This article analyses four different contexts in Sweden where children’s rights have been mobilised to govern vulnerabilised migrant childhoods. The concept of ‘vulnerabilisation’ is suggested to capture the political processes creating the conditions for defining and attributing vulnerability. To enable children’s rights to be a productive tool for challenging the repressive governing of migrant families and children, the article argues for the need of a problematisation and contextualisation of both the children’s rights paradigm and the vulnerabilisation of migrant childhoods.
Firewalls are clear divisions between border policing and the provision of basic social rights. They have a dual character: to ensure that no information collected with the purpose of safeguarding basic social rights should be shared for immigration control purposes; and that migrants should not be subject to immigration control when being present at, or in the vicinity, of religious, private and public institutions upholding and providing social rights. This article suggests a normative argument for ‘firewalls’ in the context of social work and develops the concept theoretically as a principle practised and negotiated at different scales.
Drawing on in-depth ethnographic observations among irregularised migrant families in Birmingham, UK, this article discusses how children’s political agency manifests in everyday life. It shows how children who become aware of their legal status as ‘deportable’ reject this subject position and offer their own definitions of who they are and where they belong. Simultaneously, it is argued that children with varying degrees of knowledge about their legal status also express political agency through their struggle to sustain the inclusion they experience. Such expressions highlight the duality of children’s political agency in irregular situations.
Through an analysis of 100 asylum decisions and 10 interviews with 20 asylum officers at the Swedish Migration Agency this article reveals two intricate processes through which children's rights are displaced in the Swedish asylum process; by overlooking children's individual claims for asylum through a circle of neglect, and negating children's best interests. The article demonstrates how the balancing act between migration control on one hand and children's rights on the other hand plays out in the asylum process, which results in a double displacement; the children are not adult enough to be addressed as asylum seekers and not children enough to deserve qualification as bearer of children's rights. An in-depth analysis of everyday practices at institutions applying children's rights is essential both to understand the reproduction of discrepancies between rights on paper and rights in practice, and to explore the potential of rights to disrupt oppressive vehicles of power.
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