Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification and Objectification

This book explores how humanitarian interventions for children in difficult circumstances engage in affective commodification of disadvantaged childhoods. The chapters consider how transnational charitable industries are created and mobilized around childhood need—highlighting children in situations of war and poverty, and with indeterminate access to health and education—to redirect global resource flows and sentiments in order to address concerns of child suffering. The authors discuss examples from around the world to show how, as much as these processes can help achieve the goals of aid organizations, such practices can also perpetuate the conditions that organizations seek to alleviate and thereby endanger the very children they intend to help.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Feb 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030016234

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© The Author(s) 2019

Kristen Cheney and Aviva Sinervo (eds.)Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian InterventionPalgrave Studies on Children and Developmenthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01623-4_1

1. NGO Economies of Affect: Humanitarianism and Childhood in Contemporary and Historical Perspective

Aviva Sinervo¹   and Kristen Cheney²  

(1)

San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

(2)

International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands

Aviva Sinervo (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Kristen Cheney

Email: [e-mail]

In the fall of 2016, at tram and bus stops around the Netherlands, large placards filling the shelter walls read, Saving children’s lives. That is what we do (Fig. 1.1). These advertisements were for the international nongovernmental organization (INGO) Save the Children . The ads might seem to draw ironic attention to their mission, so blatant in the very title of their organization, but they were less clear about what exactly they save children from—and what exactly they wanted the ads’ viewers to do to support this apparently laudable goal of child saving . The words splashed across the top and bottom of a close-up picture of a child’s face. In most cases, this was an obviously foreign, brown child with disheveled hair, a face smudged with dirt, and imploring eyes. The ads sat comfortably alongside fashion promotions for H&M’s fall line of jackets or posters for new film releases. Do something or give something, read another Save the Children ad. Again, we were not given any indication about what it is we should do; the other nuances of this message, and any potential specificity of problem, population, or response seemed to require no articulation. All that we needed to know was that children in need were involved.

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Fig. 1.1

Dutch advertisement for Save the Children (2016)

This volume explores how humanitarian interventions on behalf of children tend to objectify and commodify certain disadvantaged (nonideal, nonnormative) childhoods, often by leaning on circulating affects and universalized stereotypes of a globalized childhood . It has its origin in a panel that the editors organized for the 2015 meeting of the Interest Group on NGOs and Nonprofits of the American Anthropological Association in Denver, Colorado. The meeting’s theme, NGO-graphies, encouraged participants to use ethnography to examine broad patterns of NGO practices that constitute networks responsible for global flows of knowledge and resources. Our panel, comprised of a number of emergent scholars in the anthropology of humanitarianism, development , NGOs, and nonprofits , critically examined how these networks are constituted through the personal interactions, cultural practices, and shifting discourses that give them meaning, ¹ particularly where children are the targets of NGOs’ humanitarian interventions.

Commodification implies a marketable product, one that is being sold. Often it stems from processes of objectification in which a fluid, cross-culturally dynamic concept like childhood becomes fixed and seemingly unitary in its meaning. We argue that what is being commodified in NGOs for children are particular representations of universalized childhood need—indeed particular forms of disadvantage or vulnerability —that do not always line up with local perceptions of childhood, provision, charity , or development. In fact, such representations rely heavily on forms of sentiment that are cultivated to produce affective capital for donors . Affect is created in multiple subjective and temporal registers in the commodification process, entangling not just the intended consumer audiences (donors, volunteers, partner organizations, and the political arms of states) but also the producers of sympathetic childhoods (whether these are adult NGO staff, media, or children subjects themselves). For example , a donor’s need to help a particular suffering childhood demographic is enmeshed in the affective economy that discourses and images of childhood induce. However, the children targeted by affective economies are expected to conform to certain normative notions of childhood as a result (Stryker 2011). In that sense, affect’s cultural underpinnings are as deep as the political stakes for understanding it are high (White 2017, 178). Donors might think at once to their own childhoods, or their children’s childhoods, as well as feel a broad sense of responsibility for children as the future.

