Paper short abstract:

Trapped between i) paternalistic concepts of childhood and restrictive asylum law, and ii) children’s right discourse, I will discuss asylum seeking children as non-citizen child. From an intersectional childhood sociology perspective refugee childrens' multiple/political identities are analysed.

Paper long abstract:

For children in forced migration their relationship with the nation state is far from natural or automatic, and an issue of ongoing political debate and discourse. In this presentation I analyse the relationship between children’s rights and asylum law in view of refugee children’s childhood in Europe, from the perspective of childhood sociology. Specifically, the paper examines the political identity (Laclau Moufe, 1985) which is attributed to the figure of the asylum-seeking-child in the struggle between children’s rights discourse and asylum discourse. It will discuss impacts on child protection standards and children’s participation, and children’s exclusion from citizen rights, respectively. It depicts the struggle to determine the political identity of the refugee child as significant for constructivist understanding of childhood concepts. The paper examines processes of invisibilisation (Hormel 2017) of refugee childhoods and discrimination against groups of refugee children. Processes are highlighted of double victimization (Pupavac 2008) of migrant youth in forced migration, in terms of their status as legal subjects, their age, and against the background of paternalistic understandings of family in national migration and asylum legislation (Bhabha 2006) . However, adopting an intersectional perspective children’s experience in refugee mass accommodation is discussed in terms of social actorship, relational agency and refusal. Based on empirical data from an ethnographic research project with young refugee children and their parents in Germany, the paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of migrant youth, and intersecting concepts of childhood, forced migration and citizenship from a sociology of childhood perspective.