Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the challenges of accessing Zanzibari children's ideas about childhood and personhood in schools and regards them as crucial to improving children's realities and informing "child protection" development policy.

Paper long abstract:

"Child Protection" aims at increasing children's life quality and their experiences in a web of influential factors shaping their becoming. My ethnographic fieldwork in Zanzibar, Tanzania engages with children's perceptions of so-called inter/national "child protection" efforts in school. Doing research with children , the ultimate anthropological "other", re-establishes methodological possibilities and limitations. Trying to work with, about and most importantly for children and the dynamics of subjectivity and objectivity arising from their inseparability are core to my inquiry. My attempt to work with a feminist, Freire-ian methodological approach that thinks beyond the universally agreed boundaries of child-rights ideas came to face much of the Western bias I tried to escape.

While co-existing logics of child-rearing shape prevailing discourses in Zanzibar, I focus on philosophical concepts of personhood and ask how they shape ideas about childhood. Efforts to forbid corporal punishment in educational settings make impossible the achievement of personhood which leads people to reject such projects as their society's social complex realities are rendered technical. I argue that the concept of "child protection" needs to be understood beyond universalized ideas of well-being and instead build on children's ideas of protection and personhood. I do not contest the idea of children's critical agency, but I regard it in relation to their environments shaping their views - something that spatialized child protection interventions often dismiss. Hence I regard ideas of "participation", strongly emphasized by development agencies and childhood anthropologists alike, as very fragile.