Introduction

If we understand children's rights as a specific form of human rights, their beginning would be dated in the European Enlightenment or in the 18th century. However, when we take a closer look at the different aspects of children's rights, it is not possible to limit them to a purely European achievement nor to the past 250 years. Human rights and children's rights are not only the fruit of the illustrious ideas of some philosophers and pedagogues, they also emerge from social struggles for a better life, understood as humane, which could no longer be withheld from children. Children, especially those from the subaltern classes, in former times also participated in this struggle. Today, major impulses for the reconceptualization of children's rights come from young people of the Global South.

In the history of children's rights, two main strands can be distinguished: on one hand, those who emphasize the protection of children and later the guarantee of their dignified living conditions, and on the other hand, those who strive for the equality and active participation of children in society (see Renaut, 2002). The two strands are not entirely opposed to each other, although they have each developed separately until very recently. Internationally, one strand is represented by the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child, which was adopted by the League of Nations in 1924. As this history of children's rights has already been described extensively, it will not be part of our elaborations here. Rather, we look to the other, less known development, in which children's rights are foremost seen as an expression and means of the emancipation and equality of children (as human beings). As they generally go hand in hand with social movements, which aim at changing social and political conditions, we call them children's rights movements.

Children's rights movements are sometimes distinguished as ‘radical’ compared to ‘reformist’ and ‘pragmatic’ movements (Verhellen, 1994: 59– 60). Here, we refer mostly to the ‘radical’ ones. We see the distinction between ‘children's rights movements’ and ‘children liberation movements’ made by Veerman (1992) as problematic, because there is a particular understanding of children's rights in both movements. As Reynaert et al (2009: 521), we understand children's rights movements as ‘counter-movements’ against movements mainly centred in paternalistic notions of child saving and child protection.

Introduction

Among those who see children's rights as an important achievement and advocate for them, there is agreement that children must be respected and taken seriously as subjects. This is not only as subject in the legal sense, but also in the sociological and psychological sense. The recognition of children as subjects leads to the conclusion not to emphasize what children are not yet able to do, but to focus on their existing or emerging abilities to express opinions, judge and act (agency). It is therefore also important that children are able to express their views freely, gather with other children in their own interest and influence all decisions that concern them (participation). Since children and girls in particular are in a subordinate and marginalized social position, emphasis is placed on the need to strengthen them (empowerment). In view of the temporary or permanent difficulties that many children face in their lives, emphasis is also placed on their capacity to overcome adversities (resilience) and the need to promote it.

I consider all these concepts to be significant and the assumptions and intentions they contain to be relevant and necessary. Nevertheless, I also think it is important to draw attention to some blind spots and problems associated with them. These are not deduced from the concepts themselves, but from a more precise analysis of the social contexts and situations in which children find themselves, and in which the concepts have specific meanings. As the concepts of subject and subjectivity are central to this, I will focus on examining their various contexts, justifications and meanings in relation to children and their rights. Here, I put emphasis on childhoods of the Global South and engage in some reflections on its ambiguities and paradoxes as well as possible extensions and concretizations.

Children as subjects of rights

In children's rights discourse, the concept of the subject has a central and consistently positive meaning. It serves to attribute to children their own legal and social status, which must be respected by society. By designating children as legal subjects or subjects with rights of their own, it emphasizes that they are not dependent on the goodwill of people who have more power than they do that is often exercised over them, but that these persons, just like the state, are legally and morally obliged to respect children as persons with their own dignity. Like human rights, children's rights are both objective and subjective rights. Reference to objective rights emphasizes the obligations of society or the state towards children; reference to subjective rights emphasizes that children themselves can claim and assert their rights.

Introduction

Since the turn of the millennium, social childhood studies have not only become more interested in children and childhoods of the Global South, but have also critically reflected on the Eurocentric focus of previous childhood studies (see, for instance, Liebel and Budde, 2017). This critical perspective has been taken up recently in a special issue of the international journal Childhood, claiming to ‘develop perspectives that de-construct northern, dominant scholarships, and facilitate generative thinking on the study of childhood and children using southern epistemologies’ (Abebe et al, 2022: 2; see also Kannan et al, 2022). Part of this (self-)critical view is that until now, a large part of research has been characterized by an approach that uses children of the Global South as a source of knowledge without asking what the knowledge generated means for the children themselves (see Ansell, 2019, and Chapter 4). I will discuss this in detail in this chapter. I want to encourage reflection on forms of knowledge production in childhood and children's rights research that benefit children themselves and contribute to recognizing them as equal human beings and to strengthen their social position in society.

I will focus my reflections on the question of what kind of knowledge is required to reach this aim and how it can be generated. It must be knowledge that reveals children's perceptions and perspectives, that is, how they think, feel and deal with everyday experiences. And it must be knowledge in which not only the marginalization, disregard, oppression, exploitation and violence experienced by children become visible, but also their potential to defend themselves against it. In my opinion, such knowledge, sometimes called ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway, 1988) or ‘liberatory knowledge’ (Giri, 2013), can only emerge together with the children concerned. It must be legitimized by them and accessible to them. The generation of such knowledge requires ethnographic methodologies that do not separate the researcher from the researched, but see research as a joint project in which there are horizontal and equal relationships between all participants. And it requires methodologies that do not build on cognitive and linguistic premises usually attributed to adults, but give equal weight to mimetic and emotional skills and ways of communicating. Here, I refer primarily to research approaches that have emerged in Latin American and Indigenous contexts and represent what Argentine semiotician Walter Mignolo (2009) has called ‘epistemic disobedience’.

Introduction

Since the emergence of youth movements in the second half of the 19th century, it has been pondered to what extent young people can be a force for change of social conditions. Mostly, social change or renewal is referred to in a general way. Such generalizing theories about ‘generations’ and their relationship to each other were already formulated in the 1920s (see Mannheim, [1928] 1952; Mead, 1970; 1973). The debate eventually extended to young people, who today are subsumed under the life phase of childhood. This is expressed not only in terms such as ‘Young Pioneers’ (in the communist movement), but in the meantime also in numerous statements by UN bodies in which children and young people are declared to be bearers of hope for a better world. Since the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1989 at the latest, the debate on children's rights has also gone beyond questions of child protection and aims at greater social and political participation of children. In the ‘new sociology of childhood’ that emerged since the 1980s and is being newly constructed until today, children are explicitly attributed ‘agency’ and research approaches are developed in which children are granted an active part as producers of knowledge.

The discovery of the young generations as ‘agents of social change’, however, was not the same for all children and young people. So far, the understanding of children as agents of social change has been limited to those younger generations who more or less conform to the pattern of bourgeois childhood and youth, even if they rebel against the bourgeois order, as in the case of the first youth movements. Numerous children and young people who deviated from this pattern in their social behaviour, for example by skipping school or, mostly due to precarious living conditions, who lead a ‘sub-proletarian’ life of their own liking, were branded as ‘neglected’ and a danger to the existing society or the ‘disciplined’ class struggle. In Germany, before and after the First World War, some of these children and young people had come together in groups that named themselves ‘wild cliques’ (see Lessing and Liebel, 1981; Rosenhaft, 1982).

With this book, we hope to have provided numerous reasons to rethink the prevailing discourse and practice of children's rights. As such, we believe it is indispensable to transform the hitherto dominant concepts of (state) law and (subjective) rights. In the international human rights system, the principle of formal equality of legal subjects, which has repeatedly led to ‘paradoxes’ (Brown, 2002) in the enjoyment of rights, has been expanded by the introduction of specific rights (women's rights, children's rights, rights of persons with disabilities, rights of Indigenous peoples, and others) in the sense of powerless and disadvantaged groups of people. But it cannot stop there.

With regard to children's rights, we believe that an essential element of this transformation is to connect these rights with children's concrete experiences. This mediation is envisioned in the concept of Living Rights (Hanson and Nieuwenhuys, 2013; 2020). However, this concept is limited to ‘translating’ the legal rights, that is, those authorized by the state, into children's everyday lives and making visible the contradictions and conflicts of interest that arise. Instead, children, like other subaltern groups of people, would have to be enabled to formulate their own rights and to facilitate their use to shape the reality that surrounds them, without having to rely on or trust state authority (‘state power’).

Where this is done, rights are not formulated in an abstract way as ‘general rights’ that apply and are meaningful to all children in the world in the same way. In fact, they refer to specific life situations and indicate what needs to change in these distinct contexts in order to achieve a safe, dignified and satisfying life. Similarly, they are formulated in a language that does not require expert knowledge or legal experts to understand these rights. In existing legal language, these are understood as ‘moral rights’. In order for them to be understood as being more than moral admonitions that ultimately have no consequences, they rely on processes of self-empowerment that emerge from society and the collective action of young people. Since they have to deal with overcoming unequal distribution of power, they only have a chance if they see themselves as a ‘counter-hegemonic democratic project’ (Buckel, 2021: 270) or as ‘social and political counter-rights’ (Menke, 2018) that not only have their ‘own’ freedom in mind, but want to achieve a different society and world order.

Introduction

In this chapter, I explore how the lived childhoods of the Global South result from colonization and how children from popular sectors are affected by its aftermath in the postcolonial era marked by the coloniality of power. For children, being affected means being subjugated and humiliated in various ways, but it also ignites their resistance. The basic thesis is that the modern pattern of childhood is a colonial construction in the triple sense: it is inspired by the colonial relationship, it serves to justify colonial conquest, and in the postcolonial era, it serves to render invisible other childhoods that do not conform to the Western norm or to make them appear deviant and backward. After explaining the multiple forms of subjugation and humiliation of childhoods under conditions of coloniality, I explain the need for and possible ways of decolonizing childhoods and the practice of children's rights. I begin by highlighting some of the ideological underpinnings that, in my view, foster the subjugation and humiliation of children in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Binary thinking as an ideological basis for humiliation

The subjugation and humiliation of children, to which I refer here from a decolonial perspective, finds its ideological basis in binary categories constructed in a hierarchical and pejorative manner, in which a distinction is made between ‘us’ (belonging, normalized) and ‘others’ (excluded, deviant), according to Edward Said ([1978] 2013), called ‘othering’ or ‘otherness’. This binary coding has its origins in the thoughts of philosopher Rene Descartes and continues to have an effect today. It refers to territories as well as to people and populations. I will now name some of these binary codes:

• • developed versus underdeveloped (technically, socially and culturally);

• • modern or progressive versus backward;

• • civilized versus barbaric;

• • cultivated versus nature-bound;

• • rational versus irrational;

• • self-controlled versus emotion-driven;

• • educated and conscious versus ignorant and stupid (mastery of a certain knowledge, a certain way of thinking, includes mastery of a certain language – discursive power);

• • ability or power to act versus inability or powerlessness to act (as a personal characteristic); and

• • superior versus inferior (in the sense of ‘power over’ and devaluing people).

With reference to similar binaries, Michael Bourdillon, Sylvia Meichsner and Afua Twum-Danso Imoh refer to the category of childhood as follows:

Introduction

In the 1980s, I came into contact with children in Nicaragua who lived in great poverty in the midst of a cruel war during which they had witnessed a massacre or lost relatives. I was amazed at how these children mastered their complicated daily lives. They did what needed to be done, they built their own toys, and they brought life to the rural cooperative where I stayed for a few weeks. To my great surprise, they were generally in good spirits. A few years later, when I started working with children in a city in the same country whose parents had disappeared, who lived on the streets and kept themselves afloat with odd jobs or petty theft, I had similar experiences. I kept asking myself where the strength of these children came from, not to lose courage even in seemingly hopeless situations.

This and subsequent similar experiences have led me to explore theoretical concepts that can help to understand and support coping with extremely stressful life situations. One such concept is called resilience. It has witnessed a boom in recent decades and has advanced to become a key concept to explain such behaviour in view of the extreme difficulties experienced. ‘The idea of resilience seems to be associated with an almost magical quality that is now almost indispensable in any field of practice’ (Gebauer, 2017: 15). It has been repeatedly pointed out that the concept cannot only be understood in different ways, but is also often used arbitrarily. The emancipatory intentions originally associated with it have increasingly been reversed and begs an answer to the concept of resilience's suitability for emancipatory action. This also applies to social and educational work with children.

First, after an outline of the development of the concept of resilience, I will examine some of its applications and critical objections. I will then discuss some immanent limitations and contradictions of the resilience discourse and ask whether it is possible to conceive of other concepts within its framework. Finally, I will formulate some reflections on the extremely stressful conditions children live in and how they can defend themselves and address the causes of their suffering. I will focus on what needs to be considered here.

In the following sentences, I set out the basic line of argument of this book. First, I clarify why I think it is necessary to consider issues of children and children's rights in relation to colonization and coloniality. I then explain how I understand children's rights and why I consider them indispensable for the lives of children in particular at the grassroots. I also show what must happen and be considered for these rights to be experienced by children as meaningful and that they can be used by them in their own interest. In order to get a concrete idea of children's living conditions and collective interests, I explain my understanding of the concepts of ‘the popular’ and of ‘popular childhoods’ as well as ‘childhoods of the Global South’. Since I am primarily concerned with how identities of resistance emerge in these childhoods, I also consider it necessary to get an idea of colonization processes. In this book, due to my personal and professional biography, I focus on the subcontinent of Latin America and look for the traces colonization has left on social relations, on thoughts and feelings of young people, and how these can be counteracted. At the end of the Introduction, I give an overview of the individual chapters of the book.

Why and how do I speak of the colonization of childhoods?

Following the publication of the book Decolonizing Childhoods: From Exclusion to Dignity (Liebel, 2020), some people raised the question whether, analogous to the colonization of peoples and territories, it is possible to speak of a colonization of childhood(s). For this reason, I will explain how I understand colonization as a concept and why I find it meaningful to apply it to children and childhoods.

I understand colonization as a form of submission of people and living spaces against their will and to the detriment of the people in those living spaces. Certainly it must be borne in mind that the colonization is situated in a specific historical context, the era of European colonialism (and imperialism), and that it cannot be simply transposed to other historical or social contexts. It is equally important to bear in mind that the term has come to be understood in a broader sense as the ‘internal colonization’ of the lifeworld (Habermas, 1981). When I speak of the colonization of childhoods, I have in mind both meanings of colonization.