Child care and participation in the Global South: an anthropological study from squatter houses in Buenos Aires

ABSTRACT

Children and teenagers are often considered as objects of care or as subjects who have the right to be cared for. However, in squatter houses in Buenos Aires, they often take on responsibilities that challenge the ways we understand childcare and participation. This article sets out to analyse the experiences of girls and young women. To do so, we carried out ethnographic work with girls aged 8–19 years within two occupied buildings in a Buenos Aires neighbourhood before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, studying its consequent measures of isolation and social distancing. Firstly, we describe how health measures applied to contain the pandemic reinforced certain stereotypes about children and their care. Secondly, we analyse the participation of these children in production and reproduction activities inside and outside their homes. In this analysis, we include the ways in which they deployed strategies for their own care, based on their activism in a political organisation. The analysed material allows us to explore tensions between care and participation that occur in the daily practices of young women who inhabit these spaces, which are crossed by moral and legal duties as well as by material needs and violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Care; participation;
• gender; children;
• COVID-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We speak in terms of women and girls because that is the way they perceive themselves.

2. Decree No. 297/2020 on Preventive and Compulsory Social Isolation (PCSI). Article 6, established that persons affected by the activities and services declared essential within the framework of the emergency were exempted from PCSI and from circulation prohibition. Those who weren’t essential workers had to apply for a permit accessed through a smartphone application.

3. Informal economy refers to unregistered, precarious ways of inhabiting the labour market

4. To respect the confidentiality of those who participated in the research, we used pseudonyms for both people and places.

5. Human rights organisations denounced this fact in several occasions, as it can be seen: http://www.correpi.org/2020/los-datos-de-la-represion-en-pandemia-al-9-8-2020/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and the This work was supported and Project PIP 353 ”Childhood, Alterity and Citizenship: Tensions around Practices, Policies and Experiences of child care and protection in the provinces of Neuquén, Salta and Buenos Aires”.

Notes on contributors

Pía Leavy

Pía Leavy is Assistant Researcher at the Argentina´s National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), where she teaches in graduate and post-graduated courses on childhood thematics. Her professional development as an anthropologist is focused on research and transfer activities in childhood, health, care and alterity topic´s in the province of Salta (Argentina), where she has specialised in Children’s Rights and Rights of Indigenous Peoples and their process of institutionalisation through public policies. She has worked as a consultant for several national and international institutions, and also has academic publications in prestigious national and international journals. She works at the Anthropological Science Institute (UBA) Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Paula Nurit Shabel

Pía Leavy is Assistant Researcher at the Argentina´s National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), where she teaches in graduate and post-graduated courses on childhood thematics. Her professional development as an anthropologist is focused on research and transfer activities in childhood, health, care and alterity topic´s in the province of Salta (Argentina), where she has specialised in Children’s Rights and Rights of Indigenous Peoples and their process of institutionalisation through public policies. She has worked as a consultant for several national and international institutions, and also has academic publications in prestigious national and international journals. She works at the Anthropological Science Institute (UBA) Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Paula Nurit Shabel holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she is currently an Assistant Professor. She also teaches in other graduate and post-graduate courses in different universities. In her research as Assistant Researcher at Argentina’s National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), she focuses on the political participation of children and young people in the urban space, their bonding and affective networks, and the processes of knowledge construction that take place in these practices, always from an ethnographic approach. She has academic publications in prestigious national and international journals, as well as important outreach work on children’s issues in the media, and activist work with children’s social organisations. She works at the Anthropological Science Institute (UBA) Buenos Aires, Argentina.