Global Crises of Childhood: Rights, Justice and the Unchildlike Child Author(s): Stuart C.

Aitken Reviewed work(s): Source: Area, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Jun., 2001), pp. 119-127 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20004143 . Accessed: 14/04/2012 23:59
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Area (2001) 33.2, 119-127

Global

crises of childhood: the unchildlike

Stuart C Aitken
Department of Geography,

rights, justice and child1

San Diego State University, California 92182, USA

Email: stuart.aitken@mail.sdsu.edu Revised manuscript received 9 January 2001

This paper traces how the notion of childhood changes as part of other social transfor mations. Globalization and the disillusion of public and private spheres are related to contemporary crises of childhood. Visible working children and child violence are highlighted as examples of unchildlike behaviour that suggests indeterminacy in the constitution of the global child. Issues of children's rights and new forms of justice are raised as potentially liberatory ways of viewing the crisis. Key words: Children, globalization, rights spatial justice

Introduction
Contemporary child research inGeography and its cognate disciplines is focused and directed in large part by a concern over the everyday contexts of children's lived experiences. Intellectual coherence is formed by highlighting questions that relate to how children's perceptions, attitudes and opportunities are socially and spatially structured, and, ultimately, by questions about how our cultures are reproduced through our children. Although these are powerful questions, they trace adultist and well-intended research agendas onto the lives of young people. I sense that we are at a turning point in trying to understand these agendas because we now recog nize that our knowledge is perched on precarious and unsteady ideological foundations. Post-structural and feminist theories suggest appropriately reflexive ways of knowing that highlight our positionality and situatedness as researchers. And yet more is needed. I argue with this paper that contemporary crises surrounding the construction of childhood relates, at least in part, to how child/adult boundaries are designated and this has important implications for the ways justice and children's rights are theorized and implemented. Childhood cannot be regarded as an unproblem atic description of the early part of the life course. It
ISSN 0004-0894 C) Royal Geographical Society (with The

is now generally accepted that status developmental positions such as child, adolescent and adult cannot simply be regarded as an inevitable effect of the passing of time (James et al. 1998, 63).2 But we still encounter an academic legacy where 'childhood' is seen as the theoretical property of structural devel opmental psychology. Even with current advances in feminist and post-structural perspectives that move thinking away from instrumental and positivist ways of knowing, the study of young people is presump tuous because it often constitutes childhood as a legitimate and unchallenged place for our research questions and our discussions of justice. The point I want to make in this paper is that 'justice' for children is usually not related to their everyday needs and experiences, but rather to their 'rights and freedoms' under an Anglo-American liberal tradition that mechanistically reflects individual autonomy, rationality and self-interest (Flax 1993; Stephens I 1995; Diduck 1999). want to argue that childhood as it is currently constituted is a construct within which the otherness and peculiarity of children are rendered safe and manageable for programmatic research and instrumental notions of justice. What I mean by this is that childhood is an adult abstraction suggesting a state of being, whereas the study of children is really the study of a group of persons based on a search for the voice of those persons. But
of British Geographers) 2001

Institute

120 Aitken there is no authentic or just voice for childhood because the adult world dominates that of the child. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the creation of childhood as part of the modern period ofWestern industrialization and then take issue with some contemporary commentators' insistence that childhood and youth disappear as categories of experience towards the end of the twentieth cen tury. Rather, Iargue thatwe need to understand the transformation of childhood from the vantage of the disillusion of the public and the private which, among other things, highlights unchildlike behaviour. In particular, the indeterminacy of contemporary childhood parallels processes of globalization and unchildlike behaviour is often made visible inwork ing and violent children. I end by considering children's rights and the possibility of new forms of justice. in a being whose hold on lifewas quite tenuous. But Aries tended to generalize broadly from examples drawn exclusively from pre-industrial France and, to a lesser extent, England. There is a geographic and chronological vagueness in the work so that given points in time (e.g. the beginning of the seventeenth century) or specific places (e.g. urban, rural) are articulated with little precision. This notwithstanding, as an historical benchmark, Aries's tome provides a useful springboard that positions the contemporary spaces of childhood. He argues (1962, 411) that pre-industrial 'collective life carried along in a single torrent all ages and classes, leaving nobody any time for solitude and privacy'. Collective life was public life, and the function of families was to ensure the transmission of life, property and names: 'In these crowded, collective existences,' he writes, 'there was no room for a private sector'. Nothing was separated out from the vantage of individual, family or community, and children, from the time they were weaned, were considered quintessential parts of public life. This is not to say that children had the rights and power of some adults, or that particular attitudes pervaded adult-child relations, but that indifference rather than difference marked those relations. Aries further generalized about parent-child rela tions, a position thatwas severely criticized by Linda Pollock (1983) who asserted through socio biological theory, anthropology and the study of that parents are more often than not primates loving and affectionate towards their children, and always start off with infants they wish to raise to independent adulthood. Although weighed down by its own generalizations, Pollock's thesis nonetheless garnered significant support. In his own defence, Aries points out that
the idea of childhood nature is not it corresponds of childhood, to be confused with of nature

The birth of childhood

There is nothing new in suggesting that childhood is not a natural category. Few dispute that it is a social, political, economic and moral construction and it always relates to particular cultural histories and geographies. But as a category of experience child hood is problematic because the term so often is rolled into speaking about other moral and social issues. For example, when romantic perspectives are used to talk about children, languages of nature and children are conflated as similarmoral concerns: the goodness, purity and innocence of nature/children are dominant concerns and actions are predisposed towards stewardship, protection and preservation. A possible window on the social construction of child hood, then, is to view the concept as it relates to other forms of social transformation. Iargue that this is important because changes in the way we under stand childhood not only symbolize other social transformations but children are often recognized as a means through which larger societal changes are achieved.

affection

for children:

to an awareness that particular

the particular

which distinguishes the child from the adult, even the young adult. (Aries1962, 128) Comments such as this initiated the idea that childhood is a problematic social construction and, want to argue later, the 'nature' of note for what I that Aries alludes to is about links and interdepend encies. Aries (1962, 369-7) interprets relations between masters/adults and apprentices/children in terms of 'existential bonds' and describes this kind of interdependence as a valuable system of human

Indifference
Historian Philippe Aries was the first to argue that Western childhood was not always as we know it in society, but emerged as part of the early modern

In of Centuries Childhood, periodof industrialization.

his seminal work on the topic, Aries's argued that prior to industrialization, children 'did not count' (1962, 128). He pointed out that the prevailing high levels of mortality did not inspire affection or interest

Global crises of childhood community. Inmany ways, then, Centuries of Child hood is about the work and play of parenting and how children are constituted as parts of that work and play.

