Productive work and subjected labor: Children's pursuits and child rights in northern Sierra Leone

ABSTRACT

The implementation of child rights legislation in the African nation of Sierra Leone has revealed children articulating novel values for education and labor. Corporal punishment was used to reinforce for children the importance of schooling and uncompensated household labor to their development as people. With its legal banning, children are forming values that conflict with those held by elders and with rights doctrine itself. They differentiate between productive “work,” useful because it is remunerated and skilled or improves their social connections, and the drudgery of uncompensated “labor,” which reinforces their low social position. Toil such as road works and mining can be “work” if it is valued and remunerated, while the desultory job market, equally desultory classroom experience, low social status, and poor pay of teachers renders formal education subjected “labor.” This highlights children as strategic users of rights and as agents in determining what comprises their own best interests.

Acknowledgments

My first thanks go to the residents of Makeni, without whose participation this research would not have been possible. I would like to thank Fourah Bay College for institutional support in 2004–2005, and the University of Makeni for institutional support from 2005. Special thanks go to my research assistants, Mohamed Kallon and Abubakkar Taylor-Kamara, to Father Joe Turay, and the staff and lecturers at the University of Makeni. I would also like to thank Martin and Emma Bamin for their decade of unwavering support. In the United States, I owe a debt of gratitude to Kristin Doughty, Ernesto Verdeja, and Heather DeBois for comments on the article, and for the generous and thoughtful reviews of the editorial staff at Journal of Human Rights, and to the anonymous reviewers. All errors are my own.

Funding

This research was funded by the Institute of International Education (Fulbright for Sierra Leone 2004) and the United States Institute of Peace (Jennings Randolph Dissertation Fellowship 2005). Research in 2010 and 2012 was funded by the Kroc Institute for Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine E. Bolten

Notes on contributor

Catherine E. Bolten is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her publications include the book I Did It to Save My Life: Love and Survival in Sierra Leone, published by the University of California Press in 2012.