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Child Migration and the Construction of Vulnerability
2007
Julia O’Connell Davidson, Caitlin Farrow
Save the Children
Migration and the policies introduced by national governments to manage and respond to it have profound implications for children’s rights in the contemporary world. Even though the general phenomenon of migration is very much at the centre of national and international policy concern, however, policy-makers have paid very little attention to broad questions about children and migration. And while child rights (CR) agencies have started to address the issue, they have largely taken the phenomenon of “child trafficking” (especially trafficking for purposes of sexual exploitation) and the situation of “unaccompanied” asylum-seeking and refugee children as the entry point for addressing harms associated with migration.
Few CR agencies have, as yet, turned their attention to the many other child migrants – both accompanied and unaccompanied - who cannot be classified as “victims of trafficking”, “asylum seekers” or “refugees”, but who are nonetheless vulnerable to extensive and often serious violations of the rights set out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Indeed, “child trafficking” and asylum seeking by “unaccompanied” children are very often approached as if they can be isolated from migration and immigration policy more generally – as though it is possible to first deal with these phenomena, then move on to other child rights issues associated with migration. And yet as this report will endeavour to show, migration cannot be neatly boxed into separate compartments (adult or child; legal or illegal; voluntary or forced; trafficked or smuggled; and so on). Measures taken to address one feature of migration will have implications for other aspects of the phenomenon. So, for example, it has been argued that European governments’ responses to trafficking and smuggling risk “not so much solving the problem of trafficking, but rather ending the right of asylum in Europe, one of the most fundamental of all
human rights”.
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