CIAO DATE: 07/2012
Volume: 29, Issue: 1
Spring 2012
Children of the World: The Dialectic of Promise and Vulnerability
About the Authors (PDF)
Foreword (PDF)
The Macalester International Roundtable, an intellectual festival convened each October, is an occasion for serious conversations across the College on topics of transnational significance. The practice is to commission a set of essays-a keynote address, followed by two additional major essays delivered by seasoned scholars-which become the center of dialogue and discussions. Each of the two essays receives a public response from a Macalester senior and a member of the faculty. The purposes of the Roundtable are to cogitate together upon crucial but difficult global questions and to cultivate further the equipoise that minds of the Macalester academic community have long been expected to hold between local anxieties and transnational pressures.
Supporting America's Children and Adolescents (PDF)
Jacquelynne S. Eccles
Contemporary vulnerabilities that beset human beings around the world come in a variety of guises and affect diverse populations differently. Perhaps no category of people is as easily exposed as children to such injuries as the interconnected factors of poverty, disease, lack of education, physical violence, and family breakdown. To be sure, there is marked and continuous progress on a number of fronts, particularly in the reduction of mortality among the young. Yet many children and adolescents still suffer from a variety of risks to their well-being. Although not confronted with as many or as severe risks as children in the developing world, many children and adolescents in the United States are at high risk--higher than the risks faced by their counterparts in many other Western industrialized countries. Despite the fact that the United States ranks first in Gross Domestic Product, it is last among the industrial North in relative child poverty, adolescent birth rates, and securing children against gun violence. Furthermore, the United States has relatively high rates of low birth weight and infant mortality statistics as well as other indicators of poor health, such as obesity, asthma, and lack of physical fitness. For example, our country ranks 43rd among developed countries in infant mortality. Each of these risks is most pronounced among families living in poverty, many of whom are also members of racial and ethnic minority populations.
Protecting Children in Armed Conflicts as a New Imperative of International Peace and Security (PDF)
Tonderai W. Chikuhwa
One may say that there is no clearer mirror on the soul of who we are than the reflection of how we treat our children. The horrors that are being visited on children in more than thirty conflicts around the world today are a shadow over our collective conscience. The most conservative estimates suggest that in the past decade more than two million children have been killed in armed conflict. Three times that number have been seriously injured or permanently disabled. Millions of others have been forced to witness and even partake in terrible acts of violence. Hundreds of thousands of children continue to be exploited as child soldiers, and tens of thousands of girls are being subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence. Abductions of children are a more common and widespread enterprise than ever before. And, since 2003, over fourteen million children have been forcibly displaced within and outside their home countries, and between 8,000 and 10,000 children are killed or maimed every year as a result of landmines.
Response (PDF)
Leigh Bercaw
Last semester I walked to school through one of the toughest neighborhoods in the capital city of Madagascar. Every morning my friends and I passed the same gang of sleeping street-children—honestly the best word for it is puppy pile. They were a shivering, shifting heap of children, and they broke my heart. On the way home from school, they were awake and I was afraid of them. If I walked alone, they would surround me and steal everything in my pockets. They eventually pulled one of my friends to the ground and took her backpack. As a student of anthropology trained to approach multifaceted issues by looking first through the lens of the particular, these kids, for me, embody the complexity of the lives of children living in difficult situations. They inspire our compassion and move us through their vulnerability. Yet, they simultaneously remind us that they are agents in their own right.
