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.