Childhood in a Global Perspective—Third Edition by Karen Wells; The Sociology of Children’s Rights by Gran Brian

Introduction

Two recent works from Polity Press provide accessible, yet critical expositions of childhoods and children’s rights from global perspectives. The third edition of Karen Wells’ acclaimed work on Childhood in a Global Perspective is a timely update which incorporates the findings of new literature into her thesis on the construction of childhood under global capitalism. It offers substantially revised chapters on politics and war, a new chapter on juvenile justice, and a brief consideration of the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, Brian Gran, in his Sociology of Children’s Rights provides a thorough, yet provocative, primer on how we as societies ‘do’ children’s rights. Both works seek to go beyond the intellectual and physical confines of the Global North and address their material from global stances.

Childhood in a Global Perspective—Third Edition by Karen Wells, Polity Press, 2021

Wells describes her task as ‘to understand precisely how global political economy, and the structures it supports and the forces it mobilizes, reshape childhood in multiple spaces and times, societies and cultures’.¹ She takes the reader through the main strands of scholarship on childhoods as well as questions of global capitalism, state intervention, and liberal notions of autonomy. In a compelling synthesis of scholarship from childhood studies, economics, development theory, child psychology, sociology, social policy, liberal political philosophy, social and cultural geography, anthropology, and law she makes the case that:

[A] particular model of childhood, one that originates in contemporary Western ideals about what it means to be human and what differentiates children from adults, is being globalized through international instruments and global capitalism.²

The book is divided into 11 chapters, commencing with an overview before addressing themes of: policy and practice; race, gender, and class; families; school and work; play; politics; juvenile justice; and migration; and finishing with a chapter entitled ‘Rescuing children and children’s rights’. The first chapter sets out existing schools of thought on the nature of childhood and the concept of the child.³ Here, Wells covers the new sociology of childhood, history, and geography as context for her claim that ‘a global perspective on childhood is possible and useful because globalization shapes political economy everywhere’.⁴ This and each subsequent chapter end with a list of recommended readings. As well as being helpful for students, these selections alert readers to selected recent scholarship from the Global South as well as the Global North.

Chapter 2 introduces the idea of childhood as a site of North American and European public concern and policy.⁵ Here, as elsewhere, historical sections provide insight into the root causes of current concepts and practices.⁶ For example, we learn about nineteenth-century coding of impoverished parents as ‘neglectful, abusive and addicted to drink and sex’⁷ and the desire to save ‘deserving’ (i.e. white) children through separating them from these influences. Wells introduces the argument that the development of child rights in international law evolved from this child-saving movement.

In Chapter 3, childhood is examined in terms of ‘how it is lived through gendered and raced identities and experiences’.⁸ Wells sets out two central streams of recent theorizing of gender, namely socialization and performativity, and examines what these mean for the gendered division of labour. Turning to childhood in the context of ‘the globalization of race and racism’,⁹ she makes explicit the relationship between transatlantic slavery and the concurrent development of childhood as an ideology.¹⁰ The global project of capitalist imperialism, she explains, drew sharp divides between categories of children who were entitled to the newly prescribed childhood and those who were excluded. Drawing on social psychology, educational studies, and ethnographies, Wells then examines children’s current racialized conceptions of themselves.¹¹ Finally, in this chapter, Wells critiques social policy’s ‘post-class discourse’ which invisibilizes structures that produce class in favour of concepts of ‘social exclusion’ or economic poverty measures.¹² The omission of serious analysis of class, gender, and race as root causes of inequalities among children allows governments and international bodies to ‘discursively deny the salience of these social categories’,¹³ thus obscuring their significance in overdetermining childhoods in global capitalist modernity.

Chapter 4 concerns how the family is governed.¹⁴ In Wells’ analysis, ‘foundational principles of liberal political theory’¹⁵ are central to Western governments’ and international institutions’ legitimization. In this liberal worldview, the family is constructed as a haven into which the state should not intrude (except in exceptional circumstances). Yet, as Wells observes, the state is instrumental in ‘defining the family and its responsibilities towards children’.¹⁶ The concurrent creation of childhood as ‘a time separated from adult life’¹⁷ and increasing state regulation of family life during the development of Western industrial capitalism is critically examined. Wells argues that the absorption of capitalism’s ideal of family within the cultures of the governed ensures that the burdens of the system’s social reproduction fall largely on families themselves and not on the state or business. Thus, Wells writes:

The global prevalence of neo-liberal norms makes the family the site where the labour of social reproduction gets done whilst simultaneously making available fewer and fewer resources to make that labour possible.¹⁸

Policies such as conditionality in the provision of social housing and welfare benefits evidence the Global Northern states’ continued control and regulation of poor families. Meanwhile, in the Global South, emerging bourgeois adopt similar globalized cultural values around the idealized family. Wells juxtaposes the idea of the family as private and the ‘street’ as public, to illustrate the ways in which unsupervised ‘street’ children are unacceptable both in urban centres in the Global South and in the Global North.¹⁹ She argues, however, that those states that do not generally have the resources to carry out their role of tutoring the poor in neoliberal capitalist family ideals turn to ‘very blunt instruments’,²⁰ including arbitrary police violence, in efforts to discipline and govern the urban poor. Turning to reproductive health as an example of state interference in family life, Wells highlights eugenicist aspects of the early family planning movement, the coercive role of states in limiting the fertility of poor and racialized minorities, and recent examples of pronatalist policies in the Global North.²¹ States’ historic and continuing roles in preventing access to contraception and abortion are, however, oddly omitted. While compressing a vast subject into a readable volume necessitates selectivity, instances like this raise occasional questions of cherry picking.

Chapter 5 deals with school and work.²² Wells challenges the notion that education is a prerequisite for development, preferring to focus on compulsory schooling as ‘a moral technology’ in the Foucauldian sense, involving similar processes and roles to work in the governing of childhood.²³ Both are seen by families as preparing children for adult roles. Wells warns that erasure of work as a legitimate place for children, and the increasing perception of schooling as natural, ‘does nothing to erode inequality but simply reconfigures it in new ways’.²⁴ Her critique on the role of the child rights movement in delegitimizing work is, unfortunately, weakened by her statement that ‘Contrary to the discourse of human rights approaches, it is only through the self-organization of workers that improvements in pay and working conditions have been secured.’²⁵ Ignoring the centrality of workers’ rights, including the right to organize, in the history and discourse of human rights unnecessarily raises concerns about the balance of the argumentation more generally.²⁶

In Chapter 6, we move on to play.²⁷ Wells explains that social scientists have long recognized the importance of children’s play in terms of its function in preparing children for adulthood, and observes that ‘[t]he right to play generates, along with the right to education and the prohibition against work, an idea of the child as a learning, playing person.’²⁸ She argues that the conception of the children as in development (Qvortrup’s ‘human becoming’) robs play of ‘pleasure, anarchy, irrationality … mischief’, and raises the disturbing possibility that the right to play is ‘in fact an obligation on the child’s part to be playful’.²⁹ Meanwhile, a homogenizing global toy industry harnesses the conception of the playing child to increase its market. The emergence of Japan as a key influencer of global toy design alongside the USA provides a glimpse of consumer capitalism moving beyond its North American and European cultural roots.³⁰ Nevertheless, the mention of the Asia Pacific region as the largest toy market globally, without the corollary that it is also the world’s largest region by area and population, reminds one that North American and Eurocentric assumptions continue to underpin academic works.³¹ A section on digital play brings this edition of the work up-to-date with coverage of multiplayer online games, social networking, and the digital divide.³²

Chapter 7 on politics also contains new material as Wells challenges the perception that children and youth are ‘unable or unwilling to be politically active’.³³ Four key characteristics are posited as hallmarks of young people’s political activism: it is primarily engaged in by older teenagers; school is a central site of mobilization; it is not about intergenerational conflict; and the participants are often discursively positioned as moral actors engaged in correcting the errors of their elders.³⁴ South African resistance to apartheid provides a key illustration of these themes, while further examples from Iran, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Northern Ireland, China, the USA, and elsewhere give a sense of the political agency and commitments of children globally. The chapter ends with an examination of social media’s place in contemporary political youth mobilization. Here, Wells considers the role of increased inequalities brought about by states’ handling of the Covid-19 in fuelling the reinvigorated Black Lives Matter movement. The chapter is a welcome antidote to impressions that might otherwise be drawn of childhoods mechanistically determined by global capitalist forces. Nevertheless, Wells cautions against ‘thinking of youth as the new political saviour’³⁵ arguing that ‘[t]he involvement of youth in spectacular acts of terror’³⁶ serves to remind us that ‘there is nothing automatically progressive about their political engagements’.³⁷

