The research, published in Frontiers in Communication by Fernanda Tusa and Jorge Maza-Córdova of Universidad Técnica de Machala, together with Ignacio Aguaded of Universidad de Huelva and Santiago Tejedor of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, examined how eight Ecuadorian digital outlets covered the Malvinas case between December 2024 and August 2025. The team selected twelve purposively chosen journalistic texts from El Comercio, El Universo, El Mercurio, La Hora, Primicias, GK, Extra and Expreso, spanning breaking-news updates, investigative explainers, crime reporting and editorials. Using qualitative content analysis combined with critical discourse analysis, they coded nine variables in each text: child representation, source hierarchy, lexical agency, territorial references, visual treatment, contextual density, genre, underlying frame and transmitted values.

The analysis revealed three recurrent narrative configurations. The first, labeled securitized/officialist, privileged order, duty, procedural cooperation and official definers, often relying on passive constructions and territorial danger as explanatory context. The second, rights/forensic, foregrounded the children’s legal minority, family testimony, forensic evidence and explicit attribution of responsibility. The third, sensationalist, emphasized shock, graphic detail and crime-story suspense, sometimes naming violence with precision but risking the aestheticization of suffering. Crucially, these were not fixed ideological identities of entire outlets; hybrid texts were common, and coverage drifted across configurations as evidence accumulated.

One of the study’s most technically revealing findings concerns grammar. In official or security-oriented coverage, responsibility was frequently displaced into passive or nominal constructions: the children were left, an incident occurred, an excess was under investigation. Such wording did not always deny harm, but it grammatically separated outcome from actor. By contrast, rights-oriented and forensic reporting increasingly employed active, legally specific vocabulary, terms such as detained, abandoned, beaten, tortured, forcibly disappeared and executed, which reconnected acts with agents and legal categories. The authors emphasize that the ethical distinction is not between emotional and objective language but between evidentially supported precision and euphemistic indeterminacy.

Source hierarchies proved equally decisive. Early straight-news items frequently relied on military, ministerial or prosecutorial statements to establish what could be responsibly asserted, producing what the researchers call an officialist tendency even in texts that did not explicitly defend the armed forces. Institutional speakers supplied the chronology, terminology and limits of certainty, while families and human-rights actors often appeared later or as reactive sources. The authors explain this pattern through Bennett’s indexing theory and the hierarchy-of-influences model rather than through assumed partisan loyalty: during an unfolding disappearance case, official sources offer speed, verifiability, legal protection and ready-made language. As forensic information, videos and judicial proceedings accumulated, the indexed range of legitimate debate widened, and later coverage became more willing to use terms such as enforced disappearance, torture and abuse of power.

Territorial language emerged as a third mechanism. References to Las Malvinas and southern Guayaquil performed two different functions across the corpus. In some texts, place contextualized the social conditions in which families lived, the community’s fear and the wider security crisis. In others, place operated as a condensed sign of danger: descriptors such as conflictive zone or high-crime sector placed the children inside a pre-existing map of suspicion. The authors argue that this geography of suspicion can become a cognitive shortcut under militarized governance, making extraordinary coercion appear more intelligible or expected, and subtly displacing accountability: readers are invited to ask what kind of area the children came from before asking what obligations state agents had toward them. Rights-oriented reporting countered this by reconstructing the chain of custody, treating geography as evidence of institutional movement rather than as a moral property of the victims.

The study also documents what it terms biographical silence. In early coverage, the children were visible as a collective, the four minors, the disappeared children, but rarely as individuals embedded in school, family, friendship and neighborhood life. Humanization increased when family testimony became central: reports that named the boys, specified their ages, described relatives’ searches or reconstructed their last communications created a different subject position, casting them as sons, brothers and community members rather than anonymous bodies in a security chain. The authors connect this to Judith Butler’s concept of differential grievability, arguing that class-coded cues, territorial stigma and proximity to crime can weaken presumptions of innocence, making some young lives less readily recognized as worthy of protection.

A particularly revealing episode involved soldiers’ statements reported by Expreso that the boys did not look like children and were taller than the soldiers. The authors analyze these quotations as reproducing a justificatory logic in which bodily appearance is mobilized to suspend the legal relevance of minority. Even when journalists present such claims critically, the quotation becomes part of the public discursive field. The ethical task, they argue, is not to suppress official testimony but to contextualize it with verified ages, due-process obligations and the principle that perceived appearance cannot nullify child-protection duties. The case confirms the central insight of the sociology of childhood: legal age does not automatically guarantee equal symbolic protection, because public discourse can recognize or fail to recognize the social and legal meaning of youth.

