‘special attention’ on refugee children

In 1994 the UNHCR released a document entitled Refugee Children: Guidelines on Protection and Care. This document – which updated a 1988 document, and incorporated ideas from a UNHCR policy document produced in 1993 – remains the standard set of guidelines for protection regimes and measures for refugee children from the UNHCR. All of the UNHCR publications on child refugees begin by pointing out that approximately half of any refugee population are children, and this document is no different. It’s an interesting point to make, and to be continually reminding people of. We are compelled to wonder, I think, why the typical refugee is imagined as being an adult. Why do we refer to refugees and child refugees? How does adulthood become instilled as the norm? Of course, this is not a problem peculiar to refugees: in general, when discussions of society are at hand, adults are considered to norm, and their adulthoodness (if such a word can be allowed!) is invisible.

This 1994 document opens with a preface by Sadako Ogata, the then-UN High Commissioner for Refugees. One of the first things she wrote here was that “Refugee children are children first and foremost, and as children, they need special attention” (p. 5).

This line jumps out at me, as I think through the ways that the category of the child refugee has been produced at different historical moments. What does it mean to be a child “first and foremost”? How can that be evaluated and determined? The way in which this is written seems to produce an idea of a universal child who is always one thing. Indeed, Ogata goes on to explain that “children are vulnerable… children are dependent… children are developing” (p. 5-6). Are all children all of these things, all the time? In this framing, are children constituted by having these qualities, or are these qualities constituted by being carried by the children? And can one be a considered a child if they are not all these things?

The document is framed by the ideas of childhood presented in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and it notes that “the CRC’s major innovation is that it gives rights to children. We are used to thinking of children as having needs that should be met, rather than as having legal rights” (p. 20). The key framing for these rights is that activities should be done which are in the “best interests of the child” – this formulation is key to much of the way that the UN, the UNHCR and international law currently approaches understandings of best practice around policies towards child refugees. Again, however, we are compelled to inquire what precisely this can mean, and has meant, and indeed, what the precise ways are in which this formulation has been put into practice changes over time and place. It is always historical, drawing on communal ideas of both “best interest” and of “the child”.

Human rights lawyer John Tobin has argued for “a vision beyond vulnerability” when thinking about the concept of children’s rights. He has written that focusing on the vulnerability of children can “lead to their objectification and silencing. Even with the best of intentions, children can easily become objects of concern and intervention by adults who are committed to their best interests without bothering to consult with children about these interventions” (p. 171). In such approaches, he writes, children “are presumed to lack the competency and capacity to assist in the design and development of any measures or interventions to ensure their effective protection” (p. 171).

Is this perhaps what we’re seeing being instilled in the idea put forward by the UNHCR, and by Ogata, that refugee children are children. How then does this sit alongside the work of the children currently imprisoned in the Australian detention centre on Nauru, who present images such as this one

(from Free the Children NAURU, posted August 29, 2016, accessed August 31, 2016.)

and who protest and assert their own calls for rights, justice, freedom and self-determination? In this work they produce an alternate idea of what the category of the child can contain, and how it can be politically mobilised at this historical moment in the work towards attaining children’s rights. The “special attention” which these children demand is of a fundamentally different order.