My Story - News for and by teenagers. Preventing the recruitment of teenagers by illegal armed groups through participatory journalism in Colombia.

My Story: News For and By Teenagers is an online news service promoting a youth-based agenda in one of Colombia's most violent regions, where many under 18s have been forced or enticed into joining illegal armed groups. It builds upon a previous AHRC project which produced animated testimony and recommendations for the non-repetition of conflict in Colombia by former child soldiers in partnership with young people who have grown up since the ceasefire with the FARC in 2016. This new project applies these testimonies and recommendations in a creative and active way to cultivate deep engagement with our research among vulnerable communities, as well as among local authorities and campaigners. By engaging teenagers at-risk of illicit recruitment in this reporting project, we identify how they see their lives, their communities and their futures, and we are able to build interventions and advocacy to prevent them from joining armed groups.

As our previous research has shown, youngsters who grow up in war zones typically feel powerless, disaffected and unable to obtain basic necessities and improve their life circumstances. They can feel trapped and abused, and often experience a deep sense of humiliation. This can create a strong desire to achieve power so they can restore their lost dignity and regain a sense of personal efficacy. Joining an armed group can also offer protection in a context of physical, emotional or economic insecurity. Faced with contexts of protracted violence, many teenagers on the margins of Colombia can therefore experience negative identities, which destroy motivation and confidence, and also breed depression. This can instigate a desire and necessity for escape, and often joining an armed group can appear as the only solution to many young people.

Against this backdrop, our project builds confidence and self-efficacy among teenagers considered at-risk of recruitment by providing formal training in journalism and audiovisual production to stimulate reflection and provoke new ways of seeing the world. This also develops transferable skills, which enhance their potential for employment within the creative economy.

Through storytelling specifically, these young journalists will explore the dangers of conflict, guided by the experiences of former child soldiers, in order to challenge their sometimes glamourised perceptions of life as a combatant. The project will create a journalism that fosters resilience and supports peacebuilding through the promotion of recommendations for the non-repetition of conflict, provoking debate and discussion among the community, as well as a journalism that encourages the young reporters to question their surroundings by calling for and identifying positive change. Through additional peer-to-peer workshops in schools to promote the project, our young reporters also become peace advocates among their friends and fellow students, and in their neighbourhoods.

The stories published online will be accompanied by questions, activities and themes for discussion, creating a tool for schools and youth services in the wider community and other contexts of marginalisation to use our material for resilience-building. At the end of the project, an educational and advocacy toolkit based on the website and its content will be implemented into recruitment prevention strategies at the national and international level by our key partner in this project, Save The Children.