Visual treatment provided a parallel moral grammar. Photographs of vigils, relatives holding portraits and public demonstrations framed the case through grief, collective recognition and claims for justice, positioning families as active rights-claimants. Photographs of reconstruction sites, roads and forensic scenes served an evidentiary function, making chains of action visible. Sensationalist visual treatment, especially when paired with shock headlines, increased affect but risked turning suffering into spectacle. The authors stress that a powerful image can be ethically justified when it provides evidence, preserves dignity and contributes to public understanding; concern arises when graphic material exceeds informational necessity or is repeatedly circulated for attention. Genre also conditioned what could be said: longer investigative pieces were more likely to connect detention, transfer, abandonment, forensic findings and judicial proceedings into a causal sequence, while episodic compression increased dependence on the dominant source of the moment.

The findings carry direct implications for newsroom practice. The authors propose written child-protection protocols covering age verification, source-diversity checks, scrutiny of territorial stigma, proportionality tests for images and identifying details, trauma-informed family contact, legally accurate terminology and post-publication updating when evidence changes. They also articulate an ethics of memory: because digital archives give reporting a long afterlife, early official narratives should not remain frozen in search results after judicial findings have materially changed the public record. Ethical memory requires correction of disproven claims, preservation of the children’s names and biographies in dignified contexts, and archive structures that do not repeatedly foreground graphic imagery. The study is limited by its purposive sample of twelve texts and the absence of audience reception or newsroom interviews, and the authors call for comparative research across Latin American contexts of militarized security, journalist interviews on source routines and reception studies testing how alternative headlines, place descriptors and images affect judgments of childhood, legitimacy and state responsibility.

Subject of Research: Narrating childhood under state violence: media power, territorial stigma and the Malvinas case in Ecuadorian journalism

Article Title: Narrating childhood under state violence: media power, territorial stigma and the Malvinas case in Ecuadorian journalism

Article References: Tusa, F., Maza-Córdova, J., Aguaded, I., & Tejedor, S. (2026). Narrating childhood under state violence: media power, territorial stigma and the Malvinas case in Ecuadorian journalism. Frontiers in Communication, 11, Article 1734083. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1734083

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2026.1734083

Keywords: Ecuador journalism, Malvinas case, child rights, media framing, state violence, enforced disappearance, territorial stigma, critical discourse analysis, media ethics, moral panic, mediated memory, newsroom protocols

The setting is Bishan Gurracha, a town in Ethiopia’s Oromia region roughly 264 kilometers from Addis Ababa along the highway to Hawassa. It hosts one of the largest settlements for people displaced from the Somali Region during the violence of 2018, accommodating around 2,000 households. A single school was established to serve the displaced community. The stakes of the question extend far beyond one settlement. Globally, the number of forcibly displaced people rose from 38.1 million in 2000 to 89.3 million by 2021, with internally displaced persons outnumbering refugees. Children make up roughly 42 percent of the internally displaced population, and Ethiopia hosts one of the largest IDP populations in the world, its displacement driven by armed conflict, inter-communal violence, and political instability.

Methodologically, the study is a qualitative narrative inquiry rooted in a social-constructivist paradigm, which holds that reality is best understood through the subjective experiences of the people living it. The researchers purposively sampled sixteen internally displaced children aged 13 to 18, nine of them female, conducting semi-structured interviews in Afaan Oromoo alongside structured field observations of classrooms, sanitation facilities, and administrative buildings. To reduce institutional bias, the team spent an initial week conducting independent classroom observations and site visits to build rapport, deliberately distancing themselves from school administrators during the assent process and assuring children that their participation would not affect grades, teacher relationships, or household aid. Ethical approval came from Addis Ababa University’s College of Education and Behavioral Studies, with parental consent and child assent secured, trauma-informed listening protocols in place, and all identifiers anonymized.

The analytical engine of the study is a fusion of two frameworks. The first is Katarina Tomasevski’s 4A’s scheme, the operational standard under international human rights law for evaluating the right to education: Availability, meaning functioning institutions with adequate resources; Accessibility, meaning education that is physically reachable and economically affordable without discrimination; Acceptability, meaning education that is safe, high-quality, and culturally appropriate; and Adaptability, meaning schooling that evolves to meet the needs of learners in changing circumstances. The second is the New Sociology of Childhood, which treats children not as passive recipients of aid but as active social agents capable of critiquing the systems designed for them. The 4A’s identify what is missing and who is accountable; the sociological lens explains how that absence damages children’s dignity and agency.

What emerged from the thematic analysis is a pattern the authors call hollow availability. The state and humanitarian organizations, including the NGO Jigdo, provided buildings and initial supplies, but the support was transient. One child recalled the arc plainly: on arrival, the community and government offered a warm welcome and even their own clothes, but after two or three years the support stopped completely and the government forgot about them. Another described receiving food rations, school uniforms, and educational materials at the beginning, only to see them cease after a few years. Under Tomasevski’s framework, availability is a permanent, non-negotiable state obligation, not a one-time act of charity. The withdrawal of school feeding programs and material aid therefore represents not a funding gap but a structural withdrawal of children’s rights, shifting the burden of persistence onto the children themselves.

The deficits compound at every level. Classrooms lack reference books, sports fields, and sufficient space; children report being asked to contribute their own money to buy textbooks despite their families’ poverty. Teachers are stretched across subjects outside their specialization, particularly in ICT and Amharic, diluting instructional quality. Sanitation is a gendered crisis: toilets lack water and privacy, and female students report having no menstrual hygiene products, forcing absences that turn biology into a barrier to education. Teachers reportedly deliver lessons from personal mobile phones because the school lacks books. The physical environment itself violates acceptability standards: apart from two blocks built by Jigdo, classrooms are uninsulated tin structures where, after nine in the morning, intense heat makes teaching and learning extremely difficult. Kitchen smoke drifts into classrooms, and the principal’s office had its roof blown off by wind months before the researchers arrived, still unrepaired for lack of funding.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns language. The displaced children arrived educated in Af-Somali, but the host region’s medium of instruction is Afaan Oromoo. With no bridging programs or language support, many children were pushed back into lower grades because they could not read or write in the new medium. The authors term this linguistic dispossession: the system treats a child’s existing knowledge as a deficit rather than an asset, demanding that the child adapt to the school rather than the school adapt to the child. Combined with reading materials that do not match learners’ interests and a curriculum designed without consulting them, the result is functional exclusion from an education that exists on paper. Children reported never having participated in decision-making about the interventions meant for them, a top-down approach the study links to what it provocatively names a Sociology of Neglect, in which authorities exploit the unstable legal status of displaced populations to treat education as temporary charity rather than a basic right.

Beneath all of this runs the study’s most haunting concept: burdened agency. When state support evaporated, families were forced into a survival-education trade-off. One child explained that families prioritized food and shelter over educational costs, limiting school attendance. Another described working as a daily laborer after school to sustain himself and his parents. The trade-offs extend beyond schooling: because the settlement’s health center is so poorly equipped, families sell limited aid rations to buy medications from private pharmacies, sacrificing the right to learn for the right to survive. A teacher recounted a parent asking for his child’s clearance to leave after just nine months, saying he could not stay even one night because it seemed something was going to eat his children. These are not choices made freely; they are high-stakes decisions forced on children by systemic failure, and they contradict the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, which guarantee displaced persons an adequate standard of living including health and education services.

The study’s conclusions are a call to reframe accountability itself. Current emergency-education metrics, enrollment figures and completed infrastructure, measure compliance, not rights. The authors argue that physical availability is a hollow victory if not matched by accessibility, acceptability, and adaptability, and they propose a Rights-Restoration Model that centers children’s voices as the primary measure of whether education is real. Their recommendations are concrete: regional education bureaus should move the Bishan Gurracha school out of temporary humanitarian aid and into the permanent town education budget, end the practice of requiring poor children to fund their own textbooks, provide essential learning materials, and open a fully stocked free medical clinic inside the settlement so that health and education no longer compete for the same scarce resources. The researchers also acknowledge limits: sixteen participants in one settlement cannot be generalized, and future work should triangulate perspectives from NGOs, officials, and educators, ideally through longitudinal designs tracking how withdrawal of state support shapes children’s life trajectories.

What makes this research resonate far beyond a single Ethiopian settlement is its methodological inversion. By shifting the evaluative lens from duty bearers to rights holders, it demonstrates that children as young as thirteen can serve as precise witnesses to institutional failure, naming the exact moment welcome turned to neglect. The study repositions the 4A’s framework from a passive government checklist into an active rights contract, and it redirects the research agenda from a question of how displaced children survive to a far more uncomfortable one: how systems fail them. For the millions of internally displaced children worldwide, the message is stark. A school building is not a right. A right is a school with books, water, teachers who know their subjects, a language the child understands, and a state that does not forget.

Subject of Research: Educational accountability and the right to education for internally displaced children in Ethiopia

Article Title: Rights holders analysis of educational accountability for displaced children in Bishan Gurracha Ethiopia

Article References: Gari, T. B., Boru, A. K., & Abraham, G. Y. (2026). Rights holders analysis of educational accountability for displaced children in Bishan Gurracha Ethiopia. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1042. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02203-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02203-4

Keywords: internally displaced children, right to education, Ethiopia, educational accountability, 4A's framework, New Sociology of Childhood, humanitarian education, linguistic dispossession, burdened agency, Bishan Gurracha, child rights, qualitative research