Who's Afraid of Children?

Children, Conflict and International Relations

Helen Brocklehurst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754641711
• eBook ISBN: 9781351873048
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Brocklehurst's impressive work breaks new ground in normative international political theory. It develops a new theoretical framework which exposes how children are present in international relations and security practices using an empirical and comparative assessment of the role of children and youth in a range of conflicts including Nazi Germany, Mozambique, South Africa, Northern Ireland, the Cold War and the British Empire. The author argues powerfully that concepts of children are partial and 'contained' through their construction as non-political. Global in scope, this book is a timely and important contribution given the growing visibility of children in international relations evident after September 11. The political and ethical question at the heart of this book is: will international relations dare to catch up?

1
Children

Beginnings

If children are people under 18 years old, it may be said that they form half of the world’s population. Age however, in many respects, is not sufficient in itself as an indicator of childhood, nor does it illustrate why such persons are potentially receiving or deserving of different treatment throughout this time. In fact there is no single or agreed definition of childhood recognized or acted upon worldwide. As a unique and transient period of intense physical, mental, emotional and spiritual development; a time span delineated differently across and within communities and cultures; a managed societal or economic initiation; and a portal to romanticized and marketable evocations, images and memories, the consideration of childhood presents a unique empirical and theoretical challenge. Children are shaped not only by their underdevelopment as persons, but by conceptions earned and bestowed by the many individuals and groups who hold expectations of children, individually, collectively, simultaneously, arbitrarily and even contradictorily.

For the purposes of this book, however, all those considered to be children and childlike, are of interest. The construction or the image of a child, invoked in the minds of those fighting for their ‘women and children’ for example, is important to this discussion. It is also true that people can remain forever children in the eyes of their parents, regardless of age, as evidenced in the Latin American protest movement Madres de Plaza de Mayo whose grown-up children ‘disappeared’ during Argentine military rule. The choice of bestowed identity is of interest here despite the ambiguity.

The formal study of childhood, itself a young discipline, is another vital entry point. Childhood is often a clearly subdivided life phase though across different cultures and contexts these divisions may have no exact correspondence especially in later childhood. For the purposes of this book, all ages and stages of childhood are relevant. In the English language alone we may speak of early childhood, middle childhood and adolescence and ‘baby’, ‘infant’, ‘child’, ‘teenager’ and ‘youth’ to describe a spectrum of immature individuals with associated qualities and roles. As one identifies older persons, the terms ‘child’, ‘juvenile’, ‘minor’, ‘youth’ and even ‘person’ can be found interchangeably in international and customary law. The precise term used may also subtly bestow a social and political context. Youth describes a relatively older child though its use often suggests pejorative adult capabilities, notably in terms of the threat of physical strength and potential criminality.¹ The category of youth is thus included in this analysis of childhood by extension and because these social and political associations also inform the concept of child. ‘Childhood’ is clearly a concept which can be made and unmade. Through Military Orders imposed by Israel for example, Palestinians have been exclusively reclassified as adults from the age of sixteen. In Northern Ireland children throwing stones at the armed forces were described in the press as ‘violent youths’ or ‘innocent boys’ almost arbitrarily. Explicit or sensationalized portrayals of children in these political settings often unwittingly describe them as having lost their childhood. The idea that childhood and politics are mutually exclusive is one of the central building blocks of the book. No attempt to create a universal or comprehensive conception of the child will be made.

Concepts

In major works that attempt to conceptualize childhood, authors engaging in historical enquiries often admit to frustration with partial evidence and inconclusive arguments.² It appears uncommon for past societies to have recorded much of the nature and boundaries of this life phase, leaving us with a fragmented history, and particularly limited historical sources as lamented by Lloyd de Mause, in The History of Childhood (1974). This sustained the historical adage that ‘the things that really matter are hardly ever committed to paper’.³ Philip Aries’ work, Centuries of Childhood, was the first historical study which advanced the notion of the modern ‘conception’ of childhood recognized in the last several centuries. He argued that the child is a contemporary concept of modern society. His crucial contention is that until the late seventeenth century there was no concept of childhood. The so called pre-modern ages distinguished only infants from adults, had no institutions to support the maturation process, and seemingly did not hold the child beyond infancy to be a separate or significant life stage.

