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ABSTRACT
The article responds to the question of how to facilitate participation in international child protection efforts by examining the ways a critique of power can broaden participation, as well as how the cultural politics of childhood and globalisation frame these efforts. The argument that is advanced is to expand participation by formulating an imaginative and dynamic model of power to include children and young people in interrogating the ways power underscores relations in protection/participation efforts. Engaging children and young people in recognising the ways power works in their own lives so that they can identify it, exposes the workings of power in ways that clears a space to view children beyond objects of protection.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note on contributor
Virginia Caputo is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Landon Pearson Resource Centre for the Study of Childhood and Children’s Rights at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). She received her PhD in Social Anthropology at York University (1996) holding a SSHRCC doctoral fellowship. Early in her career, she was awarded the Swedish Institute’s Council of Europe scholarship, and the Sir Ernest MacMillan research award in recognition of the importance of enlarging the horizons of gender and music research to include Canadian children’s lives. Her expertise lies in studies of girlhoods, children’s rights, gendered childhoods, and the changing contours of young people’s lives in the context of globalisation.
Notes
1 Allison James, ‘Giving Voice to Children’s Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials’, American Anthropologist 109, no. 2 (2007): 261–72, at 262.
2 Joana Lúcio and John l’Anson, ‘Children as Members of a Community: Citizenship, Participation and Educational Development – An Introduction to the Special Issue’, European Educational Research Journal 14, no. 2 (2015): 129–37, at 130.
3 See C. Cott, Conceptualizing and Measuring Participation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), for example, for a discussion by scholars in disability studies who argue that there is an over-emphasis on individuals and less on participation viewed as relational and dependent on having access and opportunities in the context of diverse social relationships. For more on individual rather than collective emphasis, see also R.J.M. Perenboom and A.M.J. Chorus, ‘Measuring Participation According to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF)’, Disability Rehabilitation 25 (2003): 577–87.
4 For a fuller discussion of this point, see Tom O’Neill, and Dawn Zinga, Children’s Rights: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Participation and Protection (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).
5 Lucio and l’Anson, ‘Children as Members of a Community’, 131.
6 William Myers, ‘Children’s Right to Defend Their Well-Being and Development’, International Conference, Child Participation and Child Protection, 2015, https://icpnc.org/publications-and-resources/conference-on-child-participation-and-child-protection-resources/.
7 Ibid.
8 Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent, eds, Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1–2.
9 Ibid., 13.
10 Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, eds, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 185.
11 James, ‘Giving Voice to Children’s Voices’.
12 Sharon Stephens, ed., Children and the Politics of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
13 Ryerson University and the International Child Protection Network of Canada (ICPNC), “Facilitating Child Participation in International Child Protection”. Conference held at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, October 5–6, 2015.
14 Stephens, Children and the Politics of Culture, 23.
15 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Globalization and the Research Imagination’, International Social Science Journal 51, no. 160 (2002): 229–38; Jennifer Cole and Deborah Lynn Durham, Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007); David Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989).
16 Milton Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Anchor Books), 1999; David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2001).
17 Cole and Durham, Generations and Globalization; Stephens, Children and the Politics of Culture.
18 Stephens, Children and the Politics of Culture, 11–13.
19 James, ‘Giving Voice to Children’s Voices’.
20 To view the images and video, visit http://tooyoungtowed.org/#/video.
21 ‘Too Young to Wed’, Exhibit Catalogue (Carleton University Art Gallery, 2012), 1.
22 Sarah Banet-Weiser, ‘Am I Pretty or Ugly: Girl, Digital Media and the Economy of Visibility’ (Paper presented to Girlhood Studies and the Politics of Place: New Paradigms of Research Symposium, McGill Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, Montreal, QC, 10–12 October 2012).
23 Claudia Aradau, ‘The Perverse Politics of Four-Letter Words: Risk and Pity in the Securitisation of Human Trafficking’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33, no. 2 (2004): 251–77, at 276.
24 L. Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 1999); L. Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering (London: Sage Publications, 2004); P. Scannell, ‘What Reality Has Misfortune?’, Media, Culture & Society 26, no. 4 (2004): 573–84.