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- Convenors:
-
Caitlin Procter
(Geneva Graduate Institute)
Franziska Fay (Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz)
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Short Abstract:
Anthropologists have generated a wealth of evidence on how the systems that intend to protect children from violence are broken.In speculation of a less un-safe world for young people, this panel is about the future of children’s well-being, and the role that anthropology may take in this context.
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists have generated a wealth of evidence on how the systems that intend to protect children from different forms of violence are thoroughly broken. International child protection and violence prevention governance has left much change to be desired, specifically from the perspectives of the children addressed and if we take them seriously as diagnosticians of their own well-being. In speculation of a less un-safe world for young people, we are interested in thinking about the future of children’s well-being, and the roles that anthropologists and anthropology may take in this context.
· How can ethnographically grounded critiques of international child protection politics be practically fed back into a system, that has little capacity to accommodate scholarly intervention and beyond a diagnostic and descriptive mode of analysis?
. How can anthropology, in a public and engaged manner, serve as a tool to help change things for the better of children’s lives?
· How are the specific challenges of our times demanding and generating new approaches to keeping children’s lives safe?
· How can anthropologists apply and transform their critique to build more robust pathways to counter the general lack of young people’s protection, while conceiving of the notion in broader terms than commonly constrained by political discourse?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 12 April, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971 of India gives authority to parents/guardian to consent for abortion of people below 18 years. The law is not formed in silos influenced by social phenomenon. The question is towards social structure that doesn't beleive in the autonomy of adolescents.
Paper long abstract:
Like many parts of the world, Indian laws are formed based on the majoritarian views that fails to consider rights of people expected to benefit from those legislations. Similarly, Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971 was formed to prevent maternal deaths but there are evidences indicating formation of law for the purpose of population control. However, the beneficiary are women that excludes transgender and queer people but also doesn't give right to people below 18 years in their adolescence to decide if they want to discontinue the pregnancy. The decision makers are medical practitioners. These discriminatroy provisions are derived from the understanding that every person below 18 years is a 'child' who cannot comprehend their benefits. This category of people are highly vulnerable with their sexuality controlled and compromised due to social stigma. This causes access to resources only through peers and internet since no medical practitioner would be willing to guide an adolescent towards use of contraception where young people below 18 years in consensual sexual relationship may face detrimental effect. If there is no access to safe abortion, they will be forced to continue unwanted pregnancy or use unsafe measures to have abortion.
In the above mentioned brief it is the life of people below 18 years that comes at stake where if an unwanted pregnancy is continued it is likely to make their life more miserable without social security benefits especially if looked at the people at margins and unsafe abortion is a threeat to their life.
Paper short abstract:
In Norway there is a political debate about childcare protection in which migrant families report fear the child protection will “steal” children, ruin family and sense of belonging/wellbeing. I argue a need to attend to affects to counter child protection as structure creating violation/injustice
Paper long abstract:
This paper responds to a heated political debate concerning Norwegian childcare protection services with a focus on migrant families reporting fear that the childcare protection will “steal” their children, ruin their family, thus violate senses of belonging and wellbeing. Based on in-depth interviews with parents and childcare protection workers, and inspired by critical phenomenology, the paper points towards experiences of structural injustice, discomfort and un-belonging. I argue childcare protection practices to reflect a neo-liberal paradigm in which social justice involves application of the same principles of evaluation and distribution to all persons regardless of their social position and backgrounds making a practice of difference-blindness as part of a structural injustice. Feelings of discomfort and senses of belonging and wellbeing are not only products, but also ‘do’ things in the childcare protection as they mobilize actions, decisions and interpretations, and are thus lively actants in the service process. Reflecting on the assessment management that guide childcare workers, the making and sustaining family and home are here at stake, and I suggest, tend to create senses of discomfort and un-belonging among migrant families as their views, narratives and truth are largely neglected. Also, many childcare workers experience a “bugging feeling”, which in turn interplays in many childcare protection workers’ experience of discomfort in their practice. From such analysis, I argue a need to direct attention to such affects to counter childcare protection as a structure creating violation and injustice and rather support and better the lives of immigrant children and families.
Paper short abstract:
This study examines Romanian orphans and their agency. Not like the image of childhood in the international child protection, the orphans work as actor not recipient. Investigating the Romanian case, this study insists that anthropology can be a hub between the international model and indigeneity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses about how anthropological insights into orphans have the possibility to cooperate with the child protection through examining Romanian orphans and the child protection system.
The international child protection has made the Western conceptualisation of childhood the universal model. In the model, children are described as a recipient of being taken care of, raised, and heard. As a result, children are considered as a participant of the civil society but with the conditional membership.
In Romania, child protection has been reformed in accordance with the international model of childhood, therefore, the Romanian government has promoted deinstitutionalisation process and foster care in contrast to the institutionalisation by the former communist government. With their effort, approximately seventy percent of the Romanian live in the familial environment such as foster care.
My research in Romania from 2019 to 2021 revealed that the orphans were actually not only the recipients of care and of the familial environment but also active actors in “family” formation with the adults who surrounded them. However, at the same time, it is inevitable to point out that orphans’ agency to construct “family” sometimes destruct their relationship with the others.
The agency of children, however, does not emerge in individualistic ways, rather, it is demonstrated with Romanian indigenous concepts of children and family. Although the collective agency sometimes does not match the universal model, this study insists that the anthropological insights can contribute to further promotion of orphans’ well-being through connecting the indigenous concept to the international context.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the role of conceptions of childhood in humanitarian provision of education and its construction as protection in and after conflict, particularly as a future-oriented project of social (re)production.
Paper long abstract:
The figure of the child has historically strong resonance in humanitarianism and other social responses to disaster and conflict. This manifests in the politics of humanitarian representation, perceptions of innocence and hierarchies of need, and in practice and discourse of protection, in which the figure of the child has particular moral and affective power. This is grounded in particular historical and western imaginings of childhood, but inform child protection approaches in diverse social and political contexts. In the last two decades, the humanitarian sector has seen formal incorporation of education as emergency relief, which draws on child protection and right to education frameworks, and situates formal primary and secondary schooling as part of humanitarian child protection activities.
This paper analyzes the humanitarian education project through the lens of childhood and potential futures, and asks how particular forms of childhood are conceptualized as in need of protection in conflict and displacement and the perceived role of education as providing that protection. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with humanitarian professionals, text and image representation, and reflexive engagement with previous work experience in the development and humanitarian sectors on education and protection, I illustrate ways humanitarian education projects engage, or not, with local politics of childhood and education, in dialogue with normative instruments and policies, as well as professionals’ own experiences and values of education. In focusing particularly on the politics of childhood, I suggest that education as protection seeks to (re)produce certain patterns of social relations, and pathologizes others.