121

sixteenth to the nineteenth century, into separate public and private realms contributed to Aries' thesis on the way that childhood emerged. In short, the wrenching of public workplaces from private dom estic spheres propelled change in major social processes including the emergence of a spatially Difference Aries argues that by the end of the sixteenth century separate family identity. In the nineteenth century, after some struggle some women, and then some men, began recogniz ing the pleasure they got from watching children and through various factory and labour laws in Europe indulged in 'coddling' or pampering them to accen and the United States, the place of the child was set tuate the levity. Alternatively, some moralists and squarely in the private sphere along with women pedagogues of the time (quoted in Aries 1962, and, at least initially, education and health issues.3 130-31) did not regard children as charming toys The modern family evolved as a private retreat from but as fragile creatures/animals of God who needed sociability and so the 'discovery' of childhood pre both safeguarding and reform. Attitudes stemming scribed important changes in family and social struc from Puritanism constituted the child as anarchistic tures that began with a middle-class notion of and fundamentally evil, requiring parentally-imposed 'woman at home with children' thatwas forced upon strictures and tutelage that were God-given and the working classes. New forms of intimacy between parents and children were initiated with the creation absolute. Adrian Wilson (1980, 134-5) points out is of home life in Western that it does not matter whether childhood society as increasingly regarded as a state of weakness and imperfection, or private and separate. Of course, many women one of innocence and grace, what matters is the and children resisted, and continue to resist, this development of reason, and this was based on a restriction on theirworking lives. By the nineteenth century the attitude of indiffer specific understanding of children's natures as differ ence towards children had undergone a radical ent. Children were different from adults, their consti transformation. The association of children and par tution was separate and malleable, and not only could boys be instructed in rationality and logic, but ents became increasingly stretched and, in places, reason dictated the disciplined place of men and broken. With the growing belief that the future in the public and private spheres respect women rested on children's shoulders, certain aspects of ively. An important geography, then, relates to the societal change were deemed too important to be the sole responsibility of parents. Education and evolution of public and private spheres. Whereas coddling derived from the intimacy of the family, the health were institutionalized as part of the state new moralist pedagogies were derived from the apparatus with the admonition that family lifemust be focused on moral issues and nurturing. Aries public realm (particularly the church and psychology) and 'passed into the family' (Aries 1962, 132). (1962, 412) notes that education was the great event that heralded a move towards the recognition ... fought passionately of childhood. Neil Postman (1982) extends Aries' The reformers, these moralists ... and the the anarchy against of medieval society concern by asserting that education separates out into the strictly disci of the free school transformation children in order to prepare and socialize them for plined college. This literature, this propaganda, taught the adult world and in thisway it becomes a marker that they that they were parents spiritual guardians, for the transition to adulthood. The amount of time were responsible before God for the souls and indeed children and youths spent in educational institu it was the bodies too, of their children. Henceforth tions increased dramatically through the twentieth that the child was not ready for life, and that recognized century. to a special treatment, a sort of he had to be subjected Children's play is also separated out from the sites to join the adults. quarantine, before he was allowed of adult productive activities. Beginning in the early This new concern about education would gradually install itself in the heart of society and transform it from part of last century, supervised playgrounds were top to bottom. (Aries 1962, 412) instituted across Europe and the United States as a means of drawing children off the streets and into a The geographic question that Aries ignores turns corrective environment. Elizabeth Gagen (2000) on how this transformation occurred. The reconsti points out that the theoretical construction of the tution of space over a long period, from roughly the child that reformers drew from, and indeed that

122 Aitken made the logic of playground reform cohere, made it quarter century on children's formal rights (cf. necessary to display children in public because they Adams et al. 1971; Okin 1989; Archard 1993; King recognized children as a means of larger social 1999), the weakening of parental or house transformation. She argues that reformers believed in hold authority, and the growth of an ideological the plasticity of children over adults, and that the predilection for individuation: child's body was constructed as a conduit through A room of one's own for a child is not only a private which identity surfaced. Disciplined bodies in play spatialspheremade possible by increasedaffluence: it is grounds, as part of public spectacle would induce also a private symbolic sphere, underlying the child's transformation of internal identities. The public space position as an individualand a personality.The individ of the playground displayed ideal male identities ualization of childhood pushes the common categories ('play as the moral equivalent of war') (George of 'children'and 'parents'more into the background and stresses the intentions and personality of the Johnson 1912, cited inGagen) and female identities individualchild or parent. (Fr0nes 1994, 1 53-4) (the controlled display of dance, drills, song and crafts). Fr0nes goes on to argue that the culture of the The important features of Western society at this 'democratic' modern family is characterized by time, then, include its conception of children as negotiation and the homogenization of symbols meriting separation from the world of adults, edu through which decision-making and social control cation as an event that distinguished childhood, and the public display of particular kinds of behaviour in take place (cf. Elshtain 1990; Wood and Beck 1990). For Postman, the homogenization of symbols is boys and girls. As Sharon Stephens (1995, 16) points the global export of transformed notions of primarily through the power and pervasiveness of out, socialization and education at this contemporary media, but the destruction of the childhood, childhood realm is also traceable to changes in time is inextricably linked to the export of modern public education, methods of upbringing, and how constructions of gender, individuality and the family. families are now formed. Herbert Hengst (1987) argues forcefully that the current 'liquidation of child The death of childhood Some theorists suggest that the latter half of the hood' is primarily because the care of children is contracted out into the public sphere. The simi twentieth century signalled the death of childhood larity of employment conditions for child-care pro and adolescence (Hengst 1987; Fr0nes 1994; Cunningham 1995). Postman (1982) notes that the fessionals and all other productive activities is, for him, another example of the homogenization. extension of institutionalized educational control Noting this speculation about the disappearance makes unclear when childhood ends and adulthood of a distinctive adulthood and childhood, David begins. In addition, at the beginning in pre-industrial Oldman (1994) cautions that because adults control Europe and continuing through modern Western society, marriage often heralded fullmembership of productive activities, children may now exist as a the adult realm, but this transition is less identifiable hidden 'class' to be exploited. At the same time as children are embraced by institutions outside the after World War II. Ivar Fr0nes (1994, 152) argues home, the modern family ceases to be simply an Western society, early marriages that in the 1950s in institution for the transmission of a name and an and restricted access to sexual relations produced a estate as suggested by Aries. Children become inwhich (formen) entry into the workforce, situation marriage and a full sexual life all occurred within a an integral part of the commodified package of relatively short period, indicating a 'natural phase' for capitalism. Western contexts, the passage to full adulthood. In Postman and Fr0nes argue, there is no longer a Indeterminacy and the global child convergence which produces identifiable distinc tions between childhood and adulthood as it was The convoluted story that I articulate here only prescribed in the early part of Western industrial partially crystallizes in the notion of the 'global child' as a hollow category of globalization. Globalization is development. not a new phenomenon, The distinction between adulthood and childhood although its pace and may also have begun to lose its edge, as the welfare effects may be. Like globalization, the global child is of children became a public concern. This concern is not natural, but contrived from fluid capital pro illustrated by a sustained emphasis over the last cesses. Contemporary globalization began with the