Child-focused humanitarian organizations—whether they run local programs, are international charities like Save the Children , or are multilateral organizations like UNICEF —thereby become nexuses of action shaped not just by political economy but also by emotion . Given the current awareness of the coupling of political economy and sentiment , and how it does violence to certain populations as an inherent aspect of late capitalism and its successes (cf. Adams 2013; Fassin 2013; Gibson-Graham 2006; Hochschild 2003; Williams 2013), we use cross-cultural and international humanitarian practices as a lens for critically examining how childhood is marketed in the aid and development spheres, weighing the benefits of such publicity and fundraising tactics against its sacrifices.

The significance of this task becomes clear as we focus on how childhood is constructed within aid discourse to include certain intrinsic needs specific to the developmental life-stage of the young. As Martin Woodhead noted, the idea of need often conceals in practice a complex of latent assumptions and judgments about children (Woodhead 1997, 63) based on children’s nature rather than their social environments. While building on a palette common to human rights initiatives (the basics of food, clean water, shelter, and health), children ’s needs are multiplied (education, care through kin relations , and protection) as their circumstance and exposure to vulnerability is amplified by their age . Informed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the imperative to help disadvantaged or at-risk children becomes a moral rallying cry and a global legal imperative that mobilizes circulations of wealth alongside feelings of outrage, pity , and sadness. Because it is easy to conflate experiences of childhood suffering with the emotions that stories about these experiences produce, we emphasize that disadvantage is not a given category, even as it might be essentialized and mobilized in the name of entangled capitalist affects that often do more harm than good. We therefore interrogate how categories of childhood are created and deployed in transnational humanitarian discourse, asking what gives them such power, and why they become so useful for organizations but potentially so damaging to the very peoples that these organizations seek to assist. We pay attention to the intersections of these categories of childhood—how they become variants of each other—but also to their specificities.

Humanitarian organizations find themselves in a complicated set of moral predicaments when they solicit funding for children using sympathetic portraits of need (Benthall 1993, 277–81; Slim 2015, 16). Considering that the effectiveness of such images is based on the affective currency of childhood and the emotional capital that they elicit, such projections of need can result in aid being provided in ways that do not necessarily respect affected populations, or accurately represent their concerns, challenges, or cultural frameworks (Burman 1994; Schuller 2012). Often, such discourses of need might not even correctly identify the children who are in danger, or the form of endangered childhood that most requires intervention (Shepler 2014). At other times, such interventions can create perverse incentives that in fact generate more of the very endangered childhoods that they hope to eliminate, as is the case, for example, when orphanages are built to help orphans but end up creating even more orphans by pulling children into unnecessary institutionalization (Cheney and Rotabi 2014). It is now estimated that 80% of children in institutions around the world are not in fact orphans—children whose parents have died—but are children placed in institutions to access resources and services that are otherwise inaccessible to their families. ² A key ethical challenge arises from the success of misconstrual: children’s lived realities (i.e., that orphans have living parents) may not sell as well as specially curated, staged, or sensationalized representations .

We find commodification to be a useful heuristic device for understanding such representations; a political-economic analysis of childhood as a billable good leads us to recognize how humanitarian practices may be simultaneously helping and hindering the children they seek to serve. Commodification is often necessarily accompanied by explicit forms of objectification and misrepresentation, and thereby misrecognition. Children’s need, victimhood , and disadvantage—rather than children themselves as persons, subjects, and agents—become the foci driving humanitarianism . Children as individuals are erased, and what takes their place are broad generalizations that are manipulable based on the demands of the market. It is not our intent to deny that child-focused NGOs do good (Fisher 1997; Hilhorst 2003; Lashaw et al. 2017) for certain communities and individuals, but our concern with practices of commodification and objectification is threefold. First, in creating a particular narrative of childhood need, organizations tend to focus on one childhood vulnerability (such as orphanhood) to the exclusion of others, even those that may have greater impact (Cheney 2010; Myers and Bourdillon 2012). Second , organizations may individualize a child’s need by separating it from the social fabric in which the child is immersed, such as the child’s family or community . Third, representing need in stereotypical ways also perpetuates global perceptions of childhood at risk that do harm to self-esteem and self-determination , and may in the end create mechanisms that better serve donors and organizations than the children themselves, such as the stigmatizing labeling of a child as an orphan. Moreover, such narratives may heighten radical disjunctures between perception and experience, with consequences that are not just economic, but also legal and moral. In a world where extreme difference is circumspect, the fact that these discourses are primarily founded on divisions between donors and recipients , rather than on common humanity and connection, is perhaps even further cause for concern. Likewise, trying to create sameness to justify international interventions that rescue children from local culture (see Desai, this volume)—or defining local forms of childhood identity and experience as less valid—is also problematic.

