Paper Short Abstract:

Using legal claims against the Danish state seeking compensation for the harm it has done to Greenlandic children, this paper explores how the cost of harm gets measured; and why monetary compensation might be a prioritized form of reparation, even though it can silence lived experiences of harm.

Paper Abstract:

On the 24th of February, 2022 the media in Denmark, as elsewhere, was filled with the terrifying news of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. On the same day, beneath the media radar, the Danish state issued 250.000DKK in compensation for the remaining six of the 22 Greenlandic children displaced from their families in the 1950s and shipped to Denmark to learn Danish in Danish families. After 1,5 years, six of the children stayed in Danish families and16 returned into anorphanage in Nuuk. 

   Conversely, what had caught headlines one year earlier was the public apology that Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Prime Minister issued to these ‘experiment children’, after decades of the state refusals to apologize. Denmark had equally refused to be part of the Greenlandic Reconciliation Committee (2014-2017). The PM’s apology ‘opened the door to the darkest period of Denmark’s history’.  

    Indeed, while a Greenlandic-Danish inquiry over the past wrongdoings has begun, multiple legal claims for compensation are being processed. These claims relate for instance to the the intrauterine devices (IUD) campaign that placed IUDs into thousands of Greenlandic girls and women without their knowledge and consent; and children who were ‘adopted’ to Denmark without the consent of their Greenlandic birth parents. Unlike ‘experiment children’, the claimants are demanding compensation before possible apology.  

   This paper explores how suffering is monetarized and ‘legally correct’ compensation defined, what forms of wrongs might leave unnoticed in legal claims, and why – nonetheless - both the state and claimants might prioritize compensation over an apology?