Child migration and questions of agency

INTRODUCTION. Over the past decade, the theme of children and migration has received increased attention. Academically, it has quickly developed into a vibrant, inter-disciplinary terrain based on empirical work from across the globe. It is, however, a scattered terrain, with bodies of work clustered around distinct forms of children’s involvement in migration often treated in isolation from one another. This ranges from work on children as ‘left-behind’ following the migration of one or both parents (e.g. Amuedo-Dorantes and Pozo, 2010; Asian Meta Centre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis, 2003; Asis, 2006; Graham and Jordan, 2011) to studies on children as migrants. This latter body of work is typically sub-divided into work on children migrating independently from their parents or care givers, so-called independent child migration, which focuses largely on the global South (e.g. Iversen, 2002; Yaqub, 2009b), and work on children in family migration which focuses largely on the global North (e.g. Bushin, 2009; Dobson and Stillwell, 2000).

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