Childhood in Africa:
An Interdisciplinary Journal

Volume 2, Issue 1 • Fall 2010
ISSN 1948-6502 (online)

EDUCATION REFUGEES AND THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF CHILDHOOD VULNERABILITY
Andrew Epstein, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Abstract
This paper examines the practices of Southern Sudanese children who obtained an education in refugee camps abroad and subsequently returned to their communities during many decades of civil war, and how these practices influence and are influenced by educational interventions mobilized by international institutions intended to protect displaced children and regulate their movement. Education has only recently become a standard tool among these interventions, but has for a long time been a motivating factor in the movement of people around the globe. This meeting of historically and politically conditioned practices of movement with new international policy responses to displacement crises raises questions about distinctions that are made between voluntary and involuntary movement, between the various socio-cultural and economic conditions that give rise to child migration, and how we define home and vulnerability in a milieu of global interconnectedness and interdependence. Identifying both junctures and dis-junctures between the uses of education by child refugees and the international institutions that provide it, the author proposes a research agenda on the education refugee to better understand the development and consequences of education policy in emergency and post-conflict situations.
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GENDERED MORAL DIMENSIONS OF CHILDHOOD VULNERABILITY
Nancy Kendall, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Abstract
Community, state, and international definitions of childhood and vulnerability play a central role in determining which people and families receive the limited resources available to support vulnerable children’s survival and thriving. International definitions of childhood and vulnerability are often assumed by international development organizations (IDOs) to embody universal human rights and equality norms, and thus to serve as an appropriate basis for creating universal categorization frameworks to identify vulnerable children across communities and states. Community definitions, on the other hand, may be viewed as particular and potentially biased, embedded as they are in local power dynamics and social relations. Nonetheless, IDOs increasingly rely on communities to identify and distribute support to vulnerable children. This paper utilizes vertical ethnographic approaches to map and compare the gendered moral assumptions that shaped community, state, and international conceptions of childhood and vulnerability and responses to vulnerable children in border communities in Malawi and Mozambique. It argues that a gendered lens on childhood and vulnerability reveals both the gender inequitable assumptions underlying international and community childhood and vulnerability frameworks, and the urgent need for gendered analyses of childhood and vulnerability that engage honestly with people’s lived realities, opportunities, and social relations. These analyses would explicitly link efforts to improve children’s lives to gendered analyses of the local, national, and international social and political economic systems that differentially shape survival strategies and opportunities—and people’s judgments of the morality of these strategies—for females and males.
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A CULTURAL AND GENDER PERSPECTIVE ON MARGINAL CHILDREN ON THE STREETS OF KENYA
Philip Kilbride, Bryn Mawr College

Abstract
How to best analytically position street children in comparison to others in various social circumstances requires a robust theoretical discussion.  The very concept of street children can be contested as essentialized, serving to mask social and behavioral differences, especially those between boys and girls.  The limited perspective of the street child as a victim and thereby psychologically vulnerable is also contested.  Cases considered here serve to illustrate that all children on the streets share a common experience of social marginality.  This is experienced by them as children, as members of the powerless jua kali (hot sun) workers class, and in their isolation from cultural institutions.  Some of these children however, especially girls, are vulnerable and clearly victims of harsh social circumstances.  A theoretical perspective is put forth to explain a relative social marginality for women, taking into account increased social class differences and changing cultural values since 1900.  Girls on the streets are therefore best understood as being at the bottom of a gendered hierarchy in Kenya.  Concepts like the street child and the vulnerable child in current use as master labels serve to hide agency reported here even on the margins of Kenya’s cultural, social, and gender hierarchy.  An ethnographic method is put forth as a useful strategy for discovering strategies for success on the streets.  To specifically evaluate gender, follow up research with adults previously described as children (1991) is combined with new material from children in Nairobi and the smaller city of Nyeri in central Kenya.  A theoretical perspective from general anthropology is offered as one way to better align studies of children with broader theoretical concerns in anthropology and related disciplines.

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SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF CHILD SOLDIER RECRUITMENT IN THE SPECIAL COURT FOR SIERRA LEONE
David Rosen, Fairleigh Dickinson University

Abstract
Concern over the recruitment of child soldiers in armed conflicts has grown over the last decades. While public advocacy and media attention tend to focus public attention on the most egregious cases of child recruitment, emerging international law has actually had a more profound effect on the relationship between children and the military. What began as a relatively narrow concern with protecting children under 15 years old who served as combatants in armed forces and armed groups has evolved into an international effort to sever a broad range of connections between all persons under 18 years old and the military. Indeed, the entire legal concept of the “child soldier” has evolved to encompass a greater number of children engaged in a wider variety of activities than was previously the case.

The drive to create a universal legal and moral standard has trumped any concerns about local understandings of child soldiers, which are treated not as legitimate expressions of local culture but rather as deviant and inhumane practices under international law. International humanitarian law is not merely ethnocentric; it is indeed intentionally ethnocentric. Its concern is not to respect local norms but rather to systematically alter them. The drafters who crafted the language of the first international treaty that barred the recruitment of children under 15 years old were keenly aware of significant cross-cultural variation in the ages of childhood, youth and adulthood. But their view that the participation of children and adolescents in combat was an “inhumane practice” made such considerations irrelevant. An examination of the development of international law and its application in Sierra Leone shows that as international law develops an increasingly expanded concept of the child soldier, the disjunction between the normative aspirations of law and the reality of local practice continues to grow.
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