Global crises of childhood drive toward capital accumulation requiring an on going expansion of exploitable labour pools, the constant expansion of markets, and the quest for new resources (and places) to exploit. The important point about globalization from the standpoint of children's geographies is that there is no longer a need for capital investments to be secured at par ticular locations. Geography texts are replete with stories of disinvestment and what that means for labour, but the effects on local children are not as yet fully articulated. One notable exception is Cindi Katz's (1991; 1993) elaboration of the context of children's lives under economic and social trans formation inNew York and in Sudan. She introduces social reproduction as an important, but as yet in contemporary globalization aspect missing, debates. Children's geographies are integrally linked to social reproduction but the places and practices of children's everyday life are rarely considered a dynamic context for understanding social and material transformations. For example, feminist geog raphers use the concept of social reproduction to analyze the day-to-day lives of women, and how they contribute to maintaining productive activities through non-waged labour in the domestic realm (Gregson and Lowe 1995; England 1996; Holloway 1998). While focussing on issues such as child-care, child-rearing and the space of the home, these discussions speak only of the ways that social rules, ideals and practices are transmitted to children, but they say very little about the ways that they are received, internalized, resisted and mobilized. Much can be learnt from investigating how young people learn to negotiate and/or breach an abstract space conceived by adults. The early industrial era split productive activities from reproductive activities, but required contiguity these two sets of processes through the abstract spaces of education, play ground movements and prevailing ideologies. The domestic sphere was the site of reproduction, nur turing and disciplining a new labour force that was kept healthy and appropriately educated by local institutions. Contemporary globalization changes all that: Now capital has fewer commitments to repro ducing any particular labour force or conditions of production (Katz 1998a, 1998b). Capitalism is not committed now to tying down the nature of childhood and so the constitution of global child is highlighted is unsettled. This indeterminacy when contemporary behaviours of children are unchildlike.

123

The unchildlike child

Inasmuchas adolescents are unable to challenge either the dominant system's imperious architecture or its deployment of signs. It isonly byway of revolt that they have any prospect of recovering the world of differ ences. (Lefebvre1991, 50) Lefebvre's indictment speaks volumes about putting children in their place. Focus on children as an exclusive category of existence resulted in the creation of spaces that are intentionally designed to regulate behaviour by offering the interpretations, prohibitions and examples of adults. But what hap pens when children resist these boundaries? Alison Diduck (1999, 127) suggests a disruption in bound aries of meaning because of a 'moral crisis' engen dered by increasing numbers of children acting in unchildlike ways. Certain violent social events (the Jamie Bulger case in the United Kingdom; Santana High School in the USA), for example, seem to ascribe to childhood and youth an independence, autonomy and self-interest that is irreconcilable with the nature of childhood as prescribed by the nine teenth and twentieth centuries. Violence becomes one of the few havens left as an avenue of escape from the horror of living new, radically de-centred forms of subjectivity that are suggested by a virile, media-driven capitalist ethic (McLaren 1994). This is an ethic that often hides identity crises embedded in racial and sexual tensions with a righteous outrage over the possibility that violence of this kind can occur in seemingly 'normal' communities.4 The en suing moral crisis emanates from adult society but it does not necessarily herald the death of childhood. Rather, according to Diduck, it declares childhood's (and society's) transformation. Diduck outlines several examples of the breach of boundaries between childhood, youth and adult would like to extend and elaborate upon hood that I from a geographic perspective and from the argu I am making about the global child. One ments breach is children's increasing activity and power in the market. This is evident in the global North where children consume directly and are particularly sus ceptible to television and video advertising. In addition, they are able to influence household con sumption patterns in a myriad of ways to the extent that it is not difficult to reconcile the identity 'child' with that of 'economic consumer' (Diduck 1999, 128). The influence of children in the global South as market producers iswell documented by researchers

