The turn to the African child and the 1931 conference can therefore be thought of as an internationalizing of child governance that predates the 1989 UNCRC by over half a century. This suggests that there is a continuity to the place of the child in international relations, indeed in the constitution of the international as a sphere of humanitarian action, and certainly of international civil society. In the preliminary meeting for the conference, held in November 1928, three themes for future work were agreed on: ‘infant mortality, child labor in relation to education, and child marriage’ (Marshall 2004: 278). It is noteworthy that these remain central foci of contemporary global governance of the child. The comment of one of the delegates remains as pertinent today as it was in 1931: ‘the welfare of children with particular reference to infant mortality and to questions of education, economics and labor, was probably the only subject in the world on which [we] could conceivably devise a concerted policy’ (Marshall 2004: 281).
Summary
This chapter has explored how and why children became an object of policy concern in the long nineteenth century. The ‘child-savers’ succeeded in bringing children into the centre of social policy, and in the shift from charitable and philanthropic concern to state responsibility a discourse of child rights began to circulate and take hold. The shift from child-saving to child rights culminated in the UNCRC, which then became the underpinnings for international development that increasingly took the figure of the child as the justification for its activities. In doing so it did not entirely displace child-saving. In the UNCRC and in the international declarations that foreshadowed it, children remain a special category of person who are entitled to protection from harm by virtue of their specific vulnerabilities rather than simply by virtue of their humanity.
Recommended further reading
Fieldston, Sara. 2015. Raising the World: Child Welfare in the American Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
An instructive account of how the development of international social policy focused on child welfare functioned as a plank of USA foreign policy.
Holzscheiter, Anna. 2010. Children’s Rights in International Politics: The Transformative Power of Transnational Discourse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
An important contribution to understanding how the negotiation of the UNCRC led to a new international discourse about the child as a rights-holding subject.
Kaime, Thoko. 2011. The Convention on the Rights of the Child: A Cultural Legitimacy Critique. Groningen: Europa Law.
An incisive contribution to the debate on the tensions between the normative standards of the UNCRC and their implementation in specific local or national contexts, contextualized through the author’s research in Malawi.
Minujin, Alberto and Shailen Nandy (eds.). 2012. Global Child Poverty and Well-Being: Measurement, Concepts, Policy and Action. Bristol: Policy Press.
A comprehensive edited collection on the development of child poverty as a concept and its gradual integration into national and international social policy.
Sloth-Nielsen, Julia (ed.). 2016. Children’s Rights in Africa: A Legal Perspective. Abingdon: Routledge.
A very comprehensive edited collection by African scholars on child protection and child rights in African legal systems, including chapters on the domestication of international law, regional law, customary law and juvenile justice.
3 Race, gender and class
Introduction
This chapter is about how race and gender shape children’s lives, and how class is experienced through the prism of race and gender. The aim of the chapter is to show that childhood cannot be understood without an appreciation of how it is lived through gendered and raced identities and experiences. This aim is achieved by showing how children learn gendered roles and racial identities and how their identifications shape their life chances and their experiences. In the first part of the chapter I show that the child’s work of learning that she or he has a gender does not begin and end with the simple announcement that ‘it’s a girl’ or ‘it’s a boy’; the child has to learn what these statements mean: what it is that is involved in being a boy or a girl. The second part of the chapter shows how the founding and globalization of racial capitalism has shaped children’s lives. It explores firstly one of the most obvious examples of how race is created through discursive state practices and does violence to children’s lives: the categorization of mixed-race children in the European empires and the separation of these children from their African, Asian or indigenous mothers. It then shows how in the USA, after the end of the Civil War, the abolition of slavery and the violent resistance by whites to Black Reconstruction, children’s lives were shaped by a series of laws and social practices (Jim Crow) that overturned many of the liberties that had been won by African Americans. I then explore several studies of how race and racism shape the US school system and the ways in which children learn, in school, the significance of race in shaping their childhoods and their futures.
Gender
There are two major currents of thinking in theories of gender: socialization and performativity. In the following section I first discuss gender socialization and, in particular, the research on the role of parents in teaching their children gender roles. I then set out two theories that I have grouped together because of the similarities between them: ‘doing gender’ and performativity. In the final part of this section on gender I show how gendered expectations of children impact on their use of time and their activities.
Gender socialization
Theories of gender socialization are derived from general theories of socialization that propose that the child is taught or trained in how to be a competent member of society. This model of socialization, derived from functionalism in sociology, proposes that the child moves from the family to the outside world, gradually learning and internalizing the behaviours necessary to function in society (Corsaro 2005: 8). An alternative model of socialization criticized functionalism for its conservative perspective, arguing that it was only functional to some members of society and that a smooth transition of existing norms reproduced inequalities. One of the most influential critiques of functional sociology can be found in the research of Pierre Bourdieu, a French socialist, who proposed the concept of the habitus to describe how children through the constant repetition of small everyday actions, like eating and talking, come to feel at home in some spaces and not others, and claimed that this effectively reproduced class-based inequalities (Bourdieu 1990).
Whereas these theories of socialization are about how children learn a whole range of roles and practices, the idea of gender socialization uses the same models but only focuses on one aspect: socialization into appropriate or socially sanctioned gender roles. Gender role socialization assumes that ‘individuals observe, imitate, and eventually internalize the specific attitudes and behaviors that the culture defines as gender appropriate by using other males and females as role models’ (Hill 2002: 494, citing Ickes 1993: 79).
Parents’