In Chapter 8, Wells situates childhood within the wider context of contemporary war.³⁸ Writing prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, she draws on research on civil insurrections and ‘failed states’. Investigation of economic underpinnings of war, such as funding and munitions procurement, makes a persuasive case that no tidy divide exists between rule-of-law-based global capitalism and the criminal capitalism manifest in illegal conflicts.³⁹ Rather, contemporary war is ‘characterised by the terrorizing of civilian populations and their forced recruitment into militias and armies’.⁴⁰ While such forces are powerful, Wells also considers children’s agency in joining armies and militias. Tellingly, she describes boys reporting having joined armed groups out of religious or ethnic motivations, whereas girls are reported to have said that they were promised opportunities to escape from domestic exploitation and abuse in their civilian lives and to be able to act like boys.⁴¹

Chapter 9 offers new material on juvenile justice.⁴² Here, Wells continues the theme of the growing role of the state, arguing that the development of juvenile justice was significant for its ‘conceptualization of the state as a benign and protective force in the lives of its young citizens’.⁴³ This allowed children’s due process rights to be side-lined for roughly 70 years, resulting in children who were and are deprived of their liberty being ‘subjected to unconscionable violence’.⁴⁴ The emergence of challenges to this outlook was foundational in the shift from child saving to child rights.⁴⁵ At the same time, the restorative justice movement with its foundation myth of being based on ‘principles and practices derived from some timeless, indigenous pre-colonial and pre-capitalist forms of justices’⁴⁶ gained traction. Wells recognizes evidence of restorative justice’s efficacy in terms of victim satisfaction and recidivism rates, but shares concerns of writers such as Eliaerts and Dumortier about arbitrariness and lack of due process protections for children involved.⁴⁷ Nevertheless, the global adoption of restorative justice and changing norms, reflected in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and international guidelines, have led to reductions in the incarceration of children, although domestic implementation of these protections is widely variable.⁴⁸

Chapter 10 on migration examines global care chains (in which women, in particular, migrate for jobs as carers and work as paid caring labour), child circulation and fostering in sub-Saharan Africa, private fostering, and transnational adoption.⁴⁹ The varied nature of these phenomena and their impacts on the construction of childhood illustrate the wide variety of ways in which childhoods, families, and care are enacted. For example, Wells’ consideration of traditional and informal fostering in selected African contexts⁵⁰ provides a contrast to Eurocentric conceptualizations that typically dominate discussions of fostering and adoption. Here, social understandings of kinship are shown as continuing and being adapted to changing contexts, albeit with acknowledgement of an increasing absorption of Western norms of ideal family arrangements. The transnational adoption of ‘social orphans’ from the Global South into families in the Global North stands as a stark contrast to that continuity. Wells describes it as a ‘consequence of a crisis in social reproduction in child-sending countries’,⁵¹ and also as an example of a global care chain, with the adopted child performing ‘the affective or emotional labour of completing the white middle-class family in the heartlands of global capitalism’.⁵² The case of independent child migration is, in Wells’ analysis, compelled by ‘wider forces of economics, politics and conflict’⁵³ within which the child and their family’s exercise of agency are constrained.⁵⁴ Geographically expansive social networks facilitate and shape movement. In this context, the book problematizes the expansion of the idea of ‘child trafficking’ as often negating children’s agency, exaggerating anxieties about child prostitution, and serving to legitimize attempts by states such as the UK to repatriate child asylum-seekers elsewhere.⁵⁵

In the final chapter, entitled ‘Rescuing children and children’s rights’, Wells summarizes her arguments and draws out the implications of the evidence she has presented, writing that ‘childhood is being reshaped by global processes and structures’ based on global norms circulated ‘through international law, global media and transnational NGOs’.⁵⁶ Wells views these norms as deriving from a liberal ethics that is grounded in the idea of the human as an autonomous, rational being. However, such a ‘universal subject … does not and cannot exist’ in a world ‘shot through with inequalities’.⁵⁷ Turning to social reproduction theory to counter liberal economic's view of workers as ‘unencumbered, independent individuals’, Wells explains the importance of understanding ‘the purpose of economic activity or production from the point of view of the labourer, rather than of the owner of the means of production’.⁵⁸ From this angle, the ‘purpose of production is to generate the means to make life materially and symbolically possible; to buy or make food, homes, culture, and to raise children’.⁵⁹ In this analysis, children are ‘engaged in social reproduction as both its objects (the “substance” being reproduced, biologically and culturally) and its subjects (doing socially reproductive work)’.⁶⁰ Their actions and those of their families are constrained by processes of governmentality, which proscribe potential avenues for agency, and Wells views child saving as an example of governmentality in action. But, she asks, is the shift to child rights any better or is it merely the neo-imperial ‘caring face of capitalism’?⁶¹

Wells is unconvinced by counterclaims from child rights organizations that they ‘act as the advocate for children … rather than as the paternalistic adjudicator of children’s best interests’.⁶² Her critique is based, first, on the lack of any representative mechanism through which children can express their will, and second, on a claim that ‘the rights children are entitled to according to the UNCRC are not rights in the historical meaning of the word but conditions necessary for the constitution of particular kinds of childhood’.⁶³ This second argument relies on acceptance of a will theory of rights. In Wells’ view ‘[r]ights do not adhere to humans by virtue of our common humanity but are won in political struggle and defended by persons with capacity’.⁶⁴ However, interest theories of rights, such as Raz’s formulation, provide the most widely acknowledged theories of rights. These theories, which also have a long history, do not deny those without political capacity the dignity of rights. Wells’ framing leads her to conclude that international agencies’ goals for monitoring progress on child rights, eliminating child poverty, and the like function as a ‘rhetorical device for legitimating global capitalism at the same time as extending the exercise of power by global states and the international system over weak, marginal and developing states’.⁶⁵ Despite her global outlook and critical Marxist lens, Wells appears to accept a Western neoliberal view of human rights as merely negative civil and political rights. In this context, the excursions of child rights into welfare issues and questions of a child’s ‘best interests’ are viewed as ‘another reason and technic of government that produce[s] and inscribe[s] a liberal model of childhood in children’s lives on a global scale’.⁶⁶ Perhaps a greater awareness of the contributions made by members of the Soviet bloc and post-colonial and non-aligned states to the drafting of international human rights instruments, as well as the ongoing use made of UN treaty mechanisms by grassroots movements in the Global South, might result in a more nuanced assessment.⁶⁷

Notwithstanding this minor critique, Childhood in a Global Perspective makes a persuasive case ‘that the liberal model of childhood is tied to the globalization of capitalism and its neo-liberal subjects’⁶⁸ through compelling examples spanning much of the globe. Wells demonstrates why ‘the liberal model of childhood needs to be treated sceptically’⁶⁹ and why solutions to contemporary insecurities of childhood must be found through addressing structural inequalities not through ever greater scrutiny of individual children and their families.

The Sociology of Children’s Rights by Brian Gran, Polity Press, 2021

Brian Gran’s The Sociology of Children’s Rights also takes a global perspective. Confining the subject matter to the ideas, workings, and practical results of children’s rights, it dives more deeply into the nature of rights and the strengths and weaknesses of children’s rights approaches. The Sociology of Children’s Rights is also aimed at a different audience. Whereas Childhood in a Global Perspective has much to engage postgraduates and academics working in the field, Gran’s work is directed at less specialist, younger readers. As the back cover promises, it is a ‘critical and accessible introduction’⁷⁰ for those concerned with human rights in sociology, political science, law, social work, and childhood studies.

The Introduction and subsequent chapters each commence with a vignette written in the second person, addressing a boy who has fled to a new country with his parents to escape fighting in his home state.⁷¹ He is hearing about children’s rights for the first time. As he absorbs information, he contemplates not only its application to himself but also to his 14-year-old sister whom, we are told, has chosen to remain in their country of origin to look after the family business and who intends to get married when she turns 15.⁷² I was not convinced by this artifice at first, nor by Gran’s habit of addressing the reader in the second person. While on holiday, however, I left the book on a communal table only to come back to find a 12-year-old (whom I did not know previously) flicking through it. She consumed several chapters that evening. Despite never having come across concepts of children’s rights or sociology before, she was able to eagerly embark on a debate of Gran’s ideas. This child’s reading and analytical abilities were undoubtedly advanced. Nevertheless, her response demonstrates that The Sociology of Children’s Rights will interest and enlighten students, including those who are mature children themselves.

The Introduction provides context for the choice of protagonist in the vignettes. We learn about the number of children who migrate internationally, the harshness of situations in which many children live, and common issues relating to children’s rights to family.⁷³ The concepts of sociology as a study of ‘people doing things together’⁷⁴ and children’s rights in contradistinction to human rights⁷⁵ are introduced. This sets the scene for the book’s central conundrum, namely that:

On paper, children’s rights are universal, inalienable, indivisible, interdependent, interrelated, and non-discriminatory. Children’s rights are tools to be used to advance young people’s interests, especially their well-being. Yet evidence suggests the failure of children’s rights.

