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ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 25 NO 3, JUNE 2009 23 Civilization 1 of the children of the ‘savages’ in the colonial world was an inherent part of the colonization mission in Africa, the Americas and Oceania in the 19th century. This was partly because children were regarded as relatively easy to influence, and partly because they could be instru- mental in civilizing ‘the rest’, that is the adult population and society at large. Children were, for example, abducted into mission schools and taught the ‘word of God’ (Meinert 2009). One aspect of this project was the enlightenment of minds through literacy and reading the bible. Another was changing people’s lifestyle through dress, eating and drinking habits, discipline and housing (Hansen 1984), and by stressing individual physical boundaries and hygiene as modern responsibilities of the ‘proper person’ (Beidelman 1974, Comaroff and Comaroff 1992). In today’s global South 2 the idea of civilizing through children has con- tinued with the development of mass schooling systems and various other child-focused development projects, many of which depend heavily upon financial support from foreign donors. Dependency on foreign aid, combined with a number of human rights declarations and conventions, put pressure on governments of the independent, post-colonial nation- states to comply with internationally defined standards such as the UN Millennium Development Goals. This also includes the field of children’s rights, which has been nur- tured by a powerful global civil society, with national and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) functioning as important agenda-setting institutions (Fuchs 2007). On the international scene, the 1990s witnessed an unprecedented rise in children’s issues, reflected in the almost universal ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (Boyden 1997). Consequently, rights-based development rhetoric has had to be adopted by many national organizations in the global South. This has led to the export of internationally defined standards for a ‘good childhood’ through various development pro- grammes. While many NGOs are genuinely working for an improvement of children’s conditions, they have thus also taken on the role as second guardians in order to cul- tivate ‘proper’ children and parents who can live up to the supposedly universal ideals of a ‘good childhood’ in which a child is protected by parents, who make sure that the child goes to school to learn, is properly dressed and washed, has adequate nutrition, has leisure time, and does not do any work that is considered harmful. With this article, we seek to encourage debate on the normativity and universal ambitions of the child rights movement by shedding light on the crucial role that NGOs play as civilizing institutions in the global South. The civi- lizing project is obviously not confined to today’s children only, but reflects a historical process in which children have – perhaps increasingly – become objects for adult and institutional intervention. As historians have noted (Ariès 1979 [1960], Hendrick 1992), the ‘taming’ and socializa- tion of children, followed by, among other developments, the spread of mass schooling and protective labour laws, was an inherent part of the modernization process in 19th- century Europe and the Americas. Recent anthropological studies have similarly pointed out how institutions in con- temporary Denmark, in their attempt to teach children appropriate ways of behaving and interacting, engage in a highly normative civilizing project through which certain categories of children are marked as more appropriately ‘social’ or civil than others, and how this inevitably feeds into processes of social inclusion and exclusion (Anderson 2008, Gulløv 2008). Such civilizing projects become even more visible in the context of development intervention targeting children of the global South, because they are linked to fundamental structural inequalities in the current global order. This implies a patronization not only of children and parents, but also of nations allegedly not able to take care of their own citizens. This leads to a kind of infantilized dependency (Burman 1994), established and reproduced through three fundamentally unequal and interrelated relationships. First, there is the child-adult relationship inherent to the CRC described above, namely the underlying patroniza- tion and ‘infantilization’ of nations in the global South. Second, a hegemonic position of global North vis-à-vis South is revealed which is largely unproductive for the South. Lastly, there is the way national Southern elites This article is a revision of a paper presented at the research seminar ‘Children and Youth: Missions and Sites of Transformation’ on 4-5 June 2007 at the Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus. We thank participants in the seminar for constructive critique. 1. We are inspired by Norbert Elias’ notion of the civilizing process or the ‘history of manners’, i.e. historical changes in connections between structures of society and practices of human conduct leading to collective changes in, among other elements, bodily practices and social etiquette (Elias 1939 [2000]). Karen Valentin and Lotte Meinert Karen Valentin is an anthropologist with fieldwork experience in South and Southeast Asia. She is associate professor at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. Lotte Meinert is associate professor at the Department of Anthropology and Ethnography at Aarhus University, and has been conducting fieldwork in East Africa since 1994. Their emails are [email protected] and [email protected]. Fig. 1. Children in and out of school, Kwapa, Uganda. LOTTE MEINERT The adult North and the young South Reflections on the civilizing mission of children’s rights

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Page 1: Reflections on the civilizing mission of children’s rights€¦ · ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 25 NO 3, JuNe 2009 23 Civilization1 of the children of the ‘savages’ in the colonial

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 25 NO 3, JuNe 2009 23

Civilization1 of the children of the ‘savages’ in the colonial world was an inherent part of the colonization mission in Africa, the Americas and Oceania in the 19th century. This was partly because children were regarded as relatively easy to influence, and partly because they could be instru-mental in civilizing ‘the rest’, that is the adult population and society at large. Children were, for example, abducted into mission schools and taught the ‘word of God’ (Meinert 2009). One aspect of this project was the enlightenment of minds through literacy and reading the bible. Another was changing people’s lifestyle through dress, eating and drinking habits, discipline and housing (Hansen 1984), and by stressing individual physical boundaries and hygiene as modern responsibilities of the ‘proper person’ (Beidelman 1974, Comaroff and Comaroff 1992). In today’s global South2 the idea of civilizing through children has con-tinued with the development of mass schooling systems and various other child-focused development projects, many of which depend heavily upon financial support from foreign donors.

Dependency on foreign aid, combined with a number of human rights declarations and conventions, put pressure on governments of the independent, post-colonial nation-states to comply with internationally defined standards such as the UN Millennium Development Goals. This also includes the field of children’s rights, which has been nur-tured by a powerful global civil society, with national and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) functioning as important agenda-setting institutions (Fuchs 2007). On the international scene, the 1990s witnessed an unprecedented rise in children’s issues, reflected in the almost universal ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (Boyden 1997). Consequently, rights-based development rhetoric has had to be adopted by many national organizations in the global South. This has led to the export of internationally defined standards for a ‘good childhood’ through various development pro-grammes. While many NGOs are genuinely working for an improvement of children’s conditions, they have thus also taken on the role as second guardians in order to cul-tivate ‘proper’ children and parents who can live up to

the supposedly universal ideals of a ‘good childhood’ in which a child is protected by parents, who make sure that the child goes to school to learn, is properly dressed and washed, has adequate nutrition, has leisure time, and does not do any work that is considered harmful.

With this article, we seek to encourage debate on the normativity and universal ambitions of the child rights movement by shedding light on the crucial role that NGOs play as civilizing institutions in the global South. The civi-lizing project is obviously not confined to today’s children only, but reflects a historical process in which children have – perhaps increasingly – become objects for adult and institutional intervention. As historians have noted (Ariès 1979 [1960], Hendrick 1992), the ‘taming’ and socializa-tion of children, followed by, among other developments, the spread of mass schooling and protective labour laws, was an inherent part of the modernization process in 19th-century Europe and the Americas. Recent anthropological studies have similarly pointed out how institutions in con-temporary Denmark, in their attempt to teach children appropriate ways of behaving and interacting, engage in a highly normative civilizing project through which certain categories of children are marked as more appropriately ‘social’ or civil than others, and how this inevitably feeds into processes of social inclusion and exclusion (Anderson 2008, Gulløv 2008).

Such civilizing projects become even more visible in the context of development intervention targeting children of the global South, because they are linked to fundamental structural inequalities in the current global order. This implies a patronization not only of children and parents, but also of nations allegedly not able to take care of their own citizens. This leads to a kind of infantilized dependency (Burman 1994), established and reproduced through three fundamentally unequal and interrelated relationships.

First, there is the child-adult relationship inherent to the CRC described above, namely the underlying patroniza-tion and ‘infantilization’ of nations in the global South. Second, a hegemonic position of global North vis-à-vis South is revealed which is largely unproductive for the South. Lastly, there is the way national Southern elites

This article is a revision of a paper presented at the research seminar ‘Children and Youth: Missions and Sites of Transformation’ on 4-5 June 2007 at the Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus. We thank participants in the seminar for constructive critique.

1. We are inspired by Norbert Elias’ notion of the civilizing process or the ‘history of manners’, i.e. historical changes in connections between structures of society and practices of human conduct leading to collective changes in, among other elements, bodily practices and social etiquette (Elias 1939 [2000]).

Karen Valentin and Lotte MeinertKaren Valentin is an anthropologist with fieldwork experience in South and Southeast Asia. She is associate professor at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. Lotte Meinert is associate professor at the Department of Anthropology and Ethnography at Aarhus University, and has been conducting fieldwork in East Africa since 1994. Their emails are [email protected] and [email protected].

Fig. 1. Children in and out of school, Kwapa, Uganda. LO

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The adult North and the young SouthReflections on the civilizing mission of children’s rights

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24 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 25 NO 3, JuNe 2009

relate to the North, often seeing it as their mission to drive development of their countries through, among others, a civilization of their ‘backward peoples’. With reference to the CRC, and mediated by Southern elites, the global North assumes as it were a parenting role towards the global South, where the ‘adult North’ can bestow rights and duties on the ‘young South’, and if the South fails to comply with these, can implement sanctions.

Cultural relativity versus universalismThe field of children’s rights is interesting from an anthro-pological point of view because it exposes problematic taken-for-granted ideas about ‘proper’ childhood and ‘proper’ parenthood as standardized in a narrow Northern context and politically legitimized through universal rights.

This article raises familiar dilemmas associated with the adoption and implementation of universal rights: to what extent can and should existing social and cultural practices be respected while still insisting on a set of universally valid rights? This is linked to the debate about donor aid as ‘leverage’ to influence policy in the countries receiving the aid. Should/can aid be unconditional? If paternalism comes with resources, how is the level of involvement negotiated? The anthropological approach helps us to explore how specific practices are tied to moral categories and how the language of rights is framed within dominant moral orders of good and bad (Reynolds et al. 2006).

This article is based on our experiences over the last decade in Uganda, Nepal and Vietnam, respectively, within the areas of education, health and child/youth issues. We draw on ethnographic data collected through participant observation among and interviews with children, young people and their families. These groups have been targeted in various ways by NGOs and other development projects because their lifestyles contradict and challenge notions of a ‘normal and proper’ childhood. We also draw on experience gained from taking part in applied and policy-related work within the field of child rights. To approach children’s rights as a social process helps us to compre-hend how campaigns for human rights contribute to the

application of norms, knowledge and compliance (Merry 2006). This offers insight into the bureaucratic and highly standardized practices and discourses which tend to sur-round human rights and planned development.

Planned development and the mission of children’s rightsChildren have become increasingly visible as an interest group in the political domain over the last 15-20 years. This is most clearly manifested in the adoption of the CRC. This is not to say that children had been ignored by policy-makers prior to this, but rather that the focus on children has changed from one of humanitarian concern and social welfare to one on children as independent polit-ical and social actors (Black 1996), at least rhetorically. International co-ordination for child and youth protection was initiated as early as in the mid-19th century, motivated by a concern for public welfare and penal reform (Fuchs 2007).3 It was formalized in 1924, when the League of Nations adopted the World Child Welfare Charter, based on five key principles for the protection of children. These were the rights to material, moral and spiritual develop-ment, to special help in case of hunger, illness, disability and orphan status, to relief in situations of distress, to pro-tection against economic exploitation, and to an upbringing towards societal responsibility (Black 1996). With the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1959, children’s rights were further expanded and included the right to be protected against discrimination on the basis of, among other divisions, race, colour, gender and language, and the right to a name and nationality. Finally, in 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted, and within a few years ratified by all countries in the world except for the US and Somalia.

The CRC has been considered particularly innovative compared to previous declarations within the field of child rights for two reasons. First, it is legally binding, which means that once the convention has been ratified, under certain circumstances other state parties to the convention have a right and duty to intervene in national affairs in favour of the human rights of the child. Second, it recog-

2. When we use the terms ‘global North’ and ‘global South’ in this paper, we should emphasize that these categories are not empirical, geographical entities. They are problematic and no less ideological shorthand notions, which, like other categorizations of the world into developed/undeveloped, West/East, First/Third World, savage/civilized, refer to hegemonic divisions within the current global order. Thus these terms are used in the absence of better options.

3. This was reflected in, among other initiatives, a number of international congresses taking up questions such as juvenile criminal law, compulsory schooling and child labour in the latter part of the 19th century (Fuchs 2007).

4. http://www.africa-union.org/child/home.htm

5. http://hrw.org/english/docs/1997/09/18/uganda1528.htm.

6. http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/international_justice/icc/icc_06.htm

7. The case builds on the experiences of Valentin, who took part in this mission.

Fig. 2. School children at a government school in Lusaka, Zambia.

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nizes not only children’s vulnerabilities and demands for protection, but also their resources and capacities (Boyden 197).

Children’s participation is central to the CRC, informing one of the four guiding principles of non-discrimination, the interests of the child, the right to survival and develop-ment, and respect for the child’s participation and view-points. Moreover, the right to participation is explicitly formulated in Articles 12 and 13, which assert the child’s right to express him/herself and to be heard in cases con-cerning him/her (UN 1990). And since the early 1990s a general tendency towards a so-called rights-based devel-opment approach has increasingly informed the field of planned development in the global South. Ideally, such an approach takes participation as its point of departure, and equity and non-discrimination as its driving force in the development process.

The institutionalization of children’s rights in the CRC is an example of the way in which policy and morality, guided by a broader set of cultural ideas, become inter-twined in political attempts to objectify and universalize certain ideas (Shore and Wright 1997). The demand for children’s rights thus comes to appear universal and nat-ural rather than ideologically, morally and culturally spe-cific. However, it is a field loaded with moral discourses about children’s proper upbringing and behaviour – civi-lization – which becomes even more loaded when applied in the context of the South. This is not only because socio-economic conditions prevent many children from enjoying the supposedly universal rights of, for example, education and leisure, but also because the idea of children’s par-ticipation inherent in the CRC builds on an individualistic and egalitarian view of children that contradicts their posi-tions in generational hierarchies and social structures in societies built to cope with different environmental, socio-economic and regional pressures. This is obviously also true in the North, but the degree of institutionalization and recognition of generational hierarchies differs.

Children’s positions in generational hierarchies are generally more distinct and more clearly recognized by both children and adults in many societies of the global South – for example, in Vietnam, where hierarchical rela-tions fundamental to Confucianism place children in a structurally inferior position with regard to elders. It is therefore noteworthy that a law on Child Protection, Care and Education was introduced into Vietnamese national legislation in 1991, one year after Vietnam ratified the CRC (Burr 2006). This law includes a paragraph stating that children are expected to show affection, respect and obedience towards their parents – a clause which can be interpreted as the Vietnamese authorities’ response/resist-ance to the individualistic approach of CRC (ibid.).

Similarly, the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child was adopted by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1990. In many respects its provisions are modelled on those of the CRC. However, it provides for the protection of children against harmful and potentially exploitative cultural practices with an emphasis on ‘cus-toms and practices prejudicial to the health or life of the child and those customs and practices discriminatory to the child on the grounds of sex and others status’ (Article 21.1). This could address situations in which what would elsewhere be seen as child abuse is justified on the basis of ‘culture’.4

As noted above, the CRC provides a legitimate basis for states and organizations to encourage UN bodies to inter-vene in national affairs of child protection and socializa-tion, for example in cases of child soldiering and child labour. However, it would be an illusion to believe that all state parties are in an equal position to raise issues and be taken seriously. Northern states are occasionally sub-ject to criticism from the international community too: recently Denmark was criticized by international organi-zations for the inhuman treatment of children of asylum seekers. However, a crucial difference is that there will seldom be any formal consequences, conditionalities or sanctions towards Northern states, as they do not receive any ‘help’ from the international community. Although all

Anderson, Sally 2008. Civil sociality: Children, sport, and cultural policy in Denmark. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, Inc.

Ariès, P. 1979 [1960]. Centuries of childhood. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Beidelman, T.O. 1974. Social theory and the study of Christian missions in Africa. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 44(3): 235-249.

Black, Maggie 1996. Children first: The story of UNICEF, past and present. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Boyden, Jo 1997. Childhood and the policy-makers: A comparative perspective on the globalization of childhood. In James, Allison and Prout, Alan (eds) Constructing and reconstructing childhood: contemporary issues in the sociology of childhood, pp. 190-229. London: Routledge Falmer.

Burman, Erica 1994. Development phallacies: Psychology, gender and childhood. Agenda 22: 11-20.

Fig. 3 (above). Classroom in government school, Kathmandu.Fig. 4 (below). Group discussion with squatter children.

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state parties are obliged to submit regular progress reports to the Committee on the Rights of the Child and afterwards receive the committee’s national recommendations for fur-ther strengthening of children’s rights, the fundamentally unequal relationship between North and South hinders this critical reciprocity. Development aid is always condi-tional, and to a large extend based on the priorities of the global North. In effect, the CRC is a political tool which provides Northern donors with a legitimate rationale for setting conditions on aid, and when it is deemed necessary, withdrawing financial support on the grounds of violations of human or, specifically, children’s rights.

The following two examples from Uganda and Nepal illustrate how Northern donors acquire the right to com-ment on the social practices of the global South, and how this has turned into a moral obligation to civilize its chil-dren, parents and states.

In northern Uganda, The Lord’s Resistance Army has been fighting the Ugandan government, and has been attacking villages, raping and torturing women and men, and abducting children for the last 22 years. The popula-tion was forced by the government to live in internally displaced people’s camps, ostensibly for their own protec-tion against attack, but this has effectively deprived them of access to their land, livelihoods, homes and everyday lives. NGOs and UN bodies have played an important role in mitigating this situation in various ways and sectors. What we would like to draw attention to here, however, is the focus on children. International NGOs have criticized both the rebel army for drawing ‘innocent children into war’ and the Ugandan government for not protecting ‘its children’.

The NGO Human Rights Watch reported that: ‘[w]hat-ever the sources of the conflict, the Ugandan government is failing to protect Ugandan children from rebel abduction.’5 The Ugandan army has for 11 years now been unable to defeat the rebels, whom they designate as mere ‘bandits’,

and abductions and attacks on villages continue. NGOs criticize the rebels as well as government institutions for their failure to protect children specifically, as both sides use child soldiers.6

International NGOs played their part in making the Ugandan government take the case to the International Criminal Court, mainly by pointing to violations of chil-dren’s rights. Children were being abducted, taken away from their homes, their schools and families; boys were forced to become soldiers at a young age, and young girls became so-called sex slaves. In witnessing this and allowing it to happen the Ugandan state was criticized for failing in its obligation to protect children. NGOs (and others) cited the CRC, which binds state parties to take all feasible measures to ensure that children under 15 do not take part in hostilities and are protected in times of armed conflict. We are painfully aware of and acknowl-edge the atrocities against children in this war. But the international organizations could have highlighted other issues too: adult women and men were also abducted, raped, tortured, hit by land mines. However, the focus has been on the failure to protect children and the use of child soldiers. From the perspective of the global North, child abuse seems particularly unacceptable compared to, for example, the abduction of or violence against adults. This is because it challenges the dominant model of childhood, which portrays children as innocent victims in need of pro-tection and as competent actors in need of encouragement (cf. James et al. 1998).

A case from Nepal similarly reveals how internationally defined standards derived from the field of child rights are circulated and to varying degrees integrated into national projects and local practices. In 2000, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs took the initiative to strengthen the child rights perspective in Danish development aid. Compared to other European countries (such as the UK and Sweden) Denmark was seen by child rights advocates to be far behind in its efforts to promote this area and had, at this moment, no formulated development policy on children’s rights. One of the first concrete steps taken was to plan an ‘identification and formulation’ mission to Nepal, to serve as a model for other countries receiving aid from Denmark.7 Meetings with stakeholders from relevant min-istries and NGOs took as their point of departure the UN’s Concluding Observations on Nepal. One of many concerns of the Committee on the Rights of the Child regarded the principle of non-discrimination embedded in Article 2 of the convention, which states that state parties shall respect and ensure the rights of each child within their jurisdic-tion without discrimination of any kind. In the eyes of the Committee this was violated by the preference for sons, early marriages and the differential marriage age for boys and girls – respectively 18 and 16 with parental consent, and 21 and 18 without. It is noteworthy that this difference in marriage age of boys and girls was automatically inter-preted as an indication of discrimination and that ‘differ-ence’ here was translated into a notion of inequality. The team raised the issue of marriage age with representatives of the Nepali National Planning Commission; the imme-diate answer from the Commission’s joint secretary was that change was out of the question. She was amenable to discussing issues of child labour, disabled children and early childhood development, but not the marriage age. She explained the provision with reference to cultural tra-dition, stating that it had always been like that and that it should not be changed.

Seen in this light it was striking that, as Valentin observed during fieldwork in previous years, many young couples from the squatter community where she did her research got married when officially under age. Most of them had eloped, a common marriage strategy in the case of inter-

Burr, Rachel 2006. Vietnam’s children in a changing world. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Comaroff, John and Comaroff, Jean 1992. Ethnography and the historical imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Elias, Norbert 1939 [2000]. The civilizing process: Sociogenetic and psychogenetic investigations (revised edition). Oxford: Blackwell.

Fuchs, Eckhardt 2007. Children’s rights and global civil society. Comparative Education 43(3): 393-412.

Gulløv, Eva 2009 (forthcoming). Barndommens civilisering [The civilization of childhood]. In: Højlund, Susanne (ed.) Barndommens organisering [The organization of childhood]. Roskilde: Roskilde Universitets Forlag.

Hansen, Holger Bernt 1984. Mission, church and state in a colonial setting: Uganda 1890-1925. London: Heinemann.

Fig. 5. Young children eating a meal of dhalbhat (rice and lentils) in squatter home, Kathmandu.

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caste liaisons. For this reason the parents seldom approved the match and because pre-marital sexual relations are generally frowned upon the young couples saw no other option than to elope, as a way of formalizing the relation-ship, before the parents found what they considered a more suitable marriage partner. NGO staff involved in the area were very ready to comment critically on these practices, specifically the age of the young people involved. Parents as well as children were aware that the girls in particular were officially under age, and began to disclose their bio-logical age as a way of frustrating the marriage. There were several cases of girls who were 16 on paper, but who beyond the gaze of the authorities and the NGOs revealed that they were only 13-14 years old.

Revealing the powerful discourses on ‘proper’ childhood being negotiated in different social and political arenas, these two cases illustrate how, armed with the CRC, both organizations and bilateral donors have acquired a role as moral watchdogs towards those seen as exploiting and dis-criminating against their ‘own’ children. But what is also interesting is that, as the case from Nepal shows, national policy-makers and ordinary people do not passively accept such criticism, but seek to safeguard and maintain certain practices.

NGOs as civilizing institutionsChildren – as future citizens and as a mediating pathway to the adult population – have long been central to a civi-lizing project worked through enlightenment and ‘proper’

lifestyles. In many countries where children may not have access to ordinary schooling, NGOs play a crucial role in the socialization and ‘enlightenment’ of children. Moreover, in contrast to conventional secular schools, which tend to portray themselves as politically neutral institutions that transmit scientific knowledge, many NGOs see themselves as defenders of human rights and as political watchdogs of governments and guardians/parents, both seen to be potentially exploitative towards children. Embedded in a discourse of children’s participation and empowerment, organizations advocating children’s rights nonetheless contribute to a civilizing project which is in essence close to that of the old Christian missions, namely correcting social and bodily behaviour of both children and guardians in order to produce proper civic persons.

Examples from Nepal demonstrate how urban poor children are often targeted by NGOs through sponsorship programmes, literacy classes and skills training because they are considered deprived and particularly prone to becoming street children (Valentin 2005). While the NGOs’ work starts from a genuine interest in supporting and uplifting marginalized children and their families, their assistance often carries patronizing and moralizing overtones. Valentin’s research shows how social workers explicitly condemned men who drank large quantities of alcohol and gambled, scolded parents for not sending their children to school and for having too many children, or ridiculed people for visiting traditional healers or for what they saw as superstition. Children were directly instructed to dress properly – i.e. in clean, ironed clothes – before going to school, and some of the young couples who eloped, often in inter-caste marriages, explicitly expressed their fear of the reaction of the social workers who deemed them too young to marry (ibid.).

In Uganda, Meinert was involved in a Child Rights Education programme run by an international NGO (Save the Children Denmark). Within this programme child rights workers were trained to give local children, teachers and parents lectures on children’s rights, and to act as media-tors and observers in cases of conflict between children and parents, children and teachers etc. During this project a good number of children learned part of the CRC by heart, and obviously enjoyed some of the training, which

Hendrick, Harry 1992. Children and childhood. In: Recent Findings of Research in Economic and Social History 15: 1-4.

James, Allison, Jenks, Chris and Prout, Alan 1998. Theorizing childhood. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Meinert, Lotte 2009. Hopes in friction: Health, education and everyday life in Uganda. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, Inc.

Merry, Sally Engle 2006. Anthropology and international law. Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 99-116.

Fig. 6. Young squatter children selling stickers, Kathmandu.Fig. 7. Children from squatter settlement, Kathmandu.

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included a range of creative approaches. There were also children who began to feel exploited by their parents and denied their rights, for example to leisure time, in a way they had not considered earlier. Some of the parents and local leaders in the area protested against the child rights education programme, because they felt that it created more conflicts than it managed to solve. They felt that the child rights workers were interfering in domestic affairs in a culturally inappropriate way. In some cases parents pointed out that they agreed with the principles of the chil-dren’s rights, but that in their everyday life they could not manage to live up to standards of, for example, making sure that children had leisure time, when there was plenty of work to be done in the home and fields in order to secure the family survival.

In this way, organizations defending children’s rights might assume the privilege of interfering in domestic affairs. Paradoxically the organizations tend to take over responsibility for children from parents, but at the same time – in the name of empowerment – they explicitly stress that parents should feel more responsible for their chil-dren’s upbringing. However, what is at stake is the kind of upbringing, given that poor, uneducated families are unable to offer this in an appropriate manner.

The adult North and the young SouthThe issue of children’s rights is a sensitive and complex one. Many children all over the world experience consid-erable hardship, and not just in the South. Thus there is indeed a need for global action in order to improve their situation. Many interventions in the lives of children are well-intended and have also been extremely effective, par-ticularly in the field of health. We would also not argue unrealistically that aid should be given entirely value-free, i.e. without regard to the ways in which it is dispensed. Nevertheless, while great progress has been made in ameliorating the living conditions of children worldwide,

the relationship between rights, morality and civilization implied in the mission of enhancing children’s rights in the global South leads to the installation of certain moral codes of behaviour regarding how parents, teachers and other adults representing institutions should act towards and treat children. Children of the global South thereby become objects for outside political intervention (Pupavac 2000), while the adult populations become targets con-stantly blamed for children’s suffering. This produces a double-sided patronization of children, parents and states.

In such child-adult relationships, a model of childhood is sometimes promoted that is based on the idea that children should be protected from and by the adult world. This is reinforced by unequal power relations, which mean that the global North has the power to intervene by commenting on child-adult relationships in the global South. Childhood, according to the Northern model, should be a period of play and training for adulthood, and children should be protected from work and other supposedly adult activities. All in all, children should be ensured what is regarded as ‘proper civilization’. This often raises a dilemma about the ‘best interests of the child’: is it in the best interests of any child not to work or participate in adult activities if this is how families survive, or what children need to learn in order to have a future? Furthermore, to regard children’s rights as separate from those of their parents creates an inherent paradox, because on the one hand children are deemed competent to make decisions themselves, while on the other hand they are seldom considered able to exercise and claim their rights themselves and therefore need adult guidance and support. This means, firstly, that NGOs tend to take over part of the parental responsibilities, and sec-ondly that not only children but also parents are targeted by NGOs and donors from the international community. In other words, infantilization of ‘savages’ will continue to be an inherent part of a civilizing project unless we pause to reflect on current actions and revise them accordingly. l

Pupavac, Vanessa 2000. The infantilisation of the South and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Nottingham: Student Human Rights Law Centre.

Reynolds, Pamela, Nieuwenhuys, Olga and Hanson, Karl 2006. Refractions of children’s rights in development practice: A view from anthropology – Introduction. Childhood 13(3): 291-302.

Shore, Chris and Wright, Susan 1997. Policy: A new field of anthropology. In: Shore, Chris and Wright, Susan (eds) Anthropology of policy: Critical perspectives on governance and power, pp. 3-39. London & New York: Routledge.

UN 1990. The rights of the child. Fact Sheet no. 10. Geneva: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Valentin, Karen 2005. Schooled for the future? Educational policy and everyday life among urban squatters in Nepal. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, Inc.

Fig. 8. Birthday celebration in Hanoi, Vietnam.

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