by Alphonce C. L. Omolo

2015, Waxmann Publishers
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Children in Kenya continue to suffer diverse types of violence against them despite the fact that Kenyan laws are prohibiting violence and various prevention measures exist. In order to achieve effective prevention of violence, adequate knowledge of risk factors is imperative. In Kenya, such knowledge is lacking and there is limited attention given to the multifaceted nature of the social environment in which children grow up and how such environments aggravate violence against children as well as hinder prevention measures.

This qualitative research applied the ecological model of socialisation of Urie Bronfenbrenner as its theoretical and analytical framework in examining risk factors and consequences, responses and projects. In assessing what is being done to prevent violence against children in Kenya, the author reviews existing projects and policies that shape prevention measures including the possible influence of international conventions. He also analyses diverse sets of ideas, attitudes, philosophies and practices that explain the similar and the different notions of childhood in African and in Western settings. Exploring the social construction of violence, the author examines ideas and discourses that explain the heterogeneous characteristics of violence and how their understanding, occurrence and severity vary from culture to culture.

Edited by Spyros Spyrou & Miranda Christou
Palgrave Macmillan 2014

This edited collection brings together scholars whose work explores the entangled relationship between children and borders with richly-documented ethnographic studies from around the world. The book provides a penetrating account of how borders affect children’s lives and how in turn children play a constitutive role in the social life of borders. Providing situated accounts which offer critical perspectives on children’s engagements with borders, contributors explore both the institutional power of borders as well as children’s ability to impact borders through their own activity and agency. They show how borders and the borderlands surrounding them are active zones of engagement where notions of identity, citizenship and belonging are negotiated in ways that empower or disempower children, offer them possibilities and hope or alternatively deprive them of both. With innovative cross-fertilization between Border Studies and Childhood Studies, this volume illustrates the value of bringing children and borders together.

 Contents

PART I: CHILDREN AND BORDERLANDS
1. Experiencing the State and Negotiating Belonging in Zomia: Pa Koh and Bru-Van Kieu Ethnic Minority Youth in a Lao-Vietnamese Borderland; Trần Thị Hà Lan and Roy Huijsmans
2. ‘Anyone who welcomes a little child like this on my behalf is welcoming me’: A Case Study on Residential Child and Youth Care in the Mexican-American Border Zone; Sylvia Meichsner
3. Growing up in a Portuguese Borderland; Sofia Marques da Silva

PART II: CHILDREN, BORDERS AND WAR
4. Arrested in Place: Palestinian Children and Families at the Border; Bree Akesson
5. Destination Europe: Afghan Unaccompanied Minors Crossing Borders; Barla Buil and Melissa Siegel
6. Crossing Borders of Geography and Self: South Sudanese Refugee Youth Gangs in Egypt; Marisa O. Ensor

PART III: CHILDREN AND CONTESTED BORDERS
7. What is a Border? Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot Children’s Understanding of a Contested Territorial Division; Miranda Christou and Spyros Spyrou
8. Palestinian ‘Children of the Junction’: Contested Borders and Representations; Omri Grinberg
9. Bordering in Transition: Young People’s Experiences in ‘Post Conflict’ Belfast; Martina McKnight and Madeleine Leonard

PART IV: CHILDREN CROSSING BORDERS
10. Criminals in our Land! Border Movement and Apprehension of Children from Bangladesh within the Juvenile Justice System in India; Chandni Basu
11. Crossing Borders and Borderlands: Childhood’s Secret Undergrounds; Sonja Arndt and Marek Tesar
12. Unaccompanied Migrant Children and Youth: Navigating Relational Borderlands; Stuart C. Aitken, Kate Swanson and Elizabeth G. Kennedy

PART V: CHILDREN, BORDERS AND BELONGING
13. When the Border Becomes a Threshold: Children’s Visits to Relatives in Santo Domingo; Livia Jiménez Sedano
14. Borders Separating Families: Children’s Perspectives of Labour Migration in Estonia; Dagmar Kutsar, Merike Darmody and Leana Lahesoo
15. ‘Everything is a Spectrum’: Korean Migrant Youth Identity Work in the Transnational Borderland; Sujin Kim and Lisa Dorner

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Child Domestic Work in Nigeria: Conditions of Socialisation and Measures of Intervention

by Ina Gankam Tambo

Historisch-vergleichende Sozialisations- und Bildungsforschung, Band 13, 2014, 384 Seiten, broschiert, € 39,90, ISBN 978-3-8309-3141-6, E-Book: € 35,99, ISBN 978-3-8309-8141-1; New York & Münster: Waxmann-Verlag.

For the last two decades, child domestic work carried out in Nigeria as well as in other countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia, has been given increasing attention by international policy makers and scientists. Yet, the research mainly focuses on the living and working conditions of these children, which also forms part of this book. However, in addition, political and pedagogical measures of intervention employed on international, national and local levels on child domestic work are also at the centre of analysis. Against the background of post-colonial theory the author studies the effects of social modernisation in Nigeria as a rapidly growing national economy on child domestic work and historically
retraces the origins of this form of child work back to indigenous modes of socialisation and social security within the (pre-colonial) Nigerian extended family network. The research is based on field work in Nigeria, including interviews and documentary analysis.

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Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War

by Margaret Peacock

UNC Press (2014)

Innocent Weapons is a transnational history of the image of the child from 1945 to 1968. It explores the abundance of childhood images that Soviet and American politicians, propagandists, and protesters manufactured for the purpose of building international and domestic consensus for the Cold War. It examines how these efforts ironically led to a collapse of that consensus in the late 1960s as well as a fundamental shift in American and Soviet understandings of childhood. The book argues that leaders and propagandists in the United States and the Soviet Union used images of children in comparable ways to rally their populations behind their domestic and international policies, to pursue popular consensus, and to ensure the preservation of public order. When one reads the story of the Cold War through the lens of the child’s image, the ideological differences that seemingly differentiated the Eastern Bloc from the Western Sphere are tempered by the revelation that Soviet and American leaders and propagandists were in fact engaging in similar visual and rhetorical projects in order to sell a war, to preserve power, to justify policy, and to maintain order. These portrayals, which span the ideological and geographic boundaries of the conflict, reveal a story in which the producers of these images had more in common with each other than they did with their intended audiences. By viewing the Cold War as a dialectic between those who owned the means of image production and the intended consumers of those images, this story suggests that we must reexamine our previous understandings of the divides that defined the war itself.

 

The Government of Childhood:
Discourse, Power and Subjectivity

by Karen M. Smith

2014 – Palgrave Macmillan
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