Childhood in a Global Perspective. Karen Wells
of this book is that a global perspective on childhood is possible and useful because globalization shapes political economy everywhere, from small-scale hunter-gatherer groups to the central business districts of global cities. This global political economy overdetermines (shapes and limits) the social fields and cultural forces that necessarily make childhood different in different times and places. The task of a global perspective on Childhood Studies is to understand precisely how global political economy, and the structures it supports and the forces it mobilizes, reshape childhood in multiple spaces and times, societies and cultures.
This book addresses that task through showing how a particular model of childhood, one that originates in contemporary Western ideas about what it means to be human and what differentiates children from adults, is being globalized through international instruments and global capitalism. This model of childhood constructs healthy childhood as one that orientates children towards independence rather than interdependence and towards school-based rather than work-based learning, and separates them from the wider forces of politics, economy and society. I call this model of childhood ‘neo-liberal’ because of the compatibility between liberal ideas that value independence, rational choice and autonomy, and the concept of childhood inscribed in this model.
In the following chapters I explore the tensions between this globalizing model of childhood, the circumstances of children’s lives, and local conceptions of childhood and of children’s competencies, capacities and vulnerabilities. I do this through exploring how global flows and international structures press down on childhood in key domains of children’s lives (family, work, school and play), how children interact directly with the state in politics, war and juvenile justice, and the strategies (especially migration) that children and their families deploy to make life possible in a globalizing world. In the next chapter I expand on the role of the state, philanthropists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the reshaping of childhood in the discursive shift from child-saving to child rights.
Recommended further reading
Botchway, De-Valera N. Y. M., Awo Sarpong, and Charles Quist-Adade (eds.). 2019. New Perspectives on African Childhood: Constructions, Histories, Representations and Understandings. Wilmington: Vernon Press.
A welcome addition to the canon of Childhood Studies, this edited collection offers accounts of childhoods across the continent from scholars in both the social sciences and humanities.
Ford, Eileen Mary. 2018. Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City. New York: Bloomsbury.
A study based on archival sources of the role of the state (especially through the provision of primary schooling), the media and the Catholic Church in shaping discourses of childhood and children’s lives from 1934 to 1968, the year of the student movement and the Tlatelolco massacre by the Mexican army. One of the few historical studies of Mexican childhoods.
Montgomery, Heather (ed.). 2013. Local Childhoods, Global Issues. 2nd edn. Bristol: Policy Press.
An excellent introduction to global perspectives on childhood framed by the core themes of poverty, health, violence and resilience. Edited by a key scholar in the anthropology of childhood who contributes three of the six chapters.
Pomfret, David M. 2016. Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Covering the period from the 1880s until the Second World War, Youth and Empire conveys the importance of the governance of childhood to the expansion of European imperial power. It shows that ‘[w]hile the coercive technologies of gunboat and garrison were never entirely superseded, they were complemented by assertions of superiority in the field of culture focusing upon children, the family and new domestic norms’ (p. 17).
2 Policy and practice
Introduction
This chapter is about how charitable institutions, philanthropists and government have responded to the problem of child poverty on a national and international scale. It shows how a wave of reform energy targeted on children in the nineteenth century in North America and Europe gradually moved the responsibility for children’s welfare from charities to governments. While the entry of government into the fields of child welfare and juvenile justice did not eradicate charities from the landscape, it did reframe concern for children within a new political paradigm of rights and justice. This gradual shift from child-saving to child rights is evident in the emergence of national and international law intended to protect the rights of the child and found its fullest expression in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, a simple evolutionary narrative of a concern for child welfare that moves from child-saving to child rights does not tell the whole story. In practice the field of child welfare constantly shifts around these two poles rather than moving decisively from one to the other.
Rescuing children: the history of child-saving
The nineteenth century was a century of change on an unprecedented scale: industrialization stimulated a dramatic growth in the scale and density of urban life and parallel shifts in rural life. The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic population movements that criss-crossed the globe. If industrialization and urbanization did not necessarily increase poverty they did make it more visible and, in an era of democratic reform, inequality could no longer be legitimated by divine right or natural law. The long nineteenth century is said to have opened with the French Revolution of 1789 and closed with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. In between these epoch-shaping events there were revolutionary outbreaks in Haiti in 1791; Europe in 1848 and again in 1879; and Mexico in 1910. It is in this context of a landscape of revolutionary change of society, politics and economy that the era of social reform that begins in the nineteenth century should be situated.
The upheavals of the nineteenth century produced new problems of government, and the management of childhood poverty became, and has remained, a central problem of modern government. Many themes from this era of social reform can still be traced in how children are depicted by contemporary social reformers working with or on children.
The end of the nineteenth century ushered in what has been referred to as the ‘century of the child’. It is in the late 1800s that most of London’s most influential child charities were launched: Barnardo’s in 1867; the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1884; the Liverpool Society in 1883; the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1889 (Murdoch 2006: 3). England was not unusual in Europe in expanding child welfare institutions in this period; Germany saw the establishment and significant expansion of child welfare charities between 1830 and 1868 (Dickinson 1996: 11). In the case of Germany most of this activity was organized by private philanthropy; state action on child welfare was limited before 1870, although after that date it expanded considerably. In 1878 the German Legal Guardianship Code gave the state responsibility for ‘neglected children’ (Dickinson 1996: 18). In France there was a gradual shift in child welfare from private religious charities in the seventeenth century to the state in the late eighteenth century, and in the early nineteenth the state assumed complete legal responsibility for the care of ‘unwanted children’ (Fuchs 1984: 26). Following the agitation of private, philanthropic child protection agencies from the 1860s through to the 1880s (Fuchs 1984: 59) the state’s powers over families were expanded in a late nineteenth-century law for the protection of the moralement abandonnés which gave the state the right to separate children from ‘immoral’ parents; by the turn of the century judges had the power to remove children from their families and place them in public guardianship.
The concern with child welfare in the nineteenth century was also evident in the United States. What is referred to in America as the ‘Progressive Era’ (1890–1920) concentrated its ‘reform energy on children’ (Katz 1986: 414). Levine and Levine begin their history of Helping Children