous to form the community structures at village level, because the members will not have to travel far distances to hold meetings or to consult each other as they live so close to each other. The study found that there was one agency whose community structures were formed on a regional basis and the members had to travel long distances and so they started asking for motorcycles and bicycles. Since the agency could not supply these, the Child Welfare Committees were not effective as they became tired of walking for long distances to go to meetings.

The bigger the Child Welfare Committee, the less effective it was. As usual, not all the people attended meetings and so it was always difficult to plan interventions or even to make decisions on what needed to be done. This was especially true when at each meeting there were different people and so there was no continuity.

Existing community structures needed to have been identified and engaged appropriately. The communities had structures like football teams; kick ball clubs,

192 mothers‟ clubs, youth groups and social clubs for girls amongst others. The CWCs needed to have engaged these structures, because society is regarded as a system, and a system is an entity made up of interdependent and interrelated parts. Each part will affect the other (Haralambos and Holborn, 1990:9-10). The shared values will help the children and adults to blend together to create appropriate community structures for sustainable reintegration of child soldiers.

Culture of a society is a way of life of its members, especially African societies. It is the collection of ideas and habits which people learn and share, and is transmitted from generation to generation (Haralambos and Holborn 1990:3). Human behaviour is based on what is socialized. For any society to operate effectively, but specifically for a war- torn society like Liberia, these guidelines must be shared by its members. Culture is built on norms, values, language, symbols and material objects (Macionis (1997, 67) and child soldiers must re-socialize into their former cultures. These cultural values and norms propagated by the various Functionalist theorists can best be transmitted by the existing community structures, where specific categories of people in a society have defined roles in passing over these shared values, hence creating social order.

Social control by existing community structures to stop children from re-recruiting into armed forces and belligerent groups can be the key in enhancing social reintegration by discouraging deviance and maintaining social order in Liberian societies (Haralambos and Holborn (1990:773).

5.9 SECTION 6: LEGAL AND POLICY FRAMEWORKS FOR SOCIAL