124 Aitken (Katz 1991; Robson and Ansell 2000) but often hidden from economic enumeration. Sue Roberts (1998) argues that a child as part of the market economy is seen in the global North as a child without childhood, a child who is robbed of the proper experiences and categories of children; in short, a subject defined by a 'lack'. Not only do children in the global South lack childhood as it is constituted in the North, but their economic savvy disrupts ideas of children as innocents and so they transgress boundaries between constructions of adults and children. The media of the global North periodically pro duce savage accounts of child exploitation in 'Third World' sweat shops where sportswear and elec tronics are manufactured with advertising that con trasts the grim factory conditions of child labour in the global South with the glamorous world of star endorsed consumption. Roberts (1998, 3) argues that campaigns such as these 'press a geographical imaginary... In the contemporary representations of child labor, the time is now and the space is a segregated global one'. The demarcation of child workers within the global South and child consumers in the global North not only represents a process of delimiting and bounding global space into zones of difference, but it also suggests a strategy for growth and development. Organizations such as the Inter national Labor Organization (ILO) and the Inter national Program on the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC), that are concerned to protect children from abuse and exploitation, attempt to classify what is harmful in child labour. At the time of thiswriting, an ILO Internet site proclaimed that: attempt to establish universal standards to highly differentiated global contexts. Diatribes against 'Third World Sweat Shops' paral lelmedia accounts of child abuse in poor Western neighbourhoods. By so doing, the global North's industrial past, the present global South and poor neighbourhoods everywhere are highlighted as bar baric and exploitative for children. This suggests a problematic continuum of development that is couched in the rhetoric of contemporary moderniz ation and globalization. It is a rhetoric that enables the 'othering' of adults in past eras for their cruelty and indifference to children so that we can judge in seemingly safe, middle favourably how farwe class neighbourhoods-have come today. Are we led to believe that contemporary Western society is much more complex in its moral stance regarding children whereas early modern society, and poor neighbourhoods and parts of the global South today, have awarped or a non-existent notion of childhood? Another crisis facing childhood is the problematic way children are engaging with what might be termed public space. Aries (1962, 391) saw the street, the pub and the cafe as part of a public sphere of sociability that did not exist as fashionable meeting places prior to modern times. Today notions of 'stranger danger' and the 'corrupting public' suggest that supposed safe havens-the private in which home, school and some commercially secure the only seemingly proper places environments-are for children. Particularly instructive in this regard is the contemporary rise of commercial chains like The Discovery Zone and Kindercare in the United States that offer secure environments where children learn, play games and tumble around climbing structures Child labour is a pressing social, economic and human and slides while their caregivers relax in the knowl rights issue.As many as 250 million childrenworldwide edge that their children are safe from the perils of the are thought to be working, deprived of adequate edu street.6 Katz (1993) and Susan Davis (1997) argue cation, good health and basic freedoms. Individual children pay the highest price, but theircountries suffer that these enterprises are a shameless commodi as well. Sacrificing young people's potential forfeits a fication of children's lives, designed and promoted on the basis of fear: nation's capacity to grow and develop. [These] sites are offered as ways of getting customers
out of the house, create market ways to revive downtowns, in hyper-commercial on a carefully at a time when, is based ironic ways cultivated in less to a 'street' of activity is more than space.

