Children, Childhood and Migration: Some critical thoughts

Abstract

Limiting myself to the development literature, I first ask why it is that the issue of ‘independent child migration’ emerged as a specific field in the early 2000s even though the phenomenon itself was hardly new. I concur that its original concern was a critique to the hegemony of the child trafficking discourse, with trafficking understood as a form of boundary management within development studies’ ‘migration turn’ working to construct ‘bad’ forms and categories of mobility as separate from ‘good’ forms/categories of migration. The ‘independent child migration’ research agenda that thus emerged may be summarised as: demonstrating young migrants’ as actors in migration; highlighting that staying is often not a desirable option’; deconstructing the trafficking discourse; and reconstruction the phenomenon of mobile children as a migration issue with exploitation instead of children’s mobility as the target for intervention. Although this research agenda generated some important insights and has affected interventions, I argue that after a decade this research agenda is in need of reflection. Here I limit myself to three points. First, the phrase ‘independent child migration’ effectively amounted to a further compartmentalisation of migration (despite this being a point of critique in general migration studies). Such a categorising approach tends to hinder rather than deepen a situated understanding of young people in migration. The latter would require attending to relational dimensions, by for example concentrating on the role of ‘migration networks’ and the role of various conceptualisations of age shaping young people’s inclusion in the migratory landscape. Second, a relational approach is necessary for moving away from an exclusive concern with ‘critique’ based on deconstruction-based analyses towards constructive analyses that would ask how young people’s migrations shed light on broader questions in children and youth studies. This would include debates on: life course dynamics, young people and state, transnationalism, global householding, etc. Thirdly, the focus on ‘independent child migration’ has kept out of focus the largest group affected by migration: those that are not (yet) moving. A focus on the young offers much scope for teasing out the interrelation between staying and moving in migration research.