David Archard, cautions against this view arguing that Aries cannot prove that pre-modern society lacked an awareness of children as different from adults, he merely shows that these societies held neither our present day conception of the child, nor the visible social support structures that we recognize in support of this conception.

The presence of childhood – or the arrival of modern conceptions of childhood – is thus heavily contested as historical fact. In the present day, by comparison, our awareness or certainty over children as different to adults is seemingly indisputable. Many, at least from Western vantage points, would argue that we now have child-centered society and that since the end of the cold war in particular the child has become the quintessential icon or projection of apparent liberal values.

Archard, a theorizer of children’s rights explains that ‘[t]he concept of children requires that children be distinguishable from adults in respect of some unspecified set of attributes. We may all then have a concept of them. A conception of childhood is a specification of those attributes’⁴ and may be clearly deducible from their treatment and from legislation. Archard then identifies three aspects of conceptions of childhood, which are useful in separating out its form and content. These are ‘boundaries’ of childhood, its beginning and end; ‘dimensions’ of childhood, such as cultural, legal and social relativisms (which may end at different times), and the ‘divisions’ within childhood, that is, sub units of childhood.⁵ Archard crucially argues that a very specific conception of the child that has dominated Western philosophical and political thought still operates today: that is the child is thought of, or described, as ‘a comparative negative: an individual who is not yet an adult’.⁶

This view has a long ‘enlightened’ trajectory, and few dissenters. The dominant understanding of children, first employed by Western thinkers such as John Locke, clearly takes adulthood ‘as a state of being’, and from this ‘childhood is correspondingly clearly defined against, and set apart from and below adulthood’.⁷ This developmental⁸ model of childhood conceives of adulthood as an achieved state. The child, for example, is thought not yet to achieve rational capabilities and has insufficient knowledge to make good decisions. Although attempts to quantify and apply time scales to the development of knowledge and rationality remain unresolved,⁹ we continue to compare children in this way, with an adult being coterminous with a mature or developed norm.

Within the developmental model of childhood, there are two ways of seeing the maturation process, though these lead to the same outcome and neither are particularly generous. Either, it can be argued, that prior to becoming adults children have essential ‘child qualities’ and need specific nurturing and teaching in order to change these into, or substitute them for, adult qualities; or, the child may be understood to be a partial or a lesser version of the adult, with adult qualities in place but yet to develop without assistance. Both views share however the anticipation of a time of end, when full adulthood is attained. In the former interpretation children’s qualities are gradually transformed, in the latter, adulthood outgrows childhood. Critically neither view holds that childlike qualities may continue into adulthood, or that qualities are shared.

David Archard argues that the former developmental model of childhood, with its emphasis on the adult template and sudden transition is still privileged. He asserts that our conception of the child ‘has been to a considerable degree infused with what are essentially myths or imaginative projections, deriving from a mixture of cultural and ideological sources’.¹⁰ He goes on to say ‘[i]t is sometimes hard to separate the modern conception proper from what is in fact a symbolic ideal of childhood’. Of the modern conception recognized by Aries he writes (emphasis added):

Children neither work nor play alongside adults; they do not participate in the adult world of law and politics. Their world is innocent where the adult world is knowing; and so on. We now insist upon a sharp distinction between the behavior demanded of children and that expected of adults; what is thought appropriate treatment of children is distinct from that of adults. There is a marked division of roles and responsibilities.¹¹

Archard believes that the realization of a separate world for children to inhabit further fuels assumptions about their difference from adults. He questions this and asserts that there are scientific and cultural origins to the perception of separateness. In short, he alleges that children have been defined from the standpoint of adults and therefore perceived as the opposite of adults, a conception that privileges adult qualities:

The ideal adult is equipped with certain cognitive capacities, rational, physically independent, autonomous, has a sense of identity and is conscious of its beliefs and des...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Children
• 2 Children in Global Politics
• 3 Reproducing the State: Children in Nazi Germany
• 4 Children in Northern Ireland
• 5 Children in South Africa and Mozambique
• 6 Containment, Interdependence and Infant Power
• Bibliography
• Index