Scales of grievability: on moving children and the geopolitics of precariousness

Abstract

This article investigates legal performativities of grievability in contemporary child migration and argues for a scalar approach to analyse and understand the cultural politics underpinning current debates on the 'moving' child. I turn to two court cases in the Dutch context that involve alleged child trafficking in international adoption on the one hand and the threat of deportation in child asylum on the other. These two forms of child migration have rarely been investigated in tandem although both concern the transnational movement of children from the global South to the wealthy North. By focusing on the legal concept of 'the right to family life' and 'the best interest of the child' I point to the performativity of law and the ways in which cultural constructions of the child, childhood, kin and humanitarianism intervene in our work of justification. My contention is that placing these 'different-but-same bodies' within a scalar dimension -one that takes into account spatio-temporal conditions of grievabilityenables us to understand modern investments in child-bodies and the complexities of justice in globalization.

Imageries of family and nation: A comparative analysis of transnational adoption and care for unaccompanied minors in Belgium

“…The document clearly indicates that the government prioritizes the reproductive rights of its citizens, while the children's and birth family's rights are condensed into the word 'trustworthy', a qualifier that seems to pass the buck of moral responsibility to the adoption agencies and sending countries. Moreover, the lack of any concrete plans to prevent abuse, abduction or the falsification of records or to search for alternatives in order to avoid transnational adoptions shows an underlying ethnocentric belief that affluent families in Western democracies are healthier homes for children anyhow (Van Wichelen, 2015). In addition, by stating that policy aims to support the adoptees' search for 'roots', the document naturalizes the severing of ties with birth families in transnational adoption and turns the adult adoptees' loss and subsequent difficult quest for their origins into an inevitable aspect of (transnational) adoption, the unavoidable cost of their being 'saved' by Western families.…”

“…The conceptual and actual divisions between the two groups of minors, but also their zones of overlap, are telling about the ways in which imageries of the family and the nation intersect. In this section, we try to unravel the nexus of family ideologies, White privilege and conceptions of immigrant assimilation that produce paradoxical tensions in decisions of which children deserve what kind of committed action (see also Van Wichelen, 2015).…”

Making adoptable children: A case study of the child assessment programme for Chinese–US transnational adoptions

“…The geography of adoption has only recently been addressed through papers published in Children's Geographies and a special issue of Social & Cultural Geographies . Key topics in these papers include the issue of familial and national belonging (De Graeve, ; Selman, ; Sweeney, ), biopolitical examination of age and intergeneration (Leinaweaver, ), the juxtaposition of adoption and migration (Alipio et al., ; Posocco, ), the geography of relatedness (Nash, ), and the geopolitics of sending and receiving countries (van Wichelen, ). Moreover, scholars in other disciplines have also analysed transnational adoptions with a focus on space and place (Leinaweaver et al., ; Seligman, ).…”

Un-signing Geneva: legal pragmatics in the management of asylum

“…Scholars have argued, however, that their dependency on their kin is conveniently erased and replaced by the care of the host-state (van Wichelen, 2015;Bhabha, 2009).…”