Our reaction is not only to the traction that hegemonic, globalized norms of childhood gain when circulated without attention for the specific circumstances or life experiences to which they are applied (Twum-Danso Imoh and Ame 2012); we also reflect on the practical implications of misrepresenting or exaggerating portrayals of childhood vulnerability . For example, in today’s expanding climate of NGO competition and donor fatigue, what happens when NGOs tell a particular story about a group of children that does not accurately represent those children or their needs? NGOs may view each other as market rivals for limited funds rather than as collaborators sharing a common mission, and thereby conceal their weaknesses and failures while highlighting others’ inadequacies or misrepresentations (Sinervo 2015, 2017). NGOs are often quite recalcitrant to permit outside evaluation and international or state oversight of their programs. Many NGOs are fickle entities that come and go, dissolving rather than improving under the lens of scrutiny. What happens when NGOs draw attention to the creative survival strategies of economically marginalized families? Governments may impose new regulations or surveillance mechanisms to curtail practices of informal commerce, child labor , or child circulation upon which families depend. What happens when NGOs lose funding because of disgruntled donors who act like clients? NGOs may adjust their services to meet the expectations of client-donors rather than children and local communities. Local communities may thus lose access to a service or set of resources on which they have come to rely.

We respond to these conceptual and applied concerns by prioritizing an analysis that nuances the category of need in two ways. The first, outlined above, is through a political-economic analysis that examines how international humanitarian practice can lead to ideological reinforcement of disadvantaged childhoods—and therefore their continued proliferation as economic categories that produce value. The other is through careful ethnographic attention to children ’s (and their families’) social agency. How do children’s perspectives allow better insight into their needs in the first place, and how might attention to the ways children feel about their own commoditization and objectification help us to rethink motives and outcomes within the landscape of aid? In this regard, we are informed by childhood studies scholarship that heeds the importance of simultaneous attention to childhood as a concept and a lived experience (Alderson 2015; Bluebond-Langner and Korbin 2007; James 1993). In addition to interrogating the work of childhood as a label, we explore how children interact with this age -bound designation and use it to give meaning to their situated identities and practices. It is not enough to only look at how NGOs use disadvantaged childhoods for their advertising platforms; we must also interrogate how children use NGOs to reshape the narrative of need as well as their experiences of well-being or endangerment.

NGOs often strive to increase child empowerment as a specific aspect of their missions . Though children in NGO sites sometimes lose much of the autonomy that they might otherwise experience on the streets (cf. Hecht 1998), or in their homes and communities (cf. Hunleth 2017), many NGOs have participatory agendas wherein they make space for children’s voices and contributions to governance (cf. Liebel 2012; Taft 2015). ³ Yet even in situations where children are not afforded autonomy easily within the NGO structure (cf. Sweis 2017), children make choices that provide shape and meaning to their lives within and outside of such institutions. Children may parlay NGO capital among their peer groups or in their interactions with nonaffiliated adults, and they may explicitly hijack, resist, or transform NGO discourses (Sinervo 2013). Children can seek NGO services selectively or vary their strategies for receiving or rebuffing NGO attention. Children may find their access to aid shaped by the marketing of their disadvantage, but they might also be able to pursue different practices when they harness disempowering narratives for their own purposes (Cheney 2010; Shepler 2014), retooling or reusing the discourse of need to one’s own advantage outside the scope of NGO control. Children’s practices thereby give us a direct view of the simultaneous helping and hindering that commodification and objectification enable.

In the remainder of this introduction, we outline a brief history of global humanitarian movements and actions with regard to children ’s well-being. We then turn to a series of regional overviews to provide a sense of what is unique to approaches to childhood need in diverse areas around the world. We close with some additional conceptual thoughts on NGOs as entities, the moral underpinnings of NGO activities, and finally our critique, especially in regards to normalized, idealized, and affectively hinged framings of childhood which NGOs seek to harness, reproduce, and turn into concrete actualizations and sentiments of childhood experience.

