Karl Hanson

Refractions of Children's Rights in Development Practice: A view from anthropology – Introduction

with how children’s rights impact on their lifeworlds in developing countries. Taking an anthropological approach that focuses on the lives of vulnerable children in a variety of contexts across the globe, the authors tease out the complex ways in which rights-based policies mesh with the practice of doing development and in the process can become entangled, welded together or clash with children’s ideas of right and wrong. Beyond lofty intentions of protecting children worldwide against all sorts of abuse and granting them a wide range of material and immaterial rights, applying a children’s rights perspective in development work has sparked intense debate. Much of this debate is about the paradox that taking

The rise and fall of icons of ‘stolen childhood’ since the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child:

In the past two decades, the iconography of victimhood mobilized by child rights advocates has changed significantly. In particular, the child victim of violence has replaced the street child as the dominant icon on the international agenda. Based on data from more than 300 documents produced between 1989 and 2009 and interviews with leading advocates, this article explores the diverging trajectories of iconic child victims. It follows the traces of the successive translations of the idea of ‘stolen childhood’ and locates them against the backdrop of evolutions in the children’s rights field.

Schools of Thought in Children’s Rights

A consensus on the extent, priorities or even precise content of children’s rights is not readily available: children’s rights are a morally sensitive domain having to deal with strong, and often competing, normative and ideological perspectives. Working in such a context is particularly challenging, not only for policy makers and activists but also for researchers (Reynolds et al., 2006). This chapter aims to reflect on the differences amongst conceptions of children’s rights by proposing a heuristic structure which presents the various approaches as ‘schools of thought’ in children’s rights. After we question the supposed generalized consensus on children’s rights, we will discuss four dimensions or key issues on which opinions diverge and that are pivotal for understanding variations in approaches to children’s rights. These dimensions are the childhood image, the debate on competence, the rights of children and the difference dilemma. As a next step, and according to positions taken on the key issues, we suggest differentiating approaches to children’s rights in the form of four schools of thought: Paternalism, Liberalism, Welfare and Emancipation. In conclusion, we will point to some possible implications of this proposed framework for child research.

‘Killed by charity’ – Towards interdisciplinary children’s rights studies:

‘Killed by charity’ is the title of the second album of the avant-garde rock/jazz-band X-Legged Sally and was released in 1993. The phrase also reminds of a tragic event that occurred in the course of food droppings by air over a drought-stricken region in Africa in the early 1990s. According to the band’s lead musician, Peter Vermeersch, the title of the album refers to an incident which had lead to the accidental death of some of the people who had received heavy food palettes on their head. They had been, literally, killed by charity. Researchers in the field of childhood studies and children’s rights have recurrently uncovered that charity can also ‘kill’ in a figurative sense. Many articles published in Childhood over the last 20 years have demonstrated that taking unjustified and unfounded measures in order to protect children – in their best interests – has not been without contradictions or even tragedies (A time for celebrations, 1999). Consider, for instance, the infamous example of ingrained child protection policies in Australia during the 20th century that involved the forced removal from their families and placement in institutional or foster care of Aboriginal and mixed-descent children. The history of child protection policy and interventions contains numerous other examples of wellintended charity interventions on children’s behalf that have led not to improving but to deteriorating children’s conditions. Childhood has also published articles on the harmful consequences of interventions in children’s lives in the field of development practice. A recent example includes Susan Levine’s (2011) study on how the introduction of child labour legislation in South Africa since the end of apartheid has had the unintended consequence of deepening chronic hunger and poverty among children who formerly participated as seasonal or part-time workers, rather than improving their lives. In another article, Sircar and Dutta (2011) have pointed at the effects of attempts at ‘rescuing’ children of sex workers by kindhearted outsiders, that are at best temporary and at worst come at the cost of abrogating the children’s and their families’ rights. Childhood studies and children’s rights share the rejection of policies and interventions that are concerned about children merely as passive objects; both approaches can be seen as providing an antidote for the harm inflicted on children by charity approaches that do not consider their agency nor their rights. An appropriate starting point for exploring the relations between childhood studies and children’s rights are the first issues of The International Journal of Children’s Rights and of Childhood, two of the field’s leading academic journals that both appeared in 1993. In the Editorial introduction (1993) to the first issue of The International Journal of Children’s Rights, the editors emphasized 547453 CHD0010.1177/0907568214547453ChildhoodEditorial editorial2014

Separate Childhood Laws and the Future of Society

This article reflects upon the way how law and legal regulations on behalf of children have responded to childhood by setting up separate legal regimes. It looks at the origins of child protection and juvenile justice legislation and at the legal framework that deals with child labor. The differences between children and adults are deemed so fundamental that they have justified the setting up of different legal regimes for children, which are thought of as being better equipped to take children’s particularities into account and hence to better prepare them for the future. However, the establishment of separate childhood laws in order to better take into account children’s special needs, has in practice partially pushed children out of existing legal frameworks. This has prevented children from exercising a whole other set of fundamental rights and has not only strengthened but in some instances paradoxically also weakened their legal status.

An independent voice for children's rights in Europe? The role of independent children's rights institutions in the EU

This article attempts to understand the distinctive role of independent human rights institutions for children (IHRICs) in Europe, in the context of the proposed EU strategy on the rights of the child. It begins by explaining the distinctive characteristics of IHRICs, their presence, location and organisation in Europe, and the role of the European Network of Ombudspersons for Children (ENOC). It goes on to examine their developing relationships, individually and collectively, with European institutions (in particular the institutions of the European Union, but also with reference to the Council of Europe). The article draws on observations of the annual conference of ENOC in 2010, and on interviews with members of ENOC. The article follows this with a discussion of how IHRICs may be understood as operating at the interface of regional, national, European and global mechanisms, and concludes with a review of current issues and some questions for future research.

Embracing the past: ‘Been’, ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ children:

To be propelled to the future has long been considered the essence of modern childhood. As they grow up, children acquire the necessary knowledge and skills needed to develop into responsible adults. Children’s destiny is to be ‘waiting’ (Qvortrup, 2004), not only waiting to become adults but also waiting for economic prosperity, social justice and peace permitting everyone to live a joyful childhood and thriving adulthood without poverty, exploitative labour or discrimination. Investing in children is seen as the unique instrument that will make these developments possible. The futurity of children includes both the promise to improve individual children’s opportunities and the idea that the advancement of children will lead to improving the collective future of the nation (King, 2016). However, the promise of a bright and shining future can also be deceiving. Waiting children very well know that tomorrow might never come, and ask to also consider their present situation. One of the major drives for the emergence of the field of childhood studies in the 1990s was precisely to respond to developmental psychology and socialization theories, the then prevailing approaches to children and childhood, that were criticized for their almost exclusive focus on the adults that children will become, thereby overlooking children’s important present-day contributions (James, 2009). By patiently investigating children’s activities and contributions to their own lives and to the social world around them in the here and now, childhood studies privilege the study of the ‘being’ child of the present over the ‘becoming’ child of the future (James, 2009; Lee, 2001; Mayall, 2002). By emphasizing the ‘being’ child, childhood studies implicitly preserves the importance of the ‘becoming’ child discourse, the one providing a mirror of the other to which it is inextricably linked (Uprichard, 2008). The ‘being and becoming’ binary developed into a key analytical devise for understanding the interplay between children’s present and future that informs many current childhood research. Considering the importance of time and temporality for the empirical study and theorizations of children and childhood (James and Prout, 1997), I am often left wondering where the ‘been’ child has gone. To understand children, individually and collectively, and childhood as a social category, I feel that we should give due consideration not only to how present and future are balanced but also to more explicitly embrace children’s and childhood’s past. Conceptually, the dialectic between the ‘being’ and the ‘becoming’ child needs to be complemented by a third component, the ‘been’ child. This proposal to organize the temporal dimensions of childhood studies in a three-sided pattern is inspired by the Danish artist Asger Jorn’s (1964) triolectical method. To overcome binary thinking in art, he reworked traditional dialectics by developing a method able to preserve dynamism, vitality and movement. In doing so, he suggested introducing ‘third’ positions rather than simple oppositions (see also Hanson and Nieuwenhuys, 2013). Jorn 715347 CHD0010.1177/0907568217715347ChildhoodEditorial editorial2017

Children’s participation and agency when they don’t ‘do the right thing’

Advocacy groups acting on behalf of children frequently argue that children’s views need to be taken more seriously. Their assertions to listen more carefully to children’s voices or to expand children’s participation rights, for which they refer to article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), are mostly expressed in relation to social domains that have a positive connotation, such as school life, local policy making or the right to be heard in court proceedings. We need to recognize and enhance children’s constructive roles in society, consider them as social actors and acknowledge their citizenship more fully, the main argument goes, in particular when children ‘do the right thing’. The imposition of high minimum ages, for instance, for exercising the right to vote, to have legal standing or make decisions about one’s schooling are considered a hindrance for recognizing children’s fundamental human rights. The reasoning can be summarized as ‘the lower the age limit to act or to exercise a right, the better’. Conversely, in relation to social domains that have a negative connotation, prevalent children’s rights norms, practices and discourses tend to take the opposite viewpoint. When children marry, work, engage in armed conflict or commit a criminal offence, dominant claims no longer emphasize children’s capacities or participation but prioritize the protection of vulnerable children. When children don’t ‘do the right thing’, the governing principle seems to turn into ‘the higher the age limit, the better’. Discussions on children’s capacity to participate or to make autonomous choices are closely related to the notion of children’s agency, a key concept in childhood studies. In advocacy discourse, children’s agency refers to their capacity or incapacity of making autonomous choices. Whether or not children are considered having agency is evaluated from a normative standpoint about what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ for children to do or not to do, rather than from empirical investigations about children’s actual degrees of capacity or autonomy in practice. An example of a field where ‘the higher, the better’ principle prevails and that largely prefers protection over agency is the marriage of children and young people. The Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) stated in a general comment adopted in 1994 that the minimum age for marriage should be 18 years, both for men and women. In adopting this position, CEDAW makes reference to the important responsibilities married persons assume and to the potential negative consequences for the health, education and future economic autonomy of children, in particular girls, who marry at a young age. CEDAW (1994) consequently concluded that ‘marriage should not be permitted before [man and women] have attained full maturity and capacity to act’ (para. 36). The position that 18 years should be the minimum age for 669222 CHD0010.1177/0907568216669222ChildhoodEditorial research-article2016

