Women as the Essential Protectors of Children?: Gender and Child Protection in UN Peacekeeping
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The United Nations and many member states have placed increased emphasis on improving child protection in UN peacekeeping missions, particularly with regard to child soldiers. These efforts often depict a critical role for female peacekeepers in child protection. In this paper I analyse UN child protection documents, drawing on feminist critiques of gendered discourses in peacekeeping and work on children in global politics to explore how the UN understands gender in child protection contexts. I do so through an analysis of how peacekeepers’ gendered subject positions and representations of children in need of protection are constructed. I find that the construction of children primarily as victims lacking agency and in need of being saved, and a focus on female peacekeepers primarily in community engagement, risk perpetuating the neglect of children’s agency during armed conflict and leave the protective masculine basis of peacekeeping largely unchallenged. These constructions have implications for the implementation of both the children and armed conflict and WPS agendas in peacekeeping.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".