International Humanitarianism, Development, and Protection for Children

This volume considers the ways children are addressed in humanitarian crisis (disasters, epidemics, wars) alongside the development industry ’s response to chronic structural conditions (poverty, hunger, illicit economies). Indeed, the two are often inseparable (Benthall 1993, 3; Slim 2015, 9). We therefore aim to identify the ways in which addressing childhood need is always at once ethically, politically, affectively, and economically driven—whether done under the banner of humanitarianism or development. Prioritizing child protection is an initiative with deep historical and broad geographic roots that cuts across humanitarian and development work, although nomenclature and the nature of the crisis of childhood itself has changed over time. Here we briefly outline some of the contexts that underpin that construction of childhood need as a category for intervention.

Humanitarian aid can be traced back to eighteenth-century European responses to disasters and Christian social movements around colonial projects (Bornstein and Redfield 2010, 13). Similarly, child-focused humanitarianism has its roots in charity , which later shifted to international development in the postcolonial era—even while still retaining the connection with charity. There were many charitable children’s organizations in the Global North at local and national levels in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These efforts expanded internationally at the end of the First and Second World Wars, with a great number of European children displaced by the conflicts. Save the Children was established in 1919, and as the name connotes, was founded on the notion that children were in need of saving from an array of adverse circumstances that characterized the postwar era. In 1924, Save the Children founder Eglantyne Jebb drafted the first Declaration on the Rights of the Child (Save the Children 2006, 17). Jebb argued that the principle of neutrality should be applied specifically to children in contexts of armed conflict, thereby cementing the notion of children’s natural vulnerability as well as their place as exclusive victims—never perpetrators—of violence.

Similarly, the United Nations Emergency Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was founded in 1946, the end of the Second World War, also to respond to the needs of European children who were orphaned and/or displaced. As that need dissipated, however, UNICEF shifted to focusing on the needs of children in the newly independent but poor countries of the Global South . Primarily targeting health issues in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they gradually turned their attention to broader issues of poverty reduction as part of the United Nations’ wider movement to end poverty associated with the end of colonialism and the rise of national independence. While this might seem an innocuous effort, it has to be placed in the context of the emerging Cold War of the time. As Maggie Black notes, At a strategic level, the new enthusiasm for ‘aid’ was a reaction to the arrival of many newly independent countries—especially in Africa —onto the world stage and fear in the West of their assimilation into the Soviet camp (Black 1996, 9–10). Children’s issues were thus placed squarely within the context of new, international development efforts that were also part of the geopolitics of decolonization.

The objectives of child-focused INGOs like Save the Children as well as intergovernmental agencies like UNICEF would shift again in the 1980s when disastrous structural adjustment programs (SAPs) caused massive damage to efforts to ensure children’s health and eradicate child poverty worldwide. In some ways, however, this response inadvertently facilitated the retreat of the state from the welfare services that SAPs necessitated—and as civil wars and other social upheavals raged across Africa, Latin America , and Southeast Asia, INGOs found their efforts necessarily relegated to emergency relief services as well as the health and welfare services that failing and impoverished states were neglecting (Black 1996, 177).

Though it may be valid to argue that many children would have perished during this era were it not for the humanitarian interventions of NGOs (which in turn facilitated their positioning as development organizations, justifying their temporal longevity beyond immediate crisis mitigation), these organizations still largely viewed children as hapless victims in need of intervention for their very survival. While on one level this may be true—particularly in contexts of war , disaster, and persistent structural violence—the approach took children as mere objects of humanitarian and development intervention; indeed, as small bundles of humanity, young bodies that could belong to any of us, naked humanity… They are the innocent representatives of a common humanity, able to appeal—across the boundaries of race , culture, and nation—to an underlying, essential humanity many of us (at certain times) believe we all share (Malkki 2010, 64–65). This was so even as many children joined in armed struggles across the contexts in which humanitarian and development aid operated.