Response (PDF)
Jean-Pierre Karegeye
The movie Slumdog Millionaire (2008), adapted from Vikas Swarup’s 2005 novel Q & A, tells the story of Jamal Malik, a vulnerable orphan and street boy exposed to the misery of the world: extreme poverty, disease, lack of education, violence, murder, prostitution in Cherry Street, police brutality, and other misfortunes. Very painful images, but not without promise and determination, show Jamal at five years old, covered in excrement, succeed in reaching the Indian movie star, Amitabah, and receive an autograph. When Jamal starts playing and winning “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” Sergeant Srinivas and other policemen torture Jamal because they cannot understand how this vulnerable lost child is winning the game. Their conclusion: he must be cheating. The film places us into the dialectic of vulnerability and promise. What we can take from it is that the well-being of a child is not a private affair. It is linked to the order of the economic and the political, with these two words understood in their etymological sense. The fact of being on orphan evokes the oikos and miserable life in the streets, as well as the cops’ response referring to the order of the polis. Jamal Malik’s exceptional achievement raises the question of how is this possible? What is the correct answer among the four choices in the film: he cheated, he’s lucky, he’s a genius, it is destiny? There is a risk of celebrating the idea of heroism in Jamal Malik’s character and forgetting the call to protect vulnerable children. Any promise is inscribed in a societal project that creates conditions of possibility for the protection and success of children. Tonderai Chikuhwa, senior advisor at the United Nations, discusses the Roundtable theme of “Children of the World: The Dialectic of Promise and Vulnerability” by focusing on particular situations of children involved in armed conflict and he evokes concrete actions/operations by the United Nations to protect such “child soldiers.” The well-being of children has been defined as a “categorical imperative” for the realization of planetary peace and security, which therefore calls for actions from the United Nations Security Council.
Protecting India's Children: Vulnerabilities and Challenges (PDF)
Asha Bajpai
India is a land of paradoxes. There is no other country in the world that embraces such an extraordinary profusion of ethnic groups, mutually incomprehensible languages, topography and climate, religions and cultural practices, and levels of economic development. This largest democracy in the world is also home to the largest number of children in the world. Children constitute more than 400 million of the one billion plus population of India. The country has twenty percent of the 0–4-year-old child population of the world. India’s economy is growing at a very high rate: around seven percent GDP growth per year. It is now a trillion dollar economy (2007–08). In terms of Purchasing Power Parity, it is the fourth largest economy in the world (after the United States, China, and Japan). Sadly, the impressive economic growth of the past decade has not made much impact on underprivileged children. This is compounded by the persistence of social inequalities in the country, whereby the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, together comprising a quarter of the country’s population, have the worst income/poverty and human development indicators in the entire population. Disparities can be identified across several vectors: geography (between and within states, districts, and sub- district levels), social identity, and gender being the most notable. National data establishes that approximately 100 million children are in the poorest wealth quintile. One-half of all the poor children belong to the Scheduled Castes and Tribes groups and they continue to be at a significant disadvantage.It is clear that children have not benefited equitably from the economic growth and development in India. The lives of underprivileged children in contemporary India are struggles for survival revolving around hunger, ill health, lack of education, protection, shelter, and so on. Children continue to be malnourished; exploited while at work (instead of being in school); trafficked far away from their home, kith, and kin to unknown lands; and subject to abuse, violence, and discrimination concerning gender, caste, community, and class. This is true in spite of schemes and programs designed for their benefit; laws, policies, and charters formulated to provide them access to food, education, and many other entitlements; and their rights being guaranteed by law.
Response (PDF)
Hanna Zimnitskaya
Professor Asha Bajpai’s essay, “Children in India: Law, Policy and Practice,” commences by stating that India is the largest democracy in the world, and that by virtue of this title, one of the country’s main preoccupations is to remediate the law, policy, and practice related to the protection of children’s rights. However, her discourse overlooks an essential component of a flourishing democracy: participation. A nation is democratic to the extent to which all of its citizens are involved. As Amartya Sen points out, “if people are involved in making their own decisions and running their own lives, their actions are more likely to result...in achievement of their well-being freedoms.”
Response (PDF)
Erik Larson
Professor Asha Bajpai's essay engages a multitude of issues that influence the well-being of people under eighteen years of age in India. It argues that legal and policy interventions in India can improve protection of children's rights. Her essay makes a number of contributions. First, the detail about the myriad influences on the status of 400 million young people in India provides a wealth of information about the real situations that influence people's life chances. Second, the focus on India provides insight about a case that is critically important for substantive and theoretical reasons. India is an emerging economic power, the world's largest democracy, and a diverse society; understanding the influences on children in India enables us to draw lessons that may apply elsewhere. Additionally, as I will briefly explain later, in some respects, India is an outlier in models that predict the pace of legal change. As such, understanding more about the country can build theoretical knowledge about how global developments influence national legal changes. Third, Bajpai's article provides details about a variety of legal processes that seek to improve the realization of children's rights. Analysis of how these legal processes have played out can yield insights about the prospects for legal change. Finally, uniting each of these contributions, the paper demonstrates a passionate commitment to the issues of the status of children.