Child Trafficking: ‘Worst Form’ of Child Labour,or Worst Approach to Young Migrants?

This article presents a critique to the human trafficking discourse in relation to child migration, based on data obtained from the anti‐trafficking community in the Greater Mekong Sub‐region combined with an analysis of secondary material. It also presents a set of qualitative accounts of migration at a young age from Lao PDR and Thailand. On this basis a more theorized, grounded and nuanced perspective on child labour migration is developed. This situates child labour migration historically, embeds it within overarching processes of rural transformation and accounts for young migrants’ agency in the social process of migration, the latter shedding light on the social production of exploitation in relation to young migrants.     

Constructing the Disabled Child in England, 1800–18601

At the core of much of the historiography of disability in so far as it relates to nineteenth century England is a belief that the support offered to those with physical and mental impairments was threadbare and that such people could be and were pushed to the social margins of their communities. The current article uses poor law records, letters, newspapers and coronial inquests to suggest that officials in fact had a sophisticated sense of degrees of mental and physical impairment and relief/support systems were tailored accordingly. Like many of the pauper families who wrote to them about children with impairments I argue that officials tended to construct hierarchies of ability rather than disability and that doing so took them deeply into areas like labour market subsidy and the avoidance of institutional confinement. On the subject of children with mental and physical impairments, officials and pauper shared a common rhetorical register and strategic approach to classification and treatment.     

Monetary and Multidimensional Child Poverty: A Contradiction in Terms?

Although the multidimensional nature of poverty is widely recognized, the extent to which monetary measures can serve as a proxy for non‐monetary measures remains unresolved. This is of particular concern for children given their dependence on others for fulfilment of basic needs and assumptions about intra‐household distribution that underpin monetary measures. This article adopts an innovative mixed‐methods approach to investigate child poverty overlap and mismatch in the low‐ and middle‐income countries of Ethiopia and Vietnam using secondary longitudinal survey data and primary qualitative data from adults and children. Findings indicate that monetary and multidimensional poverty are distinct constructs that are linked, but cannot serve as a proxy for one another. While the degree of dissonance depends on the types of indicators under consideration, poverty mismatch persists regardless of time, place and multidimensional measure under consideration.     

UNICEF ‘Child Poverty in Perspective’ Report: A View from the UK

In February 2007, UNICEF launched the latest in a series of reports comparing the conditions of young people's lives across the world's more industrialised countries. The report ranked the UK as the lowest of the countries investigated. We give a critical overview of the report, identifying its limitations as well as some of the trends it reveals. We also discuss the poor placing of the UK in relation to current broader political and public debates.     

Children,Work and ‘Child Labour’: Changing Responses to the Employment of Children

This article examines the ways in which the problem of child labour has been perceived and addressed, from the beginnings of social concern about these issues until the present, with illustrations from The Netherlands and Indonesia. National and international responses to the problem of child labour reflect a number of assumptions which are almost completely at odds with the views and the preferences of children themselves. Paradoxically, powerful lobbies in some of the world's wealthiest countries – which cannot enforce, and in some cases are beginning to relax, their own child labour laws – are trying to insist that the developing countries tighten and/or enforce their laws, under the threat of various forms of sanction or boycott. These increasingly active threats make it highly inadvisable for any exporting country to acknowledge the existence of children's employment at all, for example by protective legislation or other efforts to promote the improvement of children's working conditions.     

The Ideologization of the Child: Zdeňka Bezděková and Marie Majerová

Abstract

This article traces the changes in two novels, Zdenňka Bezděková’s ?íkali mi Leni and Marie Majerová’s Bruno, made once the Communist-Party regime in Czechoslovakia was firmly established. For example, German paedophilia is changed to bullying in Bezděková and pre-war Czech political antisemitism deleted from Majerová. In both works Czech nationalist misoteutonism is changed into internationalist Communism. The author pays close attention to changes in language and style in both works. Though Majerová’s novel seems no longer to be read, Bezděková’s remains standard reading for adolescents, and in the twenty-fi rst century continues to be read with its somewhat rabble-rousing afterword by the novelist Karl Nový. The essay demonstrates how children can be made into things rather than people for the sake of a political ideology.     

Playing with Flint: Tracing a Child’s Imitation of Adult Work in a Lithic Assemblage

This paper examines the potential for identifying play and children’s imitation in the archaeological record and reviews cultural constructions of play and cross-cultural behaviour. A case study, using a lithic assemblage from a discrete knapping area for Scandinavian Neolithic axe production in Southern Sweden which identifies a child’s activity area, is discussed. The theoretical and methodological assumptions behind play, imitation and its identification as well as its social implications are also examined.