Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how child protection frameworks fail Palestinian girls in Gaza/Cairo by ignoring the colonial context. It describes a decolonial, care-based methodology using arts and ethnography to amplify girls' voices without saviourism or victimization narratives.

Paper long abstract

Israel's genocide (Albanese, 2024a; 2024b)in Gaza represents systemic violence against Palestinians, culminating a century of settler colonial expansion and erasure (Khalidi, 2024). This violence exposes the powerlessness of international legal frameworks meant to protect Palestinians, revealing the impotence of global systems in responding to what is increasingly recognised as the first live-streamed genocide in history.

This violence disrupts dominant humanitarian narratives which are rooted in liberal, individualistic paradigms that ignore structural and historical contexts (Abebe, 2019; Boyden, 2008), producing "highly normative and context-blind" programming (Hart, 2008, p.2). Consequently, the international child protection regime risks reproducing colonial tropes and enabling saviourist interventions that obscure root causes of suffering (Okyere, 2022). Since "universal categories of protection [...] sever children's experiences from their political and historical contexts," rendering them sites of imperial control (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019, p.15), these dynamics are especially dangerous for Palestinian children.

What conceptualisations of the future and 'hope' are relevant amid this livestreamed annihilation? My research explores this by examining how Gazan adolescents in Cairo make sense of violence, protection and their futures.

The paper outlines an attempt to craft a decolonial framework grounded in Palestinian feminist ethics of care (Ihmoud, 2023) and political reflexivity (Abdelnour and Abu Moghli, 2021), resisting Eurocentric adultism (Biswas, 2023; Cheney, 2019, 2023) through arts-based (Seppälä et al., 2021) and multimodal ethnographic methods (Dicks et al., 2006), while navigating asymmetrical researcher power (Morrison, 2024, p.15) and avoiding both victimizing (Sawhney, 2024) and romanticized resilience narratives (Shwaikh, 2023).