Children’s rights are often overlooked and ignored. Why?⁷⁶

Each chapter investigates the matters foreshadowed in its opening vignette. Chapter 1 traverses the sociological underpinnings of rights and the development of international agreements on children’s rights.⁷⁷ National and international institutions with roles in monitoring and advancing children’s rights are explained in Chapter 2.⁷⁸ This includes the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (the UN Committee), national independent children’s rights institutions and non-profit organizations.⁷⁹ In Chapter 3, we learn about the politics of children’s rights, including the relationships between state governments, the UN Committee, and child advocacy groups at the international and regional levels. Attention to organizational apparatus allows Gran to examine ‘what prompts struggles to advance young people’s rights? Or to define rights? How are these struggles resolved?’⁸⁰ The roles of the UN Committee, national representatives, and NGOs in negotiating not merely the fulfilment of rights ‘but which rights are deemed essential and to what degree they must be enforced’⁸¹ are brought to the fore. National politics are also examined including conflicts between pro- and anti-children’s rights factions. The right to education provides an example through which to identify weaknesses and limitations of children’s rights in terms of practical implementation at a local level, as well as to introduce data and methodological issues in the sociological study of children’s rights.⁸² Further, the ‘glaring omission’ of the right to vote from the UNCRC is challenged as a ‘grave error’.⁸³

In Chapter 4, attention is turned to whether and how children’s rights matter to children and young people in real life. Here the fictional example of the boy who has immigrated to a new, safer and more wealthy state and his sister who remained behind is relied upon to highlight how rights may mean little to young people who are unaware of them or who are unable to exercise them effectively. Data collection methods are explained and results from key studies of young people’s attitudes are used to highlight the complexities of interpreting data. In keeping with the conversational tone of the book, Gran recounts a visit he made to an Icelandic school, accompanying the Icelandic Children’s Ombudsman. This anecdote concretizes for the reader the practical issues of prioritizing and resourcing children’s rights awareness.⁸⁴

Chapter 5, on what children’s rights do and do not do, fills in some of the pieces that are missing in Wells’ analysis on rights.⁸⁵ Gran considers the importance of the ‘right to have rights’,⁸⁶ setting out, for example, Williams’ rebuttal of the views of those critical legal studies scholars who view rights talk as a distraction from the real issues of ‘social-economic-political structures and relationships’.⁸⁷ Nevertheless, he asks whether the UNCRC and other human rights treaties do in fact live up to their promise of indicating ‘that young people possess the right to have rights’.⁸⁸ After a helpful examination of the workings of the UN Committee on Children’s Rights and other UN bodies, he considers domestic implementation of rights to education, health, nationality, and freedom from harm (specifically female genital mutilation), and whether the delineation of rights in the UNCRC forecloses consideration of other rights in relation to children, such as the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress.⁸⁹

Finally, in Chapter 6 on ‘What is Right with Children’s Rights’, Gran rebuts Guggenheim’s claim that the children’s rights movement ‘may have harmed young people and their families’⁹⁰ with regard to children’s best interests and parental authority. He makes clear that this claim stems from a frame of reference focused on the rights of young people in the US court proceedings, and arising from a particular US attachment to adversarial legalism in its policy formulation and implementation, which is of limited relevance outside the USA or in consideration of the rights of the child in relation to obligations of the state.⁹¹ The challenge cultural relativism poses to the concept of universal children’s rights is addressed through examples of children’s exposure to state-sanctioned harm in a range of states both in the Global North and the Global South. Using the specific example of young people with disabilities, Gran highlights how widespread cultural acceptance of rights violations cannot be used as an argument against universalism.⁹² He concludes that children’s rights ‘certainly’ provide safeguards and protections in areas such as freedom of conscience, the right to assemble, and rights to education. He reminds us that these rights do not exist in a vacuum and that family relationships, nourishment, security, love, and independence are important for young people as they are for adults. Moreover, he concludes that the sociological study of children’s rights suggests a disturbing reality in which human rights, that ‘are supposed to reduce marginality; … prevent vulnerability; … [and] be universal’,⁹³ fail children because society is structured in ways that marginalize them from full membership and exacerbate dependency on adults.

The text of the UNCRC is included as an appendix as a handy reference.⁹⁴

Conclusion

In these works, Polity Press offers students and researchers two excellent resources: one demonstrating the weight of global forces shaping childhoods and the other aiming to be accessible to young as well as adult readers, and insisting that despite failings and limitation ‘Our study does offer hope that children’s rights may change the world.’⁹⁵ While both are firmly rooted in Western epistemologies and ontologies, each author strives to include illuminating case studies and reference to literature from outside the North American-European hegemon. Together, Childhood in a Global Perspective and The Sociology of Children’s Rights leave the reader with a critical understanding of the construction of childhood in the global neoliberal era, as well as the promises and limitations of children’s rights.

Footnotes