This article is a response to Karl Hanson’s call for the emancipation of children’s rights studies from the children’s rights movement. It explores the emergence of the children’s rights movement and children’s rights studies and analyzes some of the key childhood discourses that are emphasized by these two different approaches. As a way to understand why Hanson calls for emancipation, and in an attempt to begin to emancipate children’s rights studies, the article works to deepen current and future spaces for discussion in the field.
Child migration is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon spanning continents, age groups, and family patterns governed by two intersecting but not overlapping governance regimes. One of these two regimes is the migration regime, designed to uphold sovereign state borders and manage migration flows. The other is the child rights regime, a governance framework that privileges the protection of the best interests of the child. This article focuses on the mobility of adolescents, their needs, their challenges, and the implications of the complex and sometimes contradictory governance regimes impinging on these youthful migrations.
In this article we examine the process of construction and transformation of the meanings surrounding the serious violations of the Right to Identity in Argentina and Chile, which encompass from child appropriations during dictatorships to so called “irregular adoptions.” We inquire about how activists have built their public claims of justice and reparation. We discuss the singularities and differences of these processes in both countries and the current challenges, particularly in the construction of those affected as victims of human rights violations.
Soledad Gesteira, Irene Salvo Agoglia, Carla Villalta et al.
This paper analyses the empirical data of school occupations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during 2016 to discuss the production of novel generational orders around the good of public education. Using a decolonial standpoint from where to examine modernization in Brazil and its welfare provision for children, the paper advances the notions of intergenerational practices of co-generativity and politicized generativity as instances of how Southern realities can contribute to new theoretical insights in childhood studies.
Like childhood, thinking critically about militarism can entail a great deal of unlearning before coming to a more nuanced understanding of what lies beyond the signifier. Just as childhoods are multiple, overlapping, contingent, and bound up in many more aspects of our social worlds than is apparent if we look only for the child, so too militarism. The ways in which militarisms intersect childhoods and vice versa, therefore, call us to reflect not only on the conspicuous presence of militaries as institutions or on life in zones of conflict, but on the everyday lives of children everywhere in all their complexity and diversity.
This article develops a critical theory of adultism that can help both childhood studies and the larger academy to make visible the normative marginalization of children as children. Going beyond existing critical theories concerning sexism, racism, colonialism, and the like, adultism is formulated as a theory of normative disempowerment. In this way, it can function intersectionally to uncover the distinctive role of dominating adult-child binary oppositions both in childhood and across societies generally. After unpacking the history of concepts of adultism, the article constructs a systemic theory of adultism across three dimensions of ontological human being, epistemological knowledge, and political power.
In this article, decolonial scholarship inspires a discussion of globalization processes problematizing the concept of the ‘global child’. The antinomy global–local and the issue of the North–South divide are scrutinized, and child scholarship is evaluated from the point of view of a political economy of knowledge production. Finally, some key issues about what a Southern theory of childhood should look for based on a ‘politics of the local’ and its eventual interconnections with the global are discussed.
Within the contemporary US context, the construct of childhood innocence is a powerful social myth that structures children’s social relations and culture and informs their rights and status in society. In this article, I interrogate the construct of childhood innocence to examine how it operates as an exclusionary form of social practice. By examining the emotional investments and social tensions that have shaped concepts of childhood, which define who is entitled to innocence and what it means to “belong” with/in childhood, I reveal how the doctrine of innocence has operated to maintain White supremacy. I explore the implications of a construct of childhood that works against the agency and dignity of most children by perpetuating silence about social injustices to illustrate the need for a reconceptualization of childhood that acknowledges and prioritizes the human rights of all children.
Colombia is one of the countries where corporal punishment (CP) is not yet banned. This study aims to contribute to the understanding of CP in Colombia with respect to prevalence, severity and chronicity. We used the Spanish version of the Parent–Child Conflict Tactics Scale to assess 853 parental reports on the use of CP against their children in the four major cities of the country: Barranquilla, Bogotá, Medellin and Cali. Analyses of variances and logistic regressions were performed. Socio‐demographic variables that are predictors of the use of CP are parental age, the number of children in the household and age of the children. The results indicated a high rate of prevalence (77%) but low levels of severity and chronicity, as reported by Colombian parents. Our findings suggest that CP is a normalised practice, which might be linked to direct or indirect exposure to the long‐lasting armed conflict (more than 50 years) that the country endured. Recommendations for social policies are presented, particularly the design and implementation of locally relevant interventions for the prevention of this practice. ‘This study aims to contribute to the understanding of CP [corporal punishment] in Colombia with respect to prevalence, severity and chronicity’ Key Practitioner Messages There is a high prevalence of CP in Colombia but low levels of severity and chronicity. Socio‐demographic variables such as parental age and the number of children in the household are predictors of the prevalence of CP but not of its chronicity or severity. The use of CP might be related to the armed conflict that the country endured for the last 50 years. It is important to address the prevention of CP to promote a peaceful society.
Ángela Trujillo, Martha Rocío González Bernal, Laura Fonseca et al.
