The Figure of the Child in Today’s Development & Human Rights Regime
Written by MERA Europe.
Contemporary imaginaries of a common humanity and a world community entail particular representations of children (children themselves, images children have made, words they have written, songs they have sung or created) (59). Malkki asks why children’s images are used within humanitarian discourses and notions of international community, how do they become efficacious, and what are the consequences of these images? Malkki argues that children are evoked in five different capacities: “(1) as embodiments of a basic human goodness (and symbols of world harmony); (2) as sufferers; (3) as seers of truth; (4) as ambassadors of peace; and (5) as embodiments of the future (60).
A key point that Malkki makes is that the ways in which humanitarian discourses treat children is as apolitical beings who exist outside of the social or the political, whose specific life histories and narratives are obscured in order to assert particular qualities that it is assumed all children possess. They are the bearers of wisdom, truth, and innocence, the ability to see things with a sense of purity for what they are (and yet they are not able to serve as witnesses at legal proceedings as expert witnesses of any sort, since they are also outside the realm of rational reason) (70-‐‑71).
How the child is depicted resonated a great deal with how various organizational discourses depict the Afghan woman, provoking me to think more about the role of infantilization in the creation of the figure of the victim as well as the role of innocence as a sustained assumption for intervention to be made.
As part of our dialogue series, our team meets to discuss the figure of the child in today’s development and human rights regime.
The Figure of the Child in Today’s Development & Human Rights Regime