Children's basic human rights are important but the issues raised by definitions of this kind relate not only towhat constitutes adequate education but also how that education relates to a nation's capacity to grow. Elsbeth Robson (2001) points out that although these discourses are often contradictory and uneven, two main issues ground problems with their application. First, international conventions almost always originate in the global North and are norms and, second, they informed by Western

That all this conviviality

touristic neighborhoods, minority youth are actively prevented from congregating. (Davis 1997, 3) The surveillance and incarceration of minority youth in European and American cities is paralleled treatment of street by similar and often worse

Global crises of childhood children in the global South (Ruddick 1995; Beazley 2000). Qualities admired in adults such as indepen dence, savvy and wariness are frowned upon and sometimes dealt with severely when they are learnt by children on the street. In order to be turned into a child again, 'the delinquent or street child ... has much to unlearn' (Hendrick 1990, 43). Harriott Beazley (2000) identifies 'geographies of resistance' in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where a response to the larger 'spatial apartheid' of the State empowers street children. Despite their cultural and State sanc tioned subordination, the homeless children's appro priation of public spaces for their own survival contributes to the formation of what Beazley calls a 'cultural space'. Using their private language, Beazley (2000, 196) characterizes the street kids' subculture as tikyan, meaning 'a little but enough'. The chil dren's language is part of their cultural space because itcreates solidarity, excluding outsiders who cannot understand. And importantly, the new lan guage represents a dangerous mixing of cultural backgrounds. The children live in spaces people are supposed to pass through railway stations, public socially toilets in their movements between sanctioned nodes of urban life (homes, offices). Beazley's work suggests that although street children are not wholly outside normative, patriarchal, social izing control, they do resist certain adult strictures. Stephens (1995) argues that from certain perspec tives, street children may be viewed as integral parts of an emerging order of global capitalism: frequentlydetained for the nebulous crimes of loitering

125

families struggling privately and imploding in upon themselves and, for those who can afford it, seg mented day-care landscapes erode the well-being of adults and children because they precipitate an un derstanding of children and adults that is essentialist and exclusive. If the private-public disillusion em bodied in childwork actively resonates with parents' fears and anxieties, then we are inadequately con ceptualizing children's rights (cf.Aitken 2001 a, 134). It is to a consideration of those rights and the possi bility of new forms of justice that I turn in closing.

Conclusions:

rights, justice and

childhood
Part of the contemporary crisis of childhood, writes

Diduck:
is the Western liberal movement which attributes rights to children, and the consequent ability of children to make rightsclaims. (Diduck 1999, 128)

In the nineteenth century, demands were based on the rights of children to play (as opposed to work) and be children. Today, children's rights are en compassed by assumptions of autonomy and self consciousness to the extent that they can demand that law respects their human rights and their voices are heard when decisions about them are made. David Archard (1993, 168-169) argues that chil dren's rights should be extended although not nec essarily to cover all children with all rights currently available to adults. His 'modest collectivist proposal' advocates that children are brought more into the of young people are most and vagrancy, these assemblies public domain but not in terms of the capitalist guilty of not conforming to socializedmodels according commodification and exploitation that I describe to which children are compliant vehicles for the trans above. Rather, Archard's concern is to remove the mission of stable socialworlds. (Stephens 1995, 12) 'private shades of the family' to make easier the The disillusion of the private-public nexus is high monitoring of children's physical and psychological lighted not only by the ways children and youth progress so that in some situations and for some transgress social constructions of childhood, but also children there is 'public and palpable acknowledge by market forces and spatial segmentations around ment of their status and worth'. Diduck's (1999, 129) 'childwork' industries. Oldman (1994) created the concern with this position is that it pays insufficient term 'childwork' to describe professional childcarers attention to the 'worth that comes from mutual a category of capitalism that exploits the value of need, interdependence and connection'. She argues children's growth and development. The proliferation that extending the rights accorded children within of commercial childcare in the global North brings our current system of justice requires an unchildlike sense of autonomy and awareness that crosses the fewer unstructured contexts for some children and more segregated urban spaces. The disassociation of classic bounding of private and public spheres. Ifwe agree with Wilson (1980) that an ideologi parents from increasingly younger children and the creation of commodified childhood experiences also cal propensity toward Reason under-girded the raise questions of the changing interdependences construction of childhood beginning in the early between children and their parents. Constraints on industrial period, then we need also recognize how access to public facilities and support may result in this same ideology constitutes issues of justice. Jane