‘Global/local’ research on children and childhood in a ‘global society’

KARL HANSON: To start our conversation, I wonder if you would think of your own research as ‘global’ or as ‘local’ research? Also, how do you understand the terms ‘local’, ‘global’ and ‘globalized’ childhood? Do you personally find these terms useful/ productive? STUART AITKEN: For some time now, I’ve been persuaded by the notion of flat ontologies. Sally Marston and her colleagues David Woodward and J.P. Jones published the now famous piece in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (Marston et al., 2005) that looked at the production of scale for what it was: precisely that, a production. They argued for an intense focus on flat networks and relationalities rather than hierarchical scales, and that is how I like to proceed with my own work with children and young people. I’ve published books on children and globalization, youth activists jumping scale (to use the term of the late, great Neil Smith, 1992) to affect national and international politics, the impact of neoliberal forms of governance on young people and so forth, and it always seems to come down to (if you will pardon the pun) engagement and aesthetics (the latter formed by the ideas of Jacques Rancière). My empirical work these days looks at young people as part of communities of care rather than scaled communities. Now, it is possible for some people (politicians, CEOs) to create scales and hierarchies to shut young people down so I do not want to diminish the politics behind the production of scale, but for me, at least at the moment, I am very much concerned with reproduction in the sense that Elizabeth Grosz and others use that term. I want to use the term reproduction here in perhaps a more expansive way than it is used by contemporary feminists like Grosz, Cindi Katz, Katharyne Mitchell and others, as the potential for young people to reproduce and remake themselves differently. The importance of the right to create and recreate themselves and their spaces is in the best interests of young people (and adults) and, as a consequence, the focus on spatial rights is not only about occupying spaces that are suitable for access to housing, livelihoods and education but also the right to stay put as well as right of movement and 779480 CHD0010.1177/0907568218779480ChildhoodHanson et al. research-article2018

A global journal of local and global child research

At its launch in 1993, now 25 years ago, the subtitle of Childhood was ‘A global journal of child research,’ but later the editors decided to rearrange the subtitle a bit and changed it into ‘A journal of global child research.’ In her editorial that accompanied this adjustment, Virginia Morrow (2007) explained that the mobility of the word ‘global,’ which is since volume 14 attached to ‘child research’ instead of to ‘journal,’ reflects Childhood’s aspiration to promote and publish research on children and childhood ‘in every part of the world’ and by scholars ‘across the globe’ (p. 10). We also find the world ‘global’ in the journal’s lead text that presents Childhood as an international forum for research relating to children in ‘global society.’ Research published in Childhood is indeed not restricted to a specific part of the world but includes theoretical and empirical studies on children and childhood from many different localities as well as from a global perspective. The use of the term ‘global,’ alone or in conjunction with its antonym ‘local,’ is seldom neutral as it can refer to many different meanings (see Albrow, 2012). These range from frames with positive connotations, such as the importance to address worldwide social, economic, and environmental concerns that are important for humankind, or to respect the distinct views and interests of indigenous people, to more depreciative understandings of the impact of neoliberal market globalization, or of narrowminded parochial apprehensions. What is important for scholarship is the study of the different layers and the complex interconnections between local and global social relations rather than approaching both as exclusionary binaries. This is the aim of the academic field of Global Studies that adopts ‘an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relation between the local and the global across the domains of social life’ (James, 2012: 757). Established at the turn of the 21th century, Global Studies has several characteristics in common with Childhood Studies, such as the adoption of an interdisciplinary approach (which was the theme of our previous conversation, see Alanen et al. 2018), the inclusion of contemporary and historical configurations and the embracing of critical and of postcolonial perspectives in their study fields. Parallel to the journal Childhood’s incorporation of the study of multiple childhoods, leading journals in the field of Global Studies, such as Globalizations or The Global Studies Journal, that are this year celebrating their 15th and 10th anniversary, respectively, also aim to include multiple points of view and multiple interpretations, from many different locations, to the study of many possible trends and patterns in globalization.1 Even if the field of Global Studies aims to look at how globalization impacts the entire social life, it seems to have been only very little engaged with understanding its consequences for children and childhood. A quick search in Globalizations 779481 CHD0010.1177/0907568218779481ChildhoodEditorial editorial2018