And yet, as Laura Suski points out, we must inquire as to whether a humanitarianism that privileges children denies a more thorough humanitarianism… (2009, 203). Postcolonial scholars have critiqued how colonial powers—and later INGOs —viewed and treated colonized nations and natives as childlike and thus in need of civilizing (Burman 1994; Dean 2002; Valentin and Meinert 2009). According to Olga Nieuwenhuys, only when both the child and the colonized could be envisioned as representing imperfect specimens of the enlightened European man (in other words as vulnerable, passive and irrational ‘becomings’), did the endless effort to realize what is now termed ‘development ’—both of the child and of the world—gain currency to the point of being, today, dominant (Nieuwenhuys 2013, 5). The assumptions rooted in colonial domination and native infantilization manifested in mid-twentieth-century programs that targeted children directly for humanitarian and development intervention so as to transform their lives in the direction of broader progress and modernization.

This is true not least of the children’s rights discourses that became the mandate of UNICEF and many other children’s INGOs after the 1989 drafting and promulgation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (United Nations 1989). Over 40 years in the making, the UNCRC was the culmination of a number of preceding documents that were drafted due to a sense, following the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, that children were in need of special protections not adequately covered by the UDHR. These included a series of Declarations on the Rights of the Child, with the last one in 1959 reiterating the assertion that Mankind owes to the child the best that it has to give. ⁴ As declarations are not binding, the UN moved to build a human rights framework that could be enforced through international law . On the eve of the United Nations’ International Year of the Child in 1978, the UN proposed a draft text for the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but it would still be over ten years before the UNCRC gained final approval from the UN General Assembly in 1989. In September 1990, after twenty states’ parties had ratified it, the convention became legally binding. The UNCRC’s 54 articles set out to guarantee children’s civil, political, economic, social, health , and cultural rights. The UNCRC fast became the most ratified UN human rights convention in the history of the organization, with every country but the United States signing on. ⁵

The UNCRC has not been without its critics, however (Ennew 2002; Stephens 1995). Aside from the postcolonial critiques of human rights mentioned above, many dissenters saw the UNCRC as a Western-centric document that props up the notion of the ideal child at once as both a sovereign, rational individual of a liberal democratic society ⁶ and as a dependent who should be quarantined in child-specific spaces (Ennew and Milne 1990, 13). Though many countries rushed to sign the Convention, some regional bodies proceeded quickly to qualify the UNCRC with declarations of their own that they felt more closely reflected their social values. The Organization for African Unity’s (1990) African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (The Organization for African Unity, 1990), for example, closely resembles the UNCRC while also emphasizing children’s communal responsibilities. In spite of these efforts to assert regional autonomy over discourses of child well-being, the hegemony of the UNCRC persisted in setting the universal standard for a singular, idealized childhood based on modern theories of both social progress and child development to which societies should aspire (Twum-Danso Imoh 2012, 25).

Some also saw the promulgation of the UNCRC as an outcome of the broader failures of international development to eradicate global poverty and engender world peace despite concentrated mid to late twentieth-century efforts. Vanessa Pupavac has even argued that the elevation of children’s rights is premised on a profound disenchantment with humanity. The logical implication of the international children’s rights regime is to challenge both the moral and political capacity of individuals and their right to self-determination and to institutionalize a more unequal international system (Pupavac 2001, 95). While this may sound extreme, children’s rights discourse has allowed for the naturalization of hegemonic notions of progress in the hands of childhood’s future adult subjects (Hopkins and Sriprakash 2016), with the notion of the immature child operating as metaphor for postcolonial nations’ underdevelopment resonating throughout development discourses (Cheney 2007).

Despite these critiques of children’s rights, children’s rights-based approaches became the standard modus operandi in the 1990s and in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Though children’s rights remains a mandate for many international NGOs and humanitarian and development work concerning children, others have pulled back from children’s rights frameworks in response to political and cultural opposition in the countries where they work, favoring emphasis on the Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals. ⁷ Yet, this emphasis on rights and the debates surrounding such emphasis reveals a deep ambivalence about the place of childhood as both a protected and empowered category (Cheney 2014)—and, indeed, reflects broader doubts about modern humanitarianism. This ambivalence is heightened in the case of children, where their suffering again functions as an overt reminder of neglect and the failures of modern progress to eliminate a kind of suffering that is deemed the most horrific, and yet the most remediable (Suski 2009,