Childhood Harm, Child Protection, and the Agentic Child


Sydney Chapados, Carleton University

Child poverty, neglect, and harm have long been the interest of various actors and organizations. However, how they appear in these interests, the primary concerns, and the interventions mobilized have shifted drastically through time and space. From the moral reform movement of the early 1900s, which advanced concern about juvenile delinquency in urban environments (Valverde, 2008), to the 1960s discovery of battered baby syndrome and the memory wars of the 1980s (Hacking, 2000), followed by recent applications of risk assessment algorithms (Cradock, 2014), we can observe the fundamentally different ways that harm towards children has been conceptualized, resting on radically different understandings of what makes up a good childhood. Although these periods are not clear-cut ways of understanding harm, these different conceptions of childhood are closely related to shifts in relations of power/knowledge more broadly. Paying close attention to how this ever-changing knowledge about harmful and good childhoods rests on historically and culturally specific ways of conceptualizing and relating to children is essential. This project considers a new shift in understanding harm toward children related to trauma and neurobiological development. In 1997, the U.S. Centre for Disease Control and Prevention released its largest scientific investigation into child abuse and neglect. This study determined that household dysfunction in childhood generates toxic stress (“trauma”) that increases the likelihood of leading causes of death in adulthood through behavioural and physiological deficits (Felitti et al., 1998). Related shifts in social service provision and child protective practice can be traced. Mobilizing a neurobiological framework to understand harm towards children leverages several ontological and epistemological assumptions about childhood as future-oriented, distinct from adulthood, and requiring protection and care by biological relatives. Drawing on interview, archival, and media data, I explore how these developmental assumptions have been adapted to absorb newer ideas about childhood from the New Sociology of Childhood, described by James and Prout (1997), namely, the agentic child. Drawing on a critical child, post-structuralist lens, I unpack these assumptions to examine how child protection discourses frame childhood as a bodily, emotional, and temporal state requiring constant self-regulation. This regulation is now presented as being in children’s best interest, generating greater autonomy, self-control, and self-compassion. However, significant tensions and contradictions arise when children’s autonomy appears in practice. Ultimately, this paper concludes that child-centred and empowering practices that prevent harm by generating autonomous children are not evidence that the world is becoming more progressive for children. Instead, these shifts represent a recalibration of asymmetrical relations under the guise of care and carefully crafted autonomy, pairing the childs capacity to choose with the responsibility to choose correctly . 

This paper will be presented at the following session: