Monday, November 21, 2011

Challenges faced by refugee children

I am working with refugee children for my voluteer hours through the International Rescure Commitee. When looked at the struggles they face here in America, I am able to look at them through a functionalism perspective as well as conflict theory.
The first thing to point out is that the language barrier faces by refugees affects every institution they encounter in the U.S. Not being able to fully understand or comprehend the native language causes everything to be twice as hard for them. Because they don't have a fully understanding of the language or can't speak it fully, they are automatically at a disadvantage. The American health care institution affects refugee children because there are numerous different sicknesses and diseases in the U.S. that these refugee children never faced back in their home country. Some of them they might not understand or even see that as a problem that can be fixed by the health care system. For examle, ADD is a growing issue among young boys in the U.S. If a boy from Africa comes here and is diagnosed with something that wasn't even diagnosed back in their home country, they won't even understand what it means or how it affects them. Most of all, the American doctors will not even consider that the refugee doesn't necessarily see this as a big issue or something that needs to be treated because they maybe didn't have ADD back in their country. The doctory will percieve them as being intelectually challenged instead of noticing cultural and language barriers.
Conflict theory can be looked at in the educational system with refugee children. Again, the language barriers cause the refugee child to fall behind in all of the school subjects, putting them at a lower level than the native children. The teacher may see them as intellectually challenged and may not give them as much attention as they give their "smarter" students causing even a bigger gap between the levels of refugee's learning compared to the native children's learning. This in the long run puts the native children in better academic standings for future schooling or future jobs giving the natives better and higher paying jobs while the refugees are stuck in the low level jobs.

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