126 Aitken Flax (1993) suspects that claims to an impartial, de dialogue, dependence and welfare as well as individualistic autonomy and reason. finitive and mechanistic version of justice based on logic and reason are also based upon claims to liberal Notes I autonomy, individual control and, would add, exclu sion and the separation of children from adults. Jus that are sketched out in this 1 Some of the arguments tice constituted in these terms may serve specific and paper are developed more fully in a forthcoming book (Aitken2001). articulated rights but not necessarily people's every 2 The plasticity of terms such as 'child'and 'adolescent' day lives and welfare. Diduck (1999, 121) points out by traditional begs for more nuance than is offered that a re-conception of (legal) justice that recognizes educational and developmental theories.Although Iam dependence (that is, the conditions and relationships fully aware of the politics of difference, the fluidity of of connection) may violate the liberal principles of terms to describe children and teens seems appropriate equality and universality upon which Western law is make no excuses for, to their shifting identitiesand so I based. She argues that if this is the case, then the indeed Imake a point of, slipping between concepts autonomous self needs to be reconstituted in terms such as youth and child. of relationships rather than disconnections: 3 Women have not always been at home with children. The factoryand labour lawsof this time removedwomen This presentation recognizes thata legalsubject isnever fromworkplaces or reduced the number of hours they abstracted and individuated,but ratheralways exists as to the extent that that it may be argued could work part of his or her context and relationships even Women were not only pushed they were infantilized. based upon love ratherthanupon rightsor relationships into the private sphere, at some level they are considered exchange ... [and] also attributes an agency to the the same as children. subject to play a part in his or her subjectificiation... for a discussion of and Peake (2000) Childhood, like adulthood, cannot be universalized 4 See Kobayashi as a racially the violence at Columbine High School in this view, and we must speak of childhood and the Santana (2001 b) talks about motivated act. Aitken adulthood in the plural. (Diduck 1999, 121) shootings. The notion of child/adult boundaries as plural, 5 http://www.llo.org/public/english/standrads/relm/ilc/ permeable and infused with contested meanings ilc87/rep-ihtm#Progressiveelimination of child labour 6 In the United Kingdom, commercial playgrounds are highlights an argument Ihave been trying to make often associated with already established family res 994, 137-8). Con for several years (cf. Aitken 1 is packaged taurants and pubs, where play equipment cerned with some of the notions of reason and logic as 'Alphabet under such names Zoo', and themed that emerged at the beginning of the Enlightenment Warehouse' (McKendrick 'JungleBungle' and 'Wacky project, critics at the time held human excellence to 101). et al. 2001, abide in that adult who remains most in touch with her or his childhood. Rather than romanticizing References thinking of this kind, I believe it offers a way of the relationships between play Adams P, Berg, L, Berger N, Duane M, Neill A S and reconceptualizing Ollendorff R 1971 Children's rights: towards the liber and justice. In play there is no subject or object ation of the child Praeger, New York into and because play transforms subject and object in their place Associ Aitken S C 1994 Putting children 997). Under through process (Aitken and Herman 1 ation of American Geographers/Edwards Brothers, stood as process, justice is one way for individuals to Washington DC manage the strain of being simultaneously public and -2000 Play, rights and borders: gender bound parents private, alone and related to others (Flax 1993, 123). S and of children in Holloway and the social construction Valentine G eds Children's geographies: living,playing, Engaging in just practices ('doing justice' as Diduck learning and transformingeveryday worlds Routledge, calls it) in thisway offers the possibility of modes of relatedness with others that challenge notions of autonomy which exclude dependence and notions of welfare that exclude individuality. But, as Diduck (1999, 121) points out, justice on these terms may cause problems for able-bodied white adult males whose subjectivity rests in a liberal autonomous tradition based upon reason and logic. For others, and particularly children, there are fewer problems with a justice that is playful because it embraces
London 2001 tested and New a Geographies spaces of York 119-38 people: the morally London sexism in press power to potential Journal of and crib places Feminist con Routledge, race, Gender, spaces a and New and moral of young identity

York
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transitional

Global crises of childhood Archard D 1993 Children: rightsand childhood Routledge, New York and London

127

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