When you were four or five, did you ever work full-time as a roadside vendor? Did you ever worry about recruitment into a violent military faction or being raped or killed because of overstepping the bounds of your community to collect firewood?

Children this young are worrying about issues like these all over the world every day, and to spread awareness, UT professor of child and family studies Brian Barber held the “Adolescents and War” seminar Tuesday in the UC Ballroom.

In August 2005, Barber founded the Center for the International Study of Youth and Political Violence. As technical advisor to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, his studies and research focuses on adolescents who live inside international conflicts caused by political upheaval. For the seminar, Barber brought in some of the leading experts on youth involvement in political violence to speak on their geographical regions and areas of expertise.

“This seminar was designed to make the campus and community aware of the Center for the International Study of Youth and Political Violence,” Barber said.

As an introduction to these conflicts, the seminar covered a broad range of examples of children who are exposed to political violence around the globe. The four main geographical focuses were the conflicts in Northern Ireland, Israel, Palestine and Darfur in western Sudan.

Ed Cairns, professor at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, spoke on Northern Ireland’s behalf. He discussed the history of the conflict between those who want Northern Ireland to be part of Ireland itself and those who want it to be part of the United Kingdom. He also explained the horrible effects of the conflict on its youth.

Barber believed that Northern Ireland was a perfect place to start.

“Northern Ireland happens to be one of the most notable examples of conflict and war that youth are involved in,” Barber said.

After lunch, Michelle Slone, senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University in Israel, discussed the Israeli conflict’s effects by breaking them down into gender, age and ethnicity categories.

Senior Seth May, double-majoring in economics and political science, was surprised by Slone’s findings.

“They found that the higher the level of violence, the less affected the Israeli children were,” May said. “It was weird. The results were almost perfect inverses of what you would normally think.”

The next presentation was given by Cairo Arafat, the overseer of the Child’s Rights Planning Unit at the Ministry of Planning of the Palestine National Authority. She dove straight into the issue of how the conflict is breaking apart the strong Middle Eastern family because basic needs, especially in the Gaza Strip, are not being met.

“They used to refer to the Gaza Strip as the Hong Kong of the Middle East,” Arafat said. “Now, it’s referred to as the Alcatraz of the Middle East.”

Arafat also stated that with three out of four families unable to feed themselves and 75 percent of the population without electricity, the Strip is still trying to instill hope where little hope is found.

Finally, Neil Boothby, a professor of clinical global health at the Mailman School, spoke of how the Darfur conflict affects its youth.

“If a man or boy leaves a refugee camp, they will be murdered,” Boothby said. “But if the women leave, they will only be beaten and probably raped. So, to cope, these people send women out in groups and keep the men inside.”

In a country with a long history of adolescent abduction, 200,000 supposed deaths and the number of abandoned babies rising, Boothby said parents have to rear their children harshly out of the necessity to teach responsibility through shock.

“If there is a child playing with fire, the parent might stick the child’s hand in the fire,” Boothby said.

With these harsh issues being discussed in the public setting, many students, like May, walked away from the seminar enlightened about the horrors of the world and what America is not doing about it.

“I think we are morally obligated to intervene, through loans, through military intervention if necessary, through encouraging neighboring countries to help, through any means necessary,” May said. “Ignorance is bliss for us, but the rest of the world is suffering for it.”

As Barber’s center proves, UT is not completely ignorant. In the coming years, Barber hopes to utilize the center to bring representatives such as educators, political and religious leaders and other policy makers to communicate amongst themselves in a series of four more seminars.

“The essential goal of the center is to provide an opportunity for that integration to occur,” Barber said. “We’ll literally bring these representatives to the table and have a three day conference about what worked, what didn’t work and what they would recommend for the future.”

Furthermore, the representatives’ findings, through each of the geographical areas, will be published each consecutive year.

“And the fourth conference will be focused on the accomplishments we want to achieve at the center and integrate seamlessly what we’ve learned in gathering all that research,” Barber said.

For students interested in becoming more involved in the newborn initiative, visit http://youthviolence.tennessee.edu.