Problematics of Childhood Harm: Discursive Transformations in Child Protection Practice


Sydney Chapados, Carleton University

Childhood harm has long been a focus of governmental intervention, but approaches to the problem have shifted drastically over time (Hacking, 1991). The complex nexus of actors and institutions that address harm toward children generally conceptualize harm as observable and preventable with the proper application of the correct knowledge and tools (Cradock, 2014). Harm is heavily contested despite this conceptualization, and several knowledge domains assert their criteria for good childhoods. This paper examines a relatively new construction of harm associated with the concept of "Adverse Childhood Experiences" and childhood trauma, more broadly. Within the discourse of ACE, harm is understood as compounding events in childhood that contribute to leading causes of death in adulthood through neurobiological deterioration (Felitti et al., 1998). A compelling body of research has emerged that argues that ACEs will drastically influence children’s physiology and their ability to make healthy choices for themselves and their future offspring. For these researchers, the long-term and severe nature of ACEs makes detection, prevention, and early intervention even more urgent. Introducing neurobiology into the governance of childhood harm, ACE is a significant development. Yet, there is a marked lack of critical scholarly attention toward understanding harm through ACEs. How harm is conceptualized is profoundly political, drastically impacting children’s material worlds and how they relate to themselves and others. Interventions described as addressing childhood harm have long been criticized for their colonial and carceral surveillance tactics that systematically criminalize and dismantle families (Dhillon, 2017; Sinclair, 2004; Swift, 2018). Without examining the frameworks that inform child protection, children can continue to be harmed by tactics that are marketed as being in their best interest. My research explores the implications of orienting child protection around neurobiological deterioration, unsettling the categories this framework leverages and considering tensions between people and policy. Informed by Foucault’s writings on governmentality and genealogy, this project argues that neurobiological discourses are not objective, scientific truths about the harm that children experience and continue to be deeply moral. Drawing on interviews with service providers, archival data, and media to locate these discourses in a complex historical and political context, I argue that thinking about childhood harm and related responses in terms of "toxic stress," "trauma," "hormonal responses," "brain architecture," "fight or flight," “bodily regulation,” "intergenerational transmission," amongst others, are a recent development and contingent on social, historical, and political events and technologies. Many of the categories and constructs used to describe childrens experiences are presented as evidence-based and scientific even while they are contested, leading to increasingly ambiguous therapeutic interventions that depoliticize childrens experiences.

This